Chapter Forty-Four
Cait
He texted from the car: Landing in forty-five minutes. West Loop.
She went to the West Loop.
She had not planned to. She had been planning to go home, to her own flat in Pilsen, and to have a quiet Friday evening with the legal pad and the notes she had been making about the month-six report structure and the City College final cohort assessment.
She had planned this and then read his text and revised the plan without a great deal of deliberation, because she had learned something about herself in the two days he had been gone, and what she had learned was that the deliberation was no longer useful.
She knew what she wanted. She was going to it.
She let herself in with the code, which she had had since February and which she used the way she used everything he had given her access to: without taking it for granted.
The flat was empty and warm and smelled of the good desk and the coffee machine and the faint residual rosemary from a Sunday three weeks ago.
She sat on the sofa and looked at the west-facing windows, which at seven in the evening in April were showing the last of the light, long and golden, the specific quality of April light in Chicago that made the city look briefly like somewhere else, somewhere warmer and older, and then settled back into itself.
She heard the door.
He came in and stopped when he saw her. He was carrying his bag and his coat and he looked the way he always looked when he had been travelling: not tired, exactly, but slightly more stripped back than usual, the composure present but with fewer layers over it.
He looked at her on the sofa. Something in his face moved in the way it moved when he was not managing it. "You're here," he said.
"I'm here."
He put the bag and the coat down. He crossed the room and sat beside her, not touching yet, just present, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him and the particular quality of his attention, which was the same in every room she had encountered him in and which she had stopped comparing to other things because there was nothing to compare it to.
"New York," she said.
"Done."
"The board."
"Satisfied. The Kelleher renewal helped."
"I know." She turned to look at him. "Victor said something, didn't he. About not making people wait."
He looked at her. "How do you know that."
"Because I know Victor from the calls, and I know you, and I know the look you get when someone has said a true thing to you that you were already thinking." She held his eyes. "What are you waiting for, Garrett."
He was quiet for a moment. The April light was almost gone from the windows. The city was beginning its evening version, the lights coming on in the buildings across the way, the grid doing its patient illumination.
He reached into his coat pocket, which was on the arm of the sofa, and brought out a small box. Not a ring box. A flat box, the kind that held a key.
He opened it. Inside was a key to the flat, on a plain ring.
"I had it cut in New York," he said. "I was going to wait until May. I was going to make a plan about it." He looked at her. "I don't want to wait until May."
She looked at the key. She looked at him. She thought about the code she already had, which was provisional, the way things were provisional before they were decided. A key was not provisional.
She took it from the box.
The weight of it in her hand was slight and specific, the weight of a small piece of cut metal, which was not what it was.
"I'm not moving in," she said. "Not yet. Pilsen is mine and I'm not ready to give it up."
"I'm not asking you to give it up."
"I know." She closed her fingers around the key. "I'm telling you what this is. It's the door. It's not the whole question."
"I know," he said. "The whole question takes longer. The door is where you start."
She looked at him. She leaned forward and kissed him, unhurried, with the key in her hand and the April dark coming in at the windows and the city doing its reliable thing outside.
He kissed her back with his hand at her face and everything that had accumulated since November present in the room with them, the meetings and the folders and the plant floor and the parking lot and the bar on Randolph Street and Sunday dinners and the wobbling desk and the radiator's intervals of warmth.
All of it present. All of it decided.
She put the key in her pocket. She stayed.
Later, much later, when the city outside the west-facing windows had gone fully dark and the lamp was the only light and they were on the sofa with the April quiet around them, she took the key out of her pocket and looked at it again.
A plain ring, plain metal, nothing decorative about it.
She had a key to her parents' house in Bridgeport and a key to the CWA office on Wacker and a key to her own flat in Pilsen, and now she had this one, which was different from the others in a way that was not about the physical object but about what it represented: a door left open, a space held, an assumption of return.
She had spent six years being very precise about not making assumptions.
She had held herself back from them the way you held yourself back from a conclusion the data did not yet support.
She was revising that practice now, not because the data had changed but because she had accumulated enough of it to know what it was pointing at, and what it was pointing at was this: this flat, this man, this key in her hand, this particular April evening with everything that had led to it present in the room.
She put the key back in her pocket.
"Thank you," she said. Quietly, to the room as much as to him.
He looked at her. "For the key."
"For all of it," she said. "November to now. All of it."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he put his arm around her and she leaned into him and the city did its reliable thing outside and the lamp held its warm circle and the Schuler press was running somewhere below them in the dark, patient and steady, the sound of a thing built to last.