CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER
TEN
Stolen Flowers
Jensen
She let me back in. I knew, when she opened the door wider, that I had not earned it and that she was giving it to me anyway, and I accepted it the way I had been accepting things from her since the beginning, without examining what it cost her.
What I know now is that she saw me clearly, probably from earlier than I understood, and she stayed anyway, not out of naivety but out of the courage of someone who has chosen a thing with both eyes open and is willing to bear the consequences.
There was nothing naive about Aoife Walsh.
The idea that she did not know what was happening is one I have had to revise entirely.
She knew. She stayed. That is something I have to hold alongside everything else.
We continued as before, through month eight and into the next, and I told myself this could go on indefinitely.
I was at the graves on Thursdays and her apartment when I called and between the two I was functional and present at work and whatever Callum could see in my face when he looked at me too carefully he chose not to name yet.
The truth is that somewhere in month eight I began to notice her differently.
The way she looked when she was reading, which was with a complete absorption that shut out everything else, her chin tipped slightly forward, her hand around her tea.
The way she talked about the daycare children not as anecdotes but as individual people she had actually thought about.
The way she had made her apartment into something with her grandmother's curtains and her herbs and her secondhand books, the insistence on making a home out of what you had.
I noticed these things. I filed them in the category of things I was not going to examine and I moved on.
She is just someone who is around, I continued to tell myself, with decreasing conviction.
?
I was at the graves on a Thursday in month eight when I understood, without wanting to, that this was not entirely true.
I was talking to Nadia the way I always did, and I started talking about the evening before, which I had spent at Aoife's, and I found myself describing her with a specificity and a warmth that stopped me mid-sentence.
I had told Nadia about Aoife before, in the vague terms of the arrangement, the way you update someone on logistics.
But I was not describing logistics now. I was telling Nadia about the way Aoife had laughed at something on the television, helplessly, covering her face with both hands the way she did when something caught her fully off guard, and how she had looked afterward, still undone by it, and I had thought in that moment, watching her, that she was the most unguarded person I had ever been near.
I stopped talking. I sat in the cold between the headstones and I looked at my wife's name carved in stone and I felt the full force of the thought. Stop, I told myself, with a sharpness that surprised me. That is enough. You stop that right now.
I went home. I lasted four days without contacting her.
On the fifth day I was in a meeting about the Carmichael acquisition and Diana slid a note onto the desk in front of me that said the Singapore office needed a callback in the next twenty minutes, and I looked at the note and I thought about Aoife.
The complete irrelevance of the thought to the meeting and the note and Singapore was more information than I wanted to have.
I called Singapore. I went home. I poured a drink and I sat in the study and I said: "I am not doing anything wrong. It's just company. It doesn't mean anything." The photograph did not respond. I had never found this comforting.
I called Aoife.