Wrong as in working with bad materials. She was very still. You can want the position and not take it, he said. Or you can take it and we figure out what that means without it being the end of something. Those aren't the only two options, but they're real ones.
And neither of them requires you to disappear half of yourself to make the other half work. He looked at her. What do you actually want? Not what you're supposed to want. Not what the professional version of you wants.
What do you want? The silence lasted long enough that he heard the clamps on the ash plank settle slightly in the change of temperature from the coffee warmth in the room. I want to stay, she said. It came out quieter than anything she'd said in the 4 months he'd known her. I want to not go to Brussels.
I want to not rebuild my life around an airport and a boardroom in a city where I know no one personally. She paused. I want to be here on Saturday mornings. I want Maisie to keep correcting my pronunciation. I want to know what that rocking chair feels like when you finally get the curve right.
Her voice was steady, but it was working to be steady. I want the thing I have here, whatever it is, and I don't want to trade it for the thing I would have traded anything for 2 years ago. Ethan looked at her for a moment. Then don't go, he said. It's not that simple.
Why not? Because she stopped. Because I have spent my entire adult life making choices based on what was professionally correct and strategically sound. And I don't know how to trust a choice that's just personal. I don't have a framework for it.
I don't know what it costs yet. I don't know what I'm not seeing. You're not seeing that you already made the decision. Ethan said 3 weeks ago. You've been checking the math since then, but the decision was made when you decided to sit with it instead of saying yes immediately.
He paused. You said yes to things immediately for 20 years. This one you sat with. That's your answer. She looked at him for a long moment.
Her eyes were doing the thing they sometimes did not fill in but getting the quality of eyes that were close to something and holding it carefully. I'm not good at this. She said this whatever this is. I want to be clear about that. I will be difficult and I will be in my own head and I will manage things that don't need managing and I will be in Singapore for 2 weeks without warning and I will forget to eat dinner and I will argue with you about wood types when I should probably just concede the point.
I know, he said. I'm not going to be easy, Serena. He said her name the way he'd learned to say it, not as a stop, but as an arrival, the specific tone of someone who wanted the other person to be where they actually were. I'm a widower with a kid in a workshop that needs rewiring, and I eat cereal for dinner twice a week, and I don't call when I should. I'm not easy either.
I told you this. She looked at him. The thing that moved across her face this time was different from the near smiles she'd been catching and releasing for 4 months. This one she didn't catch. It arrived and stayed, imperfect and real, the kind that had nothing to do with an audience. "
Okay," she said. " Okay," he said. She didn't go to Brussels. She declined the consortium chair position with a letter that she wrote herself rather than having her assistant draft in language that was direct without being cold and final without being a door slammed. She told Ethan about it 3 days later over the phone at 9:00 in the morning while he was measuring cuts for the Evanston rocking chair and she was between calls. "
Did it feel right?" he asked. " It felt like jumping off something," she said. " But in the direction I wanted to land." " That's usually right," he said.
She laughed. A real one, short and a little surprised at itself, the way her laughs still sometimes were when they arrived without warning. He decided some weeks earlier that her laugh was the most unguarded thing about her, the part that had survived whatever the professional years had done to the rest of her expressiveness. It arrived quickly and left quickly and was entirely itself. I have a meeting in 40 minutes, she said.
Go, he said. Ethan, yeah, I'm glad I didn't go, she said. I know, he said. Go to your meeting. The spring moved forward.
The rocking chair was finished in April. Ethan sat in it in the workshop the proper sitting. the assessment, the weight going where it needed to go, the back holding the way a back should be held, and the curve was right. He delivered it to Evanston on a Thursday, and the woman who answered the door held both of his hands when she saw it, and didn't say anything for a moment, and he understood that the chair was doing something he hadn't built into it, except by trying to build it well, which was most of what any work asked of you. Maisie met Serena properly in May.
There had been crossings before Serena arriving at the apartment. Once when Maisie was there, brief and low pressure, structured as an accident rather than an introduction, because Ethan understood that his daughter needed to arrive at things in her own time rather than be presented with them as accomplished facts. But May was a deliberate meeting, and the deliberateness was Maisie's idea rather than Ethan's, which he took as a significant piece of information. " Can she come to the workshop Saturday?" Maisie asked.