CHAPTER SEVEN
ISLA
She told Josie she was having dinner with Dominic on Thursday.
Josie said: “Good.”
Just that. Not a speech. Not a warning. Not the full Josie analysis.
Just: good.
“That’s all you have?” Isla said.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Something more alarmed.”
Josie turned from her materials board. “You’re an adult. You’ve been working through this for a year and a half. You know what you’re doing.” She paused. “You asked me to let you go at your own pace. This is me letting you go at your own pace.”
“You’re being unusually restrained.”
“I’m being appropriate,” Josie said. “Also I think it’s the right move and I have nothing useful to add to it.”
“What do you think he’s going to say?”
Josie turned back to her board. “I think he’s going to tell you why.”
Isla was quiet.
Why. The question she’d stopped asking herself about eight months ago because the not-knowing had been better than the version of why she’d been constructing. She’d been building a narrative to survive inside: he had unfinished business. He needed to know. It had nothing to do with you.
She’d been building it because the alternative — you were always second — was a sentence she couldn’t live inside.
“What if the why makes it worse?” she said.
Josie turned around.
“Then it makes it worse,” she said. “And you’ll deal with that. You’ve been dealing with things for eighteen months.” She held Isla’s gaze. “But the not-knowing is also a thing you’re dealing with. Every day.” She paused. “At least the why is real.”
Isla looked at the materials board.
“Yes,” she said.
“The dinner’s not a reconciliation,” Josie said. “It doesn’t have to be anything. Just a conversation.”
“I know.”
“Right.” Josie turned back. “Now come look at this limestone sample. I think the veining is wrong for the east corridor.”
They looked at the limestone.
Thursday arrived gray and cold.
She wore what she always wore when she needed to feel like herself: dark trousers, a cream-colored top, the good earrings that her mother had given her when she’d graduated from architecture school.
The earrings were the only jewelry she’d worn throughout the worst of it.
She’d stopped wearing her wedding ring the day he left and she’d started wearing her mother’s earrings the same day, as if something in her understood she needed a talisman that was only hers.
He’d chosen a restaurant in SoHo she didn’t know. Small, warm, the kind of place that said: I thought about what you’d like.
She registered that.
He stood when she came in.
She sat down.
She looked at the menu because the menu gave her something to do while her body finished adjusting to being in a room with him.
She’d been on the same site as him six times in six weeks.
She’d managed each one. But a restaurant was different — a restaurant was the context of intimacy, of being two people choosing to be in the same place on purpose.
She closed the menu.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“You asked,” she said. “I said Thursday.”
“I know.” A pause. “I want to say something before we order. So it’s not sitting between us through the whole dinner.”
She folded her hands in her lap.
She waited.
“I need to tell you why I left,” he said.
She held his gaze.
“Not the story I told you at the time,” he said. “The real reason. Which took me about fourteen months to understand properly and another two to find a way to say.”
She was very still.
“It wasn’t Claire,” he said. “I mean — Claire was the mechanism. She was the person I chose, and that was real. But the reason I chose her wasn’t her.” He paused. “The reason I chose her was that I was terrified of being enough for you.”
She looked at him.
“You were—” He stopped. Organized himself.
“You were so certain of everything. Not arrogant — that’s not what I mean.
You always knew what was right and what was worth fighting for and what to do with a space and what to do with your life.
And you were certain of us. Of me.” He held her gaze.
“And I was afraid I was going to fail to be what you were certain I was.”
She didn’t speak.
“Claire was the person I’d been with before I was afraid,” he said.
“Before I’d built something worth having and therefore worth losing.
She represented a version of myself that was—” He stopped.
“Uncomplicated. Not yet accountable for the choices I’d made.
” He looked at the table briefly. “I think I wanted to go back to that version. Not to Claire specifically. To the version of myself that hadn’t been given something as clear and real as you. ”
The restaurant moved around them.
Isla breathed.
“You were afraid I’d find out you weren’t enough,” she said. Her voice was level. “So you left first.”
He held her gaze.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I was doing.”
She looked at her hands in her lap.
She thought about what that sentence did to the story she’d been carrying.
You were always second — she’d been fighting that sentence for eighteen months. Building a life that made room for it, that functioned around the specific wound of believing she’d been a placeholder.
The story he was telling was different.
Not better, exactly. Not less painful. But different in a specific way that shifted the wound’s location.
He hadn’t left because she was second.
He’d left because she was first — so clearly, so undeniably first that he’d run from it.
She didn’t know, sitting at that table, whether that was better or worse.
She said: “You know that explanation doesn’t excuse it.”
“Yes,” he said immediately.
“It doesn’t fix what it cost.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t—” She stopped. “It makes the past eighteen months—” She stopped again. She pressed her fingers briefly to her mouth.
He waited. He didn’t try to fill the silence.
She made herself look at him.
“It changes what I’ve been angry about,” she said carefully.
“I’ve been angry about being replaced. About not being — chosen.
And you’re telling me that I was chosen so clearly that it scared you into making the worst decision of your life.
” She looked at him. “That’s—I don’t know what to do with that. ”
“I know,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything with it tonight.”
She looked at the table.
“Why did you tell me now?” she said.
“Because you’re here,” he said. “In the building. Doing extraordinary work. And I couldn’t keep being in the same city as you carrying something that should have been said a long time ago.”
She looked at him.
She thought: this is the thing. This is the thing under everything.
She thought: I need to think about this for a long time.
“Okay,” she said.
She picked up the menu.
“Let’s order,” she said.
He picked up his menu.
They ordered. They talked about other things — the project, the city, a building in the Meatpacking District she’d always thought was an underutilized facade. Normal things. The ordinary conversation of two people who used to know everything about each other and were finding out what they know now.
It was the best dinner she’d had in eighteen months.
She didn’t tell him that.
She walked home in the spring air and thought about chosen so clearly it scared you and about what it meant for the story she’d been living in, and about whether a different story was something she was ready for.
She didn’t reach a conclusion.
She made tea.
She stood at her kitchen window.
She thought: not yet.
She thought: but getting closer.