Chapter Twenty-Five
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Almost
Aoife
The almost moment happened in week thirty-four, on a Saturday evening, in the kitchen.
We were making a lamb stew that was my grandmother's recipe, which I had written from memory onto an index card.
He had read it carefully and asked one question about the quantities and then produced the ingredients without further consultation.
I was managing the herb end of things from my stool at the counter, and he was at the stove.
We were talking about Callum, who had apparently sent Jensen a photograph that morning of the Delmar account quarterly report with a sticky note that said "You're welcome" in large letters.
Jensen was telling me this with the dry affection he used when talking about his brother, a warmth in his voice that he did not have to work at.
I laughed. Not the managed kind but the real kind, helpless and unplanned, the kind that catches you before you can arrange yourself around it, and he looked over at me from the stove.
Whatever was in his face in that moment was something I had not seen before. Open and undefended and entirely directed at me. Not fond exactly, or not only fond. Something more deliberate than that, as if he had looked up and seen something and decided, in that instant, not to look away from it.
The laugh finished. I looked at him. He was still looking at me.
The kitchen was very quiet. The stew was doing what stews do on low heat.
I thought: if you move toward this, if you let yourself move toward this, you are going to be back in the same place you have always been with him, wanting more than he will give.
You have two children coming and you cannot afford to do that again.
He turned back to the stove. He adjusted the heat. He said, without looking at me, "Your grandmother knew what she was doing with this recipe."
I said, "She always did."
We ate dinner. It was very good. Neither of us said anything about what had happened, because nothing technically had, and because we were both people who had learned that some things were safer in the place where words could not reach them.
But that night, in the guest room with the twins moving in the way they did in the evenings, I thought about his face at the stove. I thought: he looked at you like you were the only thing in the room.
Then I thought about Simone, years ago, in the break room at Mae's: He's looking at you like you're the only thing in the room and you are actively pretending not to notice.
I had said I was not pretending. I was still not pretending. I was simply being very, very careful.