CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DOMINIC
January.
They were not back in the marriage. They were not rushed toward anything.
They were two people building something new out of the ruins of something old, which required different skills than building from scratch — it required the ability to name what had failed and why, to keep the right pieces and release the wrong ones, to build something that had learned from everything that preceded it.
He was good at this now.
He was learning to be.
He moved some things to the West Village apartment, because she’d given him the key and because being close to her had become the organizing principle of his day in a way that felt permanent.
He still had the Tribeca place.
She didn’t ask him to give it up.
He didn’t offer to.
The pace was hers.
He was learning not just to say that but to mean it in practice, which was different.
Thomas came to dinner in January.
Not at the Tribeca place — at the West Village apartment. Isla cooked, which she was better at than she admitted, and Thomas arrived with a bottle of wine that was considerably better than anyone needed for a Tuesday evening.
Thomas ate his dinner and talked to Isla about architecture, which led to a conversation about structural engineering that led to him asking about Patricia March and Isla saying she was a structural engineer and Thomas saying well of course she is in a tone that implied he’d known all along.
After dinner, Dominic and Thomas stood on the small West Village balcony while Isla was inside.
“Better,” Thomas said.
“Than what?”
“Than the last time I saw you,” Thomas said. “Which was better than the time before. The trajectory is right.”
“I know,” Dominic said.
Thomas looked at the street below.
“She’s extraordinary,” he said.
“I know.”
“You knew before,” Thomas said. “You just couldn’t hold it.”
“I know.”
Thomas was quiet for a moment.
“I was afraid,” Dominic said. “For four years I was afraid of being enough. And the fear made me blind to the fact that I was already — I was already what she needed. I just wouldn’t let myself see it because seeing it meant I had to trust that I could keep being it.”
Thomas looked at him.
“And now?” he said.
“And now,” Dominic said, “I’ve proven to myself that I can be it.
Even after the worst of it. Even with the full understanding of what I did.
” He held his father’s gaze. “I can be what she needs. I know that now. Not because I’m different from who I was — but because I understand what being it requires. ”
Thomas looked at him for a long time.
“Your grandfather,” Thomas said, “once told me that the difference between a man who builds things and a man who keeps them is whether he understands the cost of what he’s holding.” He paused. “You understand the cost.”
“Yes,” Dominic said.
Thomas nodded.
Inside, Isla was laughing at something.
The sound of it came through the glass door.
Dominic heard it and thought: that. That is the cost of what I’m holding.
He would never, for the rest of his life, hear that sound without understanding exactly what it had almost cost him.
He was going to hold it forever.