CHAPTER TWELVE
ROMAN
January. The development meeting.
He’d been in dozens of rooms with Nora’s work in them over the past months — in the form of the graphic novel, the reviews, the adaptation discussion documents. Being in a room with her in her professional context was different.
She arrived exactly on time. She sat across from the production team — four people, competent, clearly intimidated in the specific way of people who’ve read something they find significant and are now meeting the person who made it.
He sat to the side. Observer, not participant. That was the correct position.
She talked about the book. She talked about what the adaptation needed to preserve and what it could translate into different form.
She talked about the glass door scene — the midnight moment — with the same precision she applied to everything, not clinical, but exact.
She knew what that moment meant. She knew what it needed to do in any medium.
The production team was very good at their job.
She was better.
He watched her work.
He thought: there she is.
Not the Nora of the Brooklyn apartment, the careful and measured Nora of the Saturdays who was doing the important work of deciding what to trust and what to hold. This was the other version — the fully deployed version, the artist with complete command of her material.
She’d always been this.
He’d known it and not known it simultaneously.
He was learning to know it properly.
After the meeting, in the corridor outside the conference room.
The production team had gone ahead. Kim was at the elevator. Roman and Nora were standing in the specific accidental proximity of people who’d been in the same room for two hours and were now in the corridor together.
“The glass door scene,” he said.
She looked at him.
“They want it to be the opening,” he said. “Not a flashback. The chronological opening.”
“I know,” she said. “I agreed with that.”
“It means your audience sees it first,” he said. “Before they know the full picture.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s the point.”
He looked at the corridor wall.
“Will it hurt?” he said. “To watch it be made?”
She thought about it.
“Probably,” she said. “But—” She paused. “But I made the book because not telling it was worse. The same principle applies to the adaptation.”
He looked at her.
“You make things out of the hard material,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You always did,” he said. “I didn’t understand that properly when we were married. I thought — I thought you were choosing the hard material. I think now you just — see it clearly enough to make something of it.”
She held his gaze.
“What are you making?” she said. “Out of the past two years.”
He thought about it.
“A different version of myself,” he said. “One that understands what was there when I had it.” He paused. “One that’s trying to be the right kind of present for whatever comes next.”
Kim appeared at the elevator.
“Nora,” Kim said.
“Coming,” Nora said.
She looked at Roman one more time.
She said: “Saturday.”
“Saturday,” he said.
She walked to the elevator.
He stood in the corridor.
He thought: she said Saturday like it was a promise.
He thought: I’m going to be there.