CHAPTER EIGHT
ROMAN
On the fifth Saturday he arrived at ten and she opened the door and Felix was not on her hip.
She was holding a coffee. She looked — not different, not better or worse, but more present somehow, like she’d made a decision.
“He’s napping,” she said. “Come in.”
He came in.
She poured him coffee without asking — black, she’d always known — and they sat at the kitchen table without the buffer of Felix between them.
He felt the absence of the buffer acutely.
The buffer had been useful. It had given them something to focus on.
Without it, the kitchen was just two people who used to be married sitting across from each other.
“I want to tell you something,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“I’ve been working on a new book,” she said. “The follow-up to Midnight Hours.” She held her mug. “I’ve been working on it for six months and I haven’t been able to find the right center of it.”
He waited.
“I thought it was about what came after,” she said. “The survival part. The two years.” She paused. “But I think it’s actually about what I didn’t let you know. The thing I carried.” She looked at him. “Felix. What it was like to carry that alone.”
He said nothing.
“I’m telling you because — when it’s published, you’ll read it,” she said. “I need you to know before. Not so you can stop me. You couldn’t stop me and I wouldn’t let you. But because—” She stopped. “Because I’m done making decisions about you without including you.”
He held his coffee cup.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I’m not asking for permission,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I’m thanking you for telling me. It’s different.”
She looked at him.
“What was it like?” he said. “Carrying it. If you want to tell me.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“The pregnancy was—” She started. “The first trimester was hard because I was alone and sick and furious. In that order, mostly. The second trimester I made peace with it. I moved here, I set up the drawing table, I established the routine. I made something that worked.” She paused.
“The labor was the hardest part. Not physically — well, physically too. But the specific—” She looked at the window.
“The specific moment when they put him in my arms and I thought: Roman doesn’t know this person exists. That was—” She stopped.
He could hear the thing she wasn’t saying.
“I should have been there,” he said.
“Yes,” she said simply.
“I know I should have been there,” he said. “I know that the reason I wasn’t there is that I made choices that made it impossible. Not you — me.” He held her gaze. “Nora. I’m going to say something and I need you to receive it without—” He stopped. “Just let me say it.”
She nodded.
“I have spent nine months understanding exactly what I did,” he said.
“Not the general shape of it. The specific cost of every decision I made in the year before the gala. The specific cost of believing Camille. The specific cost of signing those papers at midnight in a room off a ballroom while my wife was on the other side of a glass door.” He held her gaze.
“I will spend the rest of my life knowing those costs. I’m not asking you to reduce them or forgive them on a timeline.
I’m just—” He stopped. “I need you to know that I know.”
She was very still.
“I know you know,” she said quietly.
“Does it help?” he said.
She was quiet.
“Yes,” she said. “It helps.”
They sat in the kitchen until Felix woke — his voice coming from the bedroom, not distressed, just the particular conversational sounds he made when waking, as if he was finishing a dream conversation with someone.
Roman looked toward the sound.
Something moved through his face that Nora found, despite everything, completely heartbreaking.
“Go,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Go get him,” she said.
He went.
She heard Felix’s surprised sound — not frightened, just recalibrating. Then the specific quality of an eighteen-month-old deciding something was acceptable. Then: Baba.
She pressed her hand over her mouth.
She breathed.
She thought: there it is.