Chapter 12
XAVIER
Doctor Harlan’s office was on the second floor of a building on California Street, between a dentist and an immigration attorney.
The waiting room had two chairs, a side table with a box of tissues, and a window that looked out onto the street.
No receptionist. No intake forms on a clipboard.
Just a closed door with a white noise machine humming beside it.
The door opened at exactly two o'clock. Doctor Harlan was younger than he'd expected.
Early forties, maybe. Dark hair, glasses, a calm face.
She shook his hand, led him into a room that was smaller than the waiting room and had two chairs facing each other, along with a window with the blinds half-drawn and nothing on the walls except a single framed print of the ocean.
"So," she said, once they were seated. "Tell me why you're here."
He'd rehearsed this. He'd spent the drive over constructing a version of the story that was organized, coherent. It was designed to demonstrate that while he'd made a serious error, he was already taking corrective action.
He opened his mouth and the rehearsed version fell apart.
"I accused my wife of having an affair," he said.
"She's pregnant. The baby is mine. She told me it was mine and I didn't believe her.
I accused her of sleeping with her best friend, who is gay, which I didn't know, but it wouldn't have mattered because she told me the truth and I should have believed her regardless.
She's ten weeks pregnant, living alone and I'm sitting in this chair because I don't know how to be a person who doesn't destroy the things he loves. "
Doctor Harlan didn't blink. She didn't write anything down. She looked at him with an expression that was neither sympathetic nor judgmental, which was unnerving because Xavier was accustomed to generating one or the other in every person he encountered.
"You said you should have believed her regardless," she said. "Regardless of what?"
"Regardless of the evidence. There wasn't any evidence. I invented it. A calendar. An Instagram post. A look on her face when she talked about him."
"And what did you think that evidence proved?"
"That she was going to leave me."
The sentence came out before he could stop it. He heard it hang in the air between them and recognized, with a jolt, that he'd never said it out loud before. Not to Isabelle. Not to himself. The accusation had never been about infidelity. It had been about abandonment.
"Tell me about your mother," Doctor Harlan said.
He almost laughed. He almost said something sharp about the predictability of it, the textbook maneuver, the mother question arriving right on schedule.
But the sharp thing died in his throat because he was tired.
He was so tired of being clever, of deflecting, of steering every conversation toward the outcome he wanted. He was tired of being Xavier Grant.
So he told her. Doctor Harlan nodded and listened. And then she let the silence hold.
Xavier waited for her to tell him what to do, how to fix it, what the steps were. She didn't. She just sat with him in the quiet room and let him be a man who'd finally said out loud the thing he'd spent his entire adult life refusing to examine.
One session wasn't going to undo twenty-two years of a locked room. He knew that. But walking out onto California Street afterward, loosening his tie in the late afternoon light, he had the unfamiliar sensation of having set something down.A weight lifted from his shoulders.
He booked the next appointment before he reached his car.
The following Thursday was Isabelle's ten-week checkup. She'd texted him two days before, brief and businesslike: Thursday, 10am, Doctor Levine. Same building. You can come if you want.
He wanted. He wanted so badly it was a physical thing, a pressure behind his sternum that started when he read the text and didn't let up for forty-eight hours.
Xavier got there early. He'd told himself he wouldn't, but he got there twenty minutes early and sat in the same chair by the window and waited.
He didn't bring flowers, though he wanted to.
He didn't bring anything. He sat with his hands in his lap, his coat folded over the arm of the chair and watched the elevator doors.
When they opened, Isabelle walked out and his entire body responded before his mind could catch up.
She was wearing a blue dress he didn't recognize, something new, something she'd chosen without him, and it fit her differently than her clothes used to fit.
Her waist was thickening. Just barely, just enough that the fabric sat differently across her hips, and the sight of it, the visible evidence of their child changing her body, made his chest ache with a tenderness so acute he had to look away for a second and then look back because he couldn't bear not to look at her.
Isabelle’s hair was down. She had color in her cheeks. She looked, and this was the part that hurt the most, good. She looked like a woman who was sleeping in her own bed, eating regular meals, living a life that was functioning without him in it.
He'd expected her to look… diminished. He'd expected the separation to show on her as visibly as it showed on him, the shadows, the weight loss, the rumpled collar.
She didn't look diminished. She looked like Isabelle, his Isabelle, except she wasn't his anymore, and the loss of that possessive pronoun was still the hardest thing he'd ever absorbed.
"You're early," she said.
"I'm always early."
"You're never early. You arrive on time because being early implies anxiety and Xavier Grant doesn't do anxiety."
He smiled. She almost smiled. The almost was its own kind of agony.
She sat beside him. Closer than last time. One chair between them instead of two. He noticed and didn't comment, didn't want to name it and risk her pulling back.
"How are you?" he asked.
"Tired. Nauseous. Working."
"Working?"
She looked at him. Something shifted in her expression, a wariness mixed with something else, something that looked almost like pride.
"I'm taking clients," she said. "Restoration and interior design. Historic homes."
He stared at her.
"Margaret referred me to a colleague. I start the walkthrough next week."
"Isabelle, that's..." He stopped. He heard himself about to say incredible, about to say amazing, about to deliver the same empty superlatives he'd been offering for years, the compliments that praised her talent as though it were a personality trait rather than a discipline she'd built.
"That's exactly right," he said instead.
"That's exactly what you should be doing. "
She looked at him for a long moment. He couldn't read her expression, couldn't tell whether what he'd said had landed the way he'd intended. The inability to read her was new, frightening and possibly deserved.
"Isabelle Grant?"
They stood. They walked to the exam room together, side by side, not touching.
Xavier kept his hands at his sides and concentrated on not reaching for her, not finding her wrist, not pressing his thumb against her pulse.
The restraint was exhausting. Every instinct in his body said touch her, hold her, close the distance, and every conscious thought said don't. She asked you not to. She set a boundary. Respect it.
The exam was routine. Doctor Levine measured, listened, checked the monitor.
Ten weeks. The baby was the size of a strawberry, she said, which was a piece of information Xavier absorbed with a gravity entirely disproportionate to the fruit in question.
A strawberry. His child was the size of a strawberry, had fingernails forming and a spine curving into place.
Xavier stood by the wall, watched the monitor and pressed his hand over his own mouth to keep the sound in.
"Everything looks excellent," Doctor Levine said. "Right on track."
After, in the hallway outside the office, Isabelle pulled on her jacket. He watched her and tried to think of something to say that wasn't please come back to me.
"Can I take you to lunch?" he said instead.
She looked at him. He could see her weighing it, turning it over, testing it for hidden intent.
"Just lunch," he said. "You have to eat. The baby is the size of a strawberry and strawberries need nutrients."
"That's not how it works."
"I'm aware that's not how it works. I'm making a bad joke because I'm nervous."
"Fine," she said. "Lunch."
"Where do you want to go?"
"You're asking me?"
"I'm asking you."
She paused. He could see her considering, and he could see the moment she made a decision that was also a test.
"There's a taqueria on Clement," she said. "El Castillito. They have a lunch counter and the best carnitas in the city."
She was testing him. He knew she was testing him.
Isabelle's favorite restaurant wasn't the kind of place Xavier typically ate lunch.
Xavier ate lunch at places with reservations, tablecloths and wine lists organized by region.
Xavier had taken her to those places for ten years and she'd gone willingly, beautifully, wearing dresses that made hosts stammer, and he'd rarely asked her where she actually wanted to eat.
"Let's go," he said.
They drove separately. He followed her car across the city to the Richmond District, to a block on Clement Street lined with produce stands, bakeries and shops with signs in four languages.
El Castillito had a yellow awning, a counter with eight stools and a menu board written in marker on whiteboard.
There was no host. There was no tablecloth.
There was a woman behind the counter who called Isabelle by name.
"Isabelle! Haven't seen you in weeks. The usual?"
"Please."
The woman looked at Xavier. He was still in his suit. Charcoal wool. He was the most overdressed person in a room that contained a man in paint-splattered coveralls, two teenagers sharing a burrito, and an elderly woman reading a newspaper in Cantonese.
"What's good?" he asked.
"Everything," the woman said. "But the carnitas plate is what she comes for."
"Two carnitas plates."
They sat at the counter on stools that didn't swivel. Isabelle's knee was six inches from his. The food came quickly, enormous plates with rice, beans and carnitas that had been braised until the edges crisped and a salsa verde that was bright enough to make his eyes water.
He picked up his fork and ate, and the food was extraordinary. The pork was tender and smoky, the salsa had a heat that built slowly and the rice was seasoned with something he couldn't identify and didn't need to.
"You've been coming here," he said.
"For years. Douglas found it when he was living in the city before. He brought me here the first time when we were at Berkeley and I've been coming back ever since."
Douglas's name. She said it easily, without hesitation, without checking his reaction. He let it pass through him. He let it exist without flinching.
"It's really good," he said.
"I know."
"Why didn't you ever tell me about this place?"
Isabelle looked at him. She picked up a chip, dipped it in the salsa and took her time answering.
"Because you would have said 'that's great, baby, we should go sometime,' and then we never would have. Your assistant would have booked us somewhere with a sommelier instead. And I would have let it happen because it was easier than explaining why a taqueria on Clement Street mattered to me."
His chest tightened. “I’m here now," he said.
"You are."
"I'm eating carnitas at a lunch counter in my suit and I'm not dying."
"You look a little like you might be dying."
"That's the salsa. The salsa is trying to kill me."
She laughed. It was short and surprised, but she cut it off almost immediately, as though she'd caught herself doing something she wasn't ready to do. But it had happened. The sound of it went through him with a force that nothing in his professional life had ever matched.
They ate. They didn't talk about the marriage, the accusation, the house or any of the things that sat between them.
They talked about the food, the neighborhood, the produce stand next door that sold persimmons in winter.
Isabelle told him about a tile shop on Balboa that carried Portuguese azulejos and how she was thinking of sourcing some for the Soto project, and he listened.
He listened, asked questions and didn't offer to buy the tiles or fund the project or solve any of the problems she hadn't asked him to solve.
When they finished, he paid. She let him. They walked outside and stood on the sidewalk in the midday light.
"Thank you for lunch," she said.
"Thank you for bringing me here."
She looked at him. The distance between them was still vast, still unresolved, still filled with everything he'd broken and hadn't yet learned how to repair. But she'd laughed. He was going to carry that all the way back to the apartment on Russian Hill and hold it.
"I'll be in touch,” she said simply.
She turned and walked to her car. He watched her go. He didn't follow her, though he wanted to. He let her go because that was what she'd asked for and he was learning, slowly, painfully, to give her what she asked for instead of what he wanted to give.