CHAPTER NINETEEN
NORA
She finished the new book in September.
Thirty panels. The arc of it — from the midnight signing seen from the other side of the glass, through the Brooklyn years, through Felix, through the Saturdays and the Wednesdays and the kitchen table and the morning light.
She didn’t show Roman until it was finished.
She’d told him about it, in the way she told him things now — as they happened, in the ongoing conversation of two people who were fully in each other’s lives. He’d known it was coming. He’d given her the space to finish it without looking over her shoulder.
She showed him on a Sunday evening.
She sat beside him on the sofa while he read.
She watched his face.
He read slowly. That was how he read everything — with full attention, taking in what was actually there rather than what he expected. She’d always found that quality extraordinary.
She watched him stop at the midnight page.
The glass door. Her in the midnight-blue dress. His signature. The New Year arriving.
He held the page for a long time.
Then he kept reading.
He read through the Brooklyn years — the apartment, the drawing table, Felix. The park and the train and the rubber ducks. The kitchen table.
The ending.
She’d drawn the morning kitchen. Felix in his chair. Two people at the table. The window with its changing light. Between them — not empty space, not closed space. The morning. The ordinary specific warmth of a morning that belonged to them.
She’d titled it The Morning Hours.
Roman closed the book.
He sat with it in his lap.
He said: “The title.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Not midnight,” he said. “Morning.”
“No,” she said. “Not midnight.”
He looked at her.
She said: “Midnight is what happened to us. Morning is what we’re making.”
He held her gaze.
“Yes,” he said.
He put his arm around her.
She leaned against him.
The September evening was outside the window.
Felix was in the next room, the small sounds of a child who’d learned to put himself to sleep — the specific quiet that followed the reading of the board books, now conducted by Roman while Nora drew, the bedtime routine so completely theirs it was impossible to remember how it had been assembled.
She thought: the book is right.
She thought: the ending is right.
She thought: morning is exactly correct.
“October,” she said.
“Yes?” he said.
“The publication date,” she said. “October fifteenth.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been tracking the production schedule.”
She looked at him.
“Of course you have,” she said.
“I prepare for things,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve always known that.”
He held her.
She thought about everything that had brought them to this sofa — the midnight signing, the glass door, the New Year she’d walked into alone, the Brooklyn apartment and the drawing table and the Saturdays that had become Wednesdays that had become every evening.
She thought about Felix saying Romma for the first time with the satisfaction of a word he’d been working on.
She thought about morning light.
She thought: yes.