Chapter 18
CLAIRE
By five thirty on Saturday, the top drawer of the cabinet had stopped catching.
I discovered this after emptying it onto the couch for the second time and sliding it in with both hands. It closed without resistance. I pulled it out, checked the runner, and tried again.
Perfect.
The small screwdriver from my workroom lay on the rug beside my knee. I could have fixed the drawer myself. I could also have texted Graham that the problem had resolved, wrapped the chicken in foil, and spent the evening labeling invoices downstairs.
Instead, I put the screwdriver back in the workroom and returned the folded sleepers to the couch.
At six, the bell rang below the apartment.
Graham waited on the sidewalk while I came through the studio. He wore dark jeans and a navy sweater beneath his coat. In one hand, he carried the screwdriver he had gone upstairs to find as soon as I invited him. The sight of it made me feel both fond and fraudulent.
“The patient is upstairs,” I said as I unlocked the door.
“How serious?”
“Intermittent sticking. Possibly structural. Possibly temperamental.”
He looked at the screwdriver. “I brought the smaller one too.”
“That may be the difference.”
The studio was empty except for the low lights above the worktable. Carmen had stripped the leaves from Monday's roses before she left, and the green smell still hung in the cool air. Graham followed me past the buckets and up the narrow stairs, keeping two steps between us.
Dinner waited in the oven. I had changed my sweater once because the first one pulled too tightly across my stomach, then changed it again because I knew Graham liked the soft blue one and hated knowing that I knew.
He took off his coat inside the apartment. Cold air and clean soap came in with him. I pointed to the cabinet before I could spend too long noticing either.
“Top drawer.”
Graham knelt on the rug and opened it. The drawer moved smoothly.
“It was sticking yesterday.”
He closed it and opened it again. “I believe you.”
“You don't sound convinced.”
“I prepared for a more difficult negotiation.”
I sat on the floor beside the pile of baby clothes. “Take it out. The runner may be loose.”
He pressed the release tabs and lifted the drawer free. One screw on the left runner had backed out just enough to scrape the wood when the drawer carried weight. Without the sleepers inside, it had stopped catching.
“Vindicated,” I said.
“Completely.”
He passed me the loose screw while he checked the runner. His fingers brushed my palm. The contact was ordinary and gone before I could decide whether to move.
I set the screw on the rug and began sorting the clothes I had emptied. Three sleepers. Two packages of socks. A yellow knit cap Nina had bought after declaring every shade marketed as neutral was secretly gray.
Graham tightened the runner, then tested the other side. “Do you want the clothes back in the same order?”
“Sleepers on the left. Socks and hats on the right.”
I handed him each stack as he held out his hand. We filled the drawer together, our knees almost touching as he held it level and I guided it onto the tracks. It closed evenly with the weight inside.
“Now try it,” he said.
I opened the drawer. The soft clothes shifted forward, stopping against the painted front.
“Fixed.”
Graham put the screwdriver on top of the cabinet. He looked at the stack of diapers by the wall, the unopened package of crib sheets, and the shallow basket where I had put the ultrasound pictures.
“Do those have a place?” he asked.
“The diapers go in the bottom drawer. Sheets in the basket. The blankets still need to be washed.”
He picked up the diapers. “Bottom drawer.”
For the next ten minutes, he did what I told him. He removed the plastic from the sheets without tearing the care label and flattened the packaging for recycling. When I changed my mind, he transferred the hats to the basket and tucked the socks into their new space.
We had once been good at small domestic work, though we had not divided it fairly.
Our bodies knew how to share a narrow room.
I opened a cabinet before he asked. He moved aside before I reached behind him.
When the timer sounded in the kitchen, he took the folded cardboard downstairs while I checked dinner.
The ease of it frightened me more than the drawer had.
Graham returned as I set roasted chicken, potatoes, and green beans on the table. He stopped beside the second chair.
“Where do you want me?”
“There.”
It was the same chair he had used the night I showed him the ultrasound pictures, but the table held dinner instead of proof. He sat after I did.
For a while, we talked about ordinary things.
Paolo had changed the lettering on the Bellamy storage tubs after no one could read his first set of labels.
Rosa had threatened to retire if Graham reorganized the pantry one more time.
Nina's nephews had decided the studio cooler was where flowers went to sleep.
“That is more accurate than money things,” I said.
“Most descriptions are.”
I cut a potato in half and watched steam lift from the center.
I had invited him because I wanted an evening that was not an appointment, a delivery, or a fear too large for the apartment.
Now that I had it, the question I had carried since Audrey stood at my worktable would not stay beneath the ordinary conversation.
“Why was it easier to tell her?”
Graham's fork stopped against his plate.
“Audrey,” I said. “Why could she know the truth while I was at home waiting for you to come back?”
He set down the fork. For several seconds, he looked at the place where its tines rested in the sauce.
“I don't have one good answer.”
“Give me the bad one.”
His mouth tightened. “At Audrey's house, there was always something I could do. Theo needed a ride. A cabinet was broken. She had a form she didn't understand. Even after she knew about the test, she could give me a job and let the rest sit there.”
“And at home?”
“You were asking me what the doctor said.” His gaze lifted to mine. “You needed the one thing I was refusing to give you.”
“The truth.”
“Yes.”
The refrigerator started behind him. I could smell the rosemary from the chicken and the faint wet-green scent that had followed us up from the studio.
“So you went where you could still feel useful.”
“I think that was part of it.” He rubbed his thumb once along the edge of his napkin. “I would leave her house with something finished. Then I'd come home and see you watching me. I kept thinking I needed to solve it before I could tell you, and every day I didn't made coming home worse.”
“You let her see you before you had solved it.”
“She already knew.”
“Because you took her into the appointment.”
He looked down. “Yes.”
The answer was incomplete. He knew it. I could see him searching for the next piece and failing to find language that did not make him sound better than he had been.
“I was a coward with you,” he said. “With her, I could still carry a box out of the basement and believe the day wasn't a total loss.”
I recognized the habit in his answer. Give Graham an impossible question, and he would search for the one task he could finish.
He picked up his fork, then set it down again. “I'm sorry. I don't know how to explain more without guessing.”
I had imagined this conversation many times. In some versions, he finally found the perfect answer and my pain arranged itself around it. In others, I made him feel every separate hour I had waited. At the table, neither happened.
“I still miss you,” I said.
His face changed, hope arriving before he could hide it.
“I still want you,” I continued. “Sometimes I look at you and my body remembers the marriage before I remember why I left.”
Graham stayed still.
“That doesn't mean I can come back,” I said. “Wanting you doesn't make the house different. It doesn't make me ready to be your wife again.”
“I know it doesn't.”
He folded his napkin once and kept his hands beside his plate. The hope remained on his face beside the hurt.
We finished dinner more quietly. When he told me the potatoes were good, his voice sounded like it had before the conversation—not cheerful, not cold. I asked whether he wanted the last one. He said yes.
I carried the plates to the sink. Graham brought the serving dish and stood beside me with the dish towel.
The kitchen was too small for two people unless they knew how to move around each other. We did. I washed; he dried. When I reached for the plate in his hand, he turned at the same time.
We stopped with less than a foot between us.
His sweater was close enough that I could see one loose navy thread near the collar. His attention moved to my mouth, then returned to my eyes. He held the dry plate against his palm and waited for me to choose which direction to step.
I moved toward him.
Graham set the plate on the counter. His hands stayed at his sides. The last inches belonged entirely to me.
I lifted my face. His breath touched my cheek, warm and uneven.
Memory arrived without sequence: his mouth at my throat, my bare knee between his, the sound he made when I pulled him closer.
Pregnancy had changed the weight and balance of my body, but desire found the old path without hesitation.
For one suspended second, I wanted the familiar weight of his mouth, the hand that used to settle at my waist, the easy certainty of turning an ordinary kitchen into ours.
Then the word wife came back in my own voice at the table.
I stopped before our mouths touched.
“I can't.”
Graham's eyes closed briefly. When he opened them, he stepped far enough aside for me to reach the sink.
“I understand,” he said.
He picked up the plate again and dried the next one.
My hands shook in the dishwater. I expected the room to change—to fill with careful silence, injured restraint, or the sense that I had taken something away after offering it.
Graham asked where I kept the serving dish.
When I pointed to the cabinet above the stove, he put it there and reached for the saucepan.
We finished the dishes.
At the door, he put on his coat and returned the screwdriver to its case.
“The drawer should hold,” he said. “If it catches again, the runner may need to be replaced.”
“I'll tell you.”
He looked at me, and the wanting was still there. So was the hurt. Neither one sharpened his voice.
“Thank you for dinner, Claire.”
“Thank you for fixing the drawer.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, Graham.”
He walked downstairs and closed the studio door behind him with the same care he had used when he arrived.
The next morning, Harborside's imaging coordinator called while I was opening the cooler.
“We have your twenty-week anatomy scan confirmed,” she said. “Dr. Patel will receive the results the same day.”
She gave me the date and arrival time. I wrote both on the order sheet clipped beside the cooler, between stem counts for white roses and green hydrangea.
After we hung up, I stood in the cold room with my phone in my hand. I thought of the loose navy thread near Graham's collar, then the quiet clink of the plate as he set it in the cabinet.
I called him.
He answered on the first ring. “Claire?”
“The twenty-week scan is scheduled,” I said. “I want you there.”