CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Kael — Learning the Ordinary Way
We had our first actual date three days later, and I want to record, for whatever it’s worth, that I was considerably more nervous walking into that restaurant than I had ever been standing between Nadia and a loaded gun.
Danger, it turned out, was a language I spoke fluently. This — a reservation, a menu, small talk that wasn’t strategy, the particular vulnerability of letting someone see you with nothing to hide behind — this was the one thing four years of preparation hadn’t equipped me for at all.
“You’re doing the thing,” Nadia said, halfway through the appetizer, amusement pulling at the corner of her mouth. “The thing where you’re scanning the room like you’re casing an exit.”
“Old habit.”
“A bad one, for a dinner date.”
“I’m working on it,” I said, and made myself, deliberately, stop tracking the door, stop cataloguing every stranger’s gait for threat assessment, and simply look at her instead — really look, the way I’d started to allow myself in the weeks since the storage unit, without the excuse of danger to justify the attention.
We talked about ordinary things, that night, for the first time since any of this began.
Her work, the paintings she wanted to make next, now that water didn’t have to mean the same thing it had for the last decade.
My own uncertain future, the strange business of trying to build a life out from under the shadow of my father’s name, now that the shadow had finally, publicly, been forced into the light.
Priya’s opinion of me, which remained cautiously improving.
Ruth, who’d asked, gently, if she could meet the man Nadia’s mother had once watched from a distance and worried about, now that he’d become someone else entirely.
“She’d have liked you, I think,” Nadia said, toward the end of the evening, turning her wine glass slowly between her fingers. “Eventually. Once she got past the part where your last name terrified her.”
“I’m not sure I’d have blamed her for staying afraid a while.”
“No,” Nadia agreed. “But she wrote that a name isn’t a sentence.
I think she’d have wanted to give you the chance to prove it, the same way I did.
” She looked up, something steady and certain in her expression that I was still, weeks later, learning not to take for granted. “I’m glad I did, for what it’s worth.”
“So am I,” I said, and reached across the table for her hand, no danger requiring the gesture this time, nothing but the simple, ordinary want of it.
“I spent four years thinking the only way I could love you safely was from a distance you never knew existed. I’d like to spend considerably longer finding out what it looks like up close. ”
“That,” she said, smiling, “sounds like a start.”