She's okay. Another pause. But when she was upset, she said she asked if you were coming back. Clare was very still. She asked if you were coming back.
Andre said again carefully. And I said, "Yeah, of course. In a few months. " And she said she said she knew that. But she meant she asked if you were coming back to us. As in next door, he stopped.
As in whether things were going to be the same when you got back. The apartment was very quiet. Crown Heights outside was doing its own thing. There were always sounds, always the specific New York texture of noise that never fully stopped. But in the apartment, it was quiet.
"What did you tell her? " Clare asked. I told her I didn't know, he said. "Because I don't. " Clare held the phone. She could feel the edges of the thing he wasn't saying. And she understood that he was being careful with it, not hiding it.
Just being careful the way you're careful with something that matters. Andre, she said, I'm not. He stopped. I'm not asking you to make a promise. I'm not Ryan.
I know that's not what this is. A pause. But I had a moment today where I realized I've been I've been doing the thing I said I would do. I've been wanting you to stay and not asking you to stay. And I've been telling myself those two things don't cost anything.
He exhaled. They cost something. The honesty of it landed clean and without defense. The way Andre said everything that mattered. Not performing vulnerability but not hiding from it either.
Just saying the true thing in the plainest possible language and letting it sit. I know they cost something, she said quietly. I know it every morning when I wake up and this is not Atlanta. I'm not punishing you. I know you're not.
That's what makes it harder. She pulled her knees up on the couch, made herself smaller the way her body made her smaller when something was too much for ordinary posture to manage. I think about you every day. I think about Maya. I think about the kitchen and the breakfast and the stupid basil on the windowsill.