"That's the honest answer to the question you asked me at the diner," he said., "You asked me what I felt in the first half second before I started apologizing." "And the honest answer is that it didn't feel like surprise. It felt like something I already knew. He paused. But I'm scared, Clare.
I'm genuinely scared. Not of you. Of giving you the power to hurt Ava. Of her getting attached to you in a way she might not survive intact if this doesn't work. Of—" "Malcolm—" "Let me finish."
He needed to finish because he had started and he was not going to walk away again. Of being the man who does this who lets someone in after all of it and gets it wrong again. She set her mug down on the coffee table. She crossed a few feet between them and looked at him. "I can't promise you that life won't hurt you," she said.
Her voice was very quiet. I can't promise that every hard thing will work out. I can't even promise that I won't say the wrong thing sometimes or push you too hard or get it wrong in ways neither of us can predict right now. He held her gaze, but I can promise you this. She held his eyes with complete steadiness.
I will never ask you to choose between being a father and being my partner. Not once, not ever, because I have been watching you be that father for nine years. And it is the most important thing about you. And I would not ask you to set it aside for anyone or anything, not even for me. The room was very still.
Malcolm felt the wall, the one he had been building for 6 years, one careful brick at a time, develop a crack that ran all the way through it. Not a collapse, not yet, but a crack. And for the first time since his marriage ended, he did not reach for the mortar. He stood there in Clare's living room and let the crack be there. And Clare stood in front of him and did not push, did not hurry him, did not ask him to move faster than he was capable of moving.
She simply waited the way she had been waiting, he realized for a very long time. The crack in the wall did not disappear overnight. Malcolm drove home from Clare's apartment that Sunday with the windows down and the radio off, and he did not feel the way he thought a man was supposed to feel after a moment like that one. He did not feel relieved or resolved or like something had been definitively settled. He felt the way you feel after a surgery not fixed yet but opened which is not the same thing and which requires its own kind of recovery.
He checked on Ava who was already asleep her soccer cleat abandoned by the door in a way that suggested she had taken them off in motion. He stood in her doorway for a moment in the dark, listening to her breathe, doing the thing he had done a thousand times since she was born. The thing where he recalibrated his entire internal world by the simple evidence of her being present and safe and unharmed. Then he went to bed. He didn't sleep well.
But that wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that he woke up at 4:30 in the morning not because his mind was running projections on worst case legal scenarios, but because he was thinking about what Clare had said. I will never ask you to choose between being a father and being my partner. Not once, not ever. He had heard a version of that promise before.