Her voice was somewhere between a smile and something sadder. You didn't know that. I made two. The first one fell apart when I tried to take it out of the pan and I just sat on the kitchen floor for 20 minutes because I was so She stopped. Swallowed.
I just wanted it to be right for her. It was right, he said. It was perfect. It was crooked. Nadia didn't care about the letters.
No, she agreed. She didn't. She looked at him. When did you know exactly? Not the birthday.
When did you actually know what it was? He was quiet for a moment. Because there was an honest answer to that question and a comfortable answer and he had promised himself quietly, privately on a night 6 weeks ago when he'd stood in the hallway outside her door for 30 seconds before walking past. That if she ever asked him directly, he would give her the honest one. The night you came home from your attorney's office in February, he said.
You sat down at this table and you didn't say anything. You just put your hands flat on the surface and breathed. And I sat across from you and I didn't say anything either because I knew you didn't need words. You needed someone to just be there and I wanted to be there. Not because it was the arrangement.
Because I couldn't imagine being anywhere else. She looked at him for a long time. I knew before that, she said. He raised an eyebrow. October, she said.
You had a shoot that ran late, a wedding out in Brooklyn. You didn't get home until almost midnight, and Nadia had had a bad dream, and she was in my room, and I'd gotten her back to sleep, and I was just sitting there in the dark, and I heard you come in. I heard you check her room, and then I heard you stop outside my door just for a second. Just stop, like you wanted to know I was okay without waking me up. He remembered that.
He hadn't thought she'd heard. You stood there for maybe 5 seconds, she said. And then you walked away. And I lay in the dark, and I thought I thought I am in so much trouble. He almost smiled.
You didn't say anything. Neither did you. No. He looked at his coffee. Neither did I.
The kitchen was quiet. Outside a city bus went past. Somewhere down the hall a door closed. The ordinary sounds of a building full of people living their lives. None of them aware that two people in apartment 4A were sitting at a kitchen table trying to find words for something that had been living between them for over a year.