A spin and a look directly at the sideline where her father was sitting in the car. He raised his fist through the window. Ava's face broke into that massive grin. "Thank you," he said to Diane. "He said it anyway, because it was true.
Don't make me regret it," she said. And he could hear the edge of something lighter under the words. "I won't," he said. She hung up. Malcolm sat in the car and breathed.
The thing he had been bracing for for two months, the custody battle, the legal fight, the version of his life where the worst case scenario was real, had just dissolved on a Saturday afternoon while his daughter scored a goal in recreational league soccer. He picked up his phone. He called Clare. She picked up immediately. "Malcolm, what happened?"
"Diane is withdrawing the petition." Silence. "Malcolm?" "She called me herself. She's filing the withdrawal Monday.
He heard Clare breathe a long, slow exhale that released something she had been holding. "Are you okay?" She said. ""I don't know what I am right now."" He meant it literally. He was sitting in a car and the worst thing that had been hanging over his life for 2 months was not happening. And he had not yet recalibrated to a reality without the weight of it.
"I think I need to. I don't know. "Come over later."" "Yes," she said immediately. "Bring Ava." He looked at the field where his daughter was jogging back to midfield with the particular bounce of someone who is exactly where they want to be.
Yeah, he said well will come over. That evening was one of those evenings that doesn't announce its own significance while it's happening. It's only later months later. Sometimes years that you look back and realize a particular ordinary evening was actually a cornerstone of something. Ava ate dinner at Clare's table and talked for 27 straight minutes about marine biology, which had now expanded to include sea turtles and bioluminescent jellyfish and a documentary she had seen that had apparently changed her entire understanding of the ocean floor.
Clare listened to all 27 minutes. She asked 12 questions. Every question was genuine. After dinner, Ava fell asleep on Clare's couch in the way that children fall asleep when they have had a large day. Not gradually, but all at once like a light.
Switching off, Malcolm covered her with the blanket that lived on the back of Clare's couch, which was now there specifically for Ava, a fact that had migrated from an accommodation to a fixture without anyone formally deciding it should. He and Clare sat at her kitchen table again, their kitchen table. He was starting to think of it that way with tea and the quiet of a house that had a sleeping child in it which was a different quality of quiet from empty quiet. "Diane is a complicated person," Clare said. "But what she did today wasn't small."