He said, "There's a difference." She was quiet for a long moment. I spent most of the last 3 years, she said, making sure that my professional life was airtight and my personal life was small enough that nothing in it could be used against me. That's She paused. That's not actually a way to live.
I know that. I've known it for a while. I just got very good at it and it became the shape of everything. You can get good at the wrong thing, Ethan said. That's one of the more annoying things about competence.
She looked at him. The thing moved across her face again, the involuntary one that arrived before the controlled version got there. This time she didn't catch it. I like you, she said. She said it plainly, the way she said most things, not as a confession, not as a performance, but as a fact she had assessed and confirmed and saw no reason to obscure.
I know, he said. I like you, too. This is going to be complicated, she said. Yes, he agreed. My life is not simple.
I have an 8-year-old who argues with me about everything in a workshop that needs a new electrical panel, he said. My life isn't simple either. Our worlds are different, he said. Yes, I know. He looked at her directly.
Are they too different? She held his gaze for a moment. I don't know yet, she said. I think that's the honest answer. That's fair, he said.
I'm also not good at, she started. Serena, what? Just eat your lunch, he said. We don't have to solve it today. She looked at him.
Then she looked down at her plate and she picked up her fork and she ate her lunch. The whole thing, not just three spoonfuls of soup. The next 3 months were not simple. Ethan hadn't expected them to be. and the fact that they weren't.
The fact that it was genuinely difficult and uncertain and required the kind of patience that didn't come from strategy, but from deciding that something was worth the patience was in its own way reassuring. Easy things had a way of not meaning much once you got to the other side of them. The difficulty was practical first. Serena's calendar operated in a register that Ethan had no reference point for board meetings and investor calls and quarterly reviews that couldn't be moved. international trips that materialized with two days notice, evenings that ended at 9:00 and mornings that started at 5.
She was in London for a week in January and in Singapore for 10 days in February. And during those stretches, they talked by phone at odd hours early morning for him, late evening for her, the time difference turning every call into a small negotiation with the clock. He was not naturally good at long-distance conversation. He was a person who needed to be in the same room, who read the quality of a silence better than the content of a message, who found the telephone a thin medium for anything that mattered. He told her this once during a call when they had both been tired, and the conversation had gone flat in a way that neither of them knew what to do with. "
I know," she said. " I'm better on the phone than you are. I've had to be." " Is that going to be a problem?" he asked.
A pause. " I'm coming home Saturday," she said. " We can talk then." " Actually talk?" Okay, he said she came home Saturday.
They walked along the lakefront in weather that was too cold for walking comfortably and didn't go inside until both of them were genuinely freezing. And the conversation they had, the actual one, in the same physical space covered things that had been accumulating in the gaps between phone calls, and by the end of it, they had not resolved anything exactly, but had established up the slightly wobbly architecture of two people who had decided to keep building. Maisie was the variable Ethan could not predict. He had not told Maisie anything specific. He told her that he'd met a woman through work true in its own way and that they were having lunch sometimes.
And Maisie had looked at him with evaluating expression she'd developed sometime around her sixth birthday. The one that suggested she was processing significantly more information than she was being given. " Is she nice?" Maisie asked. " She's yes," Ethan said. "
She's very direct. She says what she thinks." Maisie considered this. I like people who say what they think. She said most people at school don't say what they think and then you never know where you are with them.
That's a very sophisticated observation. Ethan said. Ms. Brennan says I'm emotionally intelligent. Maisie said she also says I need to work on not interrupting, but I think those two things can coexist. Ethan stared at his daughter.
What? Maisie said nothing. He said, "You sound like someone I know." The first time Serena came to the workshop, she came alone. She'd asked if she could see it, not in the sense of wanting to be shown a professional space, but in the sense of someone who genuinely wanted to understand where a person spent their time, what it looked like when nobody was performing anything.
Ethan had said yes. She arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in her own car, the practical one, not the car the company kept for her, and she stood in the doorway of the workshop for a moment before coming in. the way people stood in the doorways of places they were entering without a role to play. The workshop was not impressive in the way that impressive things were. It was functional tools on walls, workbenches with the specific disorder of active projects, sawdust in the corners that the broom hadn't reached, the smell of wood and oil, and the particular dryness of a heated space in winter.