I'm asking if some part of you, some part of me wants you to stay, he said evenly. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I've been wanting you to be around for 2 years. Adding more distance to that is not something I'm thrilled about, he looked at her steadily. But wanting you to stay and asking you to stay are two different choices, and I'm only making one of them.
She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she said, "I'll call you when I land. " "I'll answer," he said. She walked down the steps, got to the end of his walkway, turned back once because she couldn't not. He was still in the doorway with the morning behind him, and he lifted one hand, not a wave, just an acknowledgement, and she turned back around and walked to her own front door and let pressed her back against the closed door for approximately four to 5 seconds. She tried herself to move.
Then she picked up her phone and called her mother. That conversation took an hour and a half. Patricia Morgan had exactly four stages of reaction to major news, and she cycled through all of them in sequence. First, silence that lasted exactly long enough to be worrying. Second, a series of practical questions delivered in rapid succession, like she was working through a mental checklist she'd prepared in advance.
Third, a single question that was actually about what she really felt. And fourth, the real thing, the truth underneath all the other responses delivered quietly, almost as an afterthought. This morning, the silence lasted 12 seconds. The practical questions covered the company behind the project, whether Clare had negotiated her housing allowance, what the contract termination clauses looked like, and whether she had spoken to her doctor about living in a city with a different climate during winter. The third question was, "What does Andre think? " Clare paused.
He told me to take it. A shorter silence this time. Did he mean it? Yes, Clare said he meant it. The fourth stage arrived after a moment.
Quiet and true. Then he's better than I thought," her mother said. "And I already thought highly of him. " After she hung up with her mother, she called Dre, who reacted with significantly less ceremony and considerably more volume, and whose primary concerns were whether New York in winter would ruin Clare's skin and and whether Andre was aware that long-d distanceance relationships required active maintenance and not just good intentions. Delivered with the authority of someone who had read exactly one article about this on the internet and considered herself an expert. He knows, Clare said.
Does he know what that actually looks like? Like the missed calls and the time zones and the we're in the same time zone. Dedra New York and Atlanta are in the same time zone. A pause. That does make it easier.
Dedra aloud. Okay. You're going to be fine. He's going to be fine. You're both going to have a moment around month 2 where everything feels impossible and you're going to call me at 11 at night and I'm going to talk you through it.
I'm not going to you're going to call me at 11:00 at night around month two. Dedre said again with the serenity of someone reading from a script that has already been written. I'm putting it in my calendar. She was right as it turned out. But that was later.