CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ROMAN
March.
Felix said his name.
Not Baba — his actual name, or the version of it that an emerging two-year-old could produce, which came out as something between Woh-man and Romma but was clearly, unambiguously, pointed at him.
He’d been reading a board book when it happened. He’d looked up.
Felix was looking directly at him. “Romma,” Felix said, with the satisfaction of someone who’d been working on something.
“Yes,” Roman said.
Felix nodded. He climbed into Roman’s lap, which he’d started doing two weeks ago — the specific decisive crossing of distance that a two-year-old makes when they’ve decided something. He opened the board book he’d been carrying and held it up.
Roman held him and read the book.
Nora was at the drawing table across the apartment. She was working — he’d learned to read the quality of her drawing attention, whether she was in the material or at the surface of it. She was in it today.
She’d heard Felix say his name.
He’d seen her go still at the drawing table for exactly two seconds.
Then she’d kept drawing.
He read the board book twice.
Felix said again with the authority of a child who has discovered the concept.
He read it a third time.
She made lunch that Saturday — not the improvised kitchen lunch, an actual lunch, the kind that required deliberate preparation. Soup and bread and the specific care of food that was made for someone rather than assembled at them.
He sat across from her.
They ate.
“I want to ask you something,” she said.
“Ask.”
“What do you want?” she said. “Not — I know you want to be Felix’s father. That’s established. But—” She held his gaze. “What do you want from me.”
He set down his spoon.
He looked at her.
She was looking at him with the direct, full-attention look that she’d always used for the things that required it. She wasn’t asking to be managed. She was asking for the true answer.
He said: “I want the chance to be the person you should have had when you were standing at that glass door.”
She held his gaze.
“I can’t go back to that night,” he said.
“I can’t give you back what walking out of that building cost you.
I can’t—” He stopped. “I can’t undo eighteen months of Felix’s life that I wasn’t in.
But I want—” He breathed. “I want mornings. Specifically. I want Saturday mornings where I’m not leaving at noon.
I want to read the board books at bedtime.
I want to be in the drawing when you draw the people at the kitchen table.
” He paused. “I saw it, two months ago. You drawing. The kitchen. The space between two people.” He held her gaze.
“I want to be the person on the other side of that table.”
She was very still.
“That’s—” She stopped.
“I know it’s more than I’ve asked for,” he said. “I know that’s more than what we’ve been building toward, or maybe it’s exactly what we’ve been building toward and I’m saying it before you’re ready—”
“No,” she said.
He waited.
“No, you’re not saying it before I’m ready,” she said.
She looked at her soup.
She looked back at him.
“I need one more thing,” she said.
“Name it.”
“I need you to come on a weeknight,” she said. “Not a Saturday. A Tuesday or a Wednesday. With no occasion. Just — come.” She held his gaze. “Because the Saturdays are perfect and perfect things make me nervous. I need to see what it looks like when there’s no occasion.”
He looked at her.
“Wednesday,” he said.
She nodded.
“Wednesday,” she said.