Chapter 29
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
The Sublet
Aoife
“To love at all is to be vulnerable.” — C.S. Lewis
I told him on a Tuesday morning, six days after we came home from the hospital. The babies were asleep in the room that had been the guest room and was now the nursery. I had fed them both at five and they were down again, and the house had the held-breath calm between one need and the next.
I came downstairs. Jensen was in the kitchen with his coffee. He looked up when I came in, and his expression was the easy one he wore in the mornings now, open and unhurried, the one that had replaced the careful containment of the first weeks.
He poured me a tea without being asked and pushed it across the counter. I stood there for a moment and I thought: say it now. Say it before the day gets going and before you talk yourself out of it again.
"I've arranged a sublet," I said. "14C Alderton Street. Near my old apartment, actually. It has two bedrooms and it's available from the first of next month. It will give me time to find something more permanent once I go back to work."
Jensen put his coffee cup down. He looked at me with an expression that I could not immediately place, something between confusion and a sharpness that was working to conceal itself.
His brow drew slightly together, not a frown exactly, something more like a person trying to understand how the thing they were hearing could be true.
"I want to say thank you," I said. "For everything.
The last twelve weeks have been more than I had any right to ask for, and I am genuinely grateful.
I would like to work out an arrangement for you to see the babies, whatever makes sense, whenever you want.
I am not going to make that difficult." I had rehearsed this.
The practiced quality of it was probably visible.
"But I think it's the right time for me to be in my own space, and I think it is also the right thing for you. "
He said, "Where are you going?" His voice was careful and his face was not. He looked like a man who had received unexpected news and was deciding how to hold it, his eyes on mine with an intensity that was not the usual composure.
"Alderton Street," I said. "14C. It's a fifteen-minute drive from here."
He said, "Aoife. Don't go."
I looked at him. His expression had changed while I was looking, the carefulness falling away, replaced by something more exposed, the face of a man who is asking for something and is not certain he has the right to ask for it.
He is saying that because he is used to me being here, I thought.
He is saying it because the babies are here and it is easier to say don't go than to say what he actually wants.
He is not saying it for the reason I want him to be saying it.
"Jensen," I said. "You don't have to do this. I know what this was. I do not want to be someone you feel obligated to house and feed because I am the mother of your children. That is not a life."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "What if I'm asking you to stay because I want you to stay?"
He said it steadily, looking at me, his hands flat on the counter, and there was something in his face that was neither performance nor management. Something simply there. Something that had decided to be there regardless of what came back at it.
I wanted to believe it. That was the problem. I always wanted to believe it.
"That's not enough," I said. "I need more than 'I want you to stay.' If there is something real you need to say, then say it. All of it. And I will listen. But if there isn't, then please let me go and let us do this properly as parents who live in separate places."
He looked at me for a long time. Something moved in his face, complicated and real, a working through of something interior that he was not hiding from me.
He said, "I need tonight. Can you give me tonight?"
I thought: this is how it has always worked. He asks for time and I give it. But he has never before asked for time to say something. He has asked for time to avoid things. Those are different requests.
"Tonight," I said. I picked up my tea. I went upstairs to listen for the babies.