His mother didn't respond, which was in its way a response. I'll call you tomorrow, he said. Good night, Malcolm. He hung up. He sat at the kitchen table in the quiet apartment for a long time with Ava asleep down the hall and the city doing its ordinary nighttime things outside the window.
And he thought about what his mother had said. You're going to keep punishing her for Diane's choices. He picked up his phone. He sent Clare one message. Thank you for this morning at the practice.
I mean, she liked having you there. 3 minutes later. I know. She told me I should have a chair because you walk around and then get some sleep, Malcolm. We have time.
He put the phone down. He sat for another minute. And for the first time in 6 years, the silence in the apartment didn't feel quite as empty as it usually did. He had said yes, and he had no idea yet what saying yes was actually going to cost him. But 6 weeks would start and the experiment would begin, and both of them were about to discover that the thing they'd been protecting themselves from wasn't heartbreak at all.
It was the very thing they'd spent 9 years sitting 3 ft away from. The first week of the 6-week agreement was, in Malcolm's estimation, the most uncomfortable 7 days of his adult life, and this was a man who had once navigated a custody mediation hearing while running on 3 hours of sleep and a gas station breakfast sandwich. The discomfort wasn't what he'd expected. He had braced himself for awkwardness, for the specific social torture of of two people who have accidentally kissed each other trying to be normal around each other. The forced laughs, the careful distances, the conversational detours around the things sitting in the middle of every room.
He had survived an entire marriage dissolving in real time. He knew how to manage uncomfortable silences. But that wasn't what the first week was. The first week was uncomfortable because it felt too easy. That was the thing nobody told you about spending 6 weeks intentionally with the person who already knew you better than almost anyone alive.
There was no adjustment period. There was no getting to know you phase, no careful self-presentation, no strategic editing of your worst qualities. Clare had seen Malcolm's worst qualities. She had watched him be short-tempered after bad sleep and self-protective after difficult conversations and so deeply inside his own head during stressful periods at work that he forgot to eat lunch for three days in a row. She had watched him cry exactly once.
The night Ava had a febrile seizure at age two and had to be rushed to the hospital and she had sat next to him in that waiting room and not said a single unnecessary word for 2 hours. She already knew him. That was the whole problem because it meant that when she showed up at his apartment on Wednesday evening, not planned, just texting 20 minutes ahead that she had leftover jollof rice and was dropping some off because she had made too much. And he opened the door and she walked and started parceling rice into containers for the fridge while Ava did homework at the kitchen table. The whole thing felt exactly like it had for years, except it didn't.
Except something underneath it was vibrating at a completely different frequency now, and Malcolm was acutely aware of every moment he would have previously let pass without registering. "You're hovering," Clare said without looking up from the containers. He stopped hovering. I'm not hovering. You're standing 3 ft from me with your arms crossed, watching me put food in your refrigerator.
She finally looked up. That's hovering. I'm observing. Same thing. Ava looked up from her homework.