Then he lowered his hand. He walked back to the kitchen. He got his camera bag. He wrote three words on a yellow sticky note, the same legal pad they had used to write the rules 26 months ago, and he stuck it on her coffee mug before he left. It said 14 days together.
He closed the front door quietly behind him. Isabelle heard the click of the latch from inside her room. She heard him leave. She sat on the edge of her bed with her hands pressed flat on her knees and her eyes closed, breathing the way her grief counselor had taught her. Counting slowly.
Waiting for the feeling to pass through her and out the other side. When she walked back to the kitchen 20 minutes later, she saw the note. She read it once, then again. She sat down, wrapped both hands around the cold coffee mug, and she stared at those three words for a long time. 14 days together.
Not a promise, not a plan, not another rule on a legal pad, just a declaration. Simple and quiet and his. The kind of thing a man says when he's done performing strength and is ready to offer it instead. She folded the note, pressed it flat, and put it in the pocket of his robe. She was still wearing it.
She was not going to pretend she didn't know why. Across the hall, apartment 4B stood empty. She had given her key back 3 months ago when they stopped making sense as separate people living parallel lives. She had a key to 4A now. She had a drawer in the bathroom and a shelf in the refrigerator and a chair at the kitchen table that had over 26 months become so fully hers that no one in their household, not Ethan, not Nadia, not the string of small routines that made up their days, remembered a time when it had been anything else.
She had a life here, a real one, built from grief and paperwork and a yellow legal pad and five rules, two of which they had broken and three of which they had kept and one of which the most important one they had spent over a year violating in the most profound way possible. Rule five, honesty, always. Even when it's hard. She had written that rule. She had broken it first.
And now there were 14 days before two strangers in a government office would look at her and ask her to prove that what she had was real. She closed her eyes. The strange and terrible and suddenly clarifying truth was this, she wasn't afraid of failing the interview because her marriage was fake. She was afraid of failing it because it wasn't. And she didn't know if that was better or worse.
The first three days after the email, they didn't talk about it directly. Not because they were avoiding it, but because 14 days had a weight to it that required a certain amount of adjustment before either of them could carry it in conversation without dropping it. Ethan came home from his shoot that first afternoon at exactly 2:28. Nadia was already at the kitchen table with her homework. Isabelle was at the stove.
The apartment smelled like garlic and something simmering. And for exactly 4 seconds, Ethan stood in the doorway and let himself feel what it felt like to come home to this to them before he remembered that what he'd left on a sticky note that morning had changed the shape of everything. And the interview was now 14 days away. And nothing about the next 2 weeks was going to be simple. Nadia looked up from her worksheet.
You're 2 minutes early. I drove fast. You don't have a car. I walked fast. She went back to her worksheet.