Close enough. Are you okay? Clare looked at the question. Thought about it. Yes.
She typed back. Actually, genuinely, yes. She meant it. What she didn't know yet, what neither of them knew. Sitting in their separate cities with the long middle of the six months still ahead of them was that the hardest part wasn't missing each other.
The missing was painful and specific and real, but it was clean. It had a shape. The hardest part arrived in week nine on a Wednesday morning in the form of a name, Marcus. Marcus Webb was one of the senior producers at the foundation, a few years younger than Clare. Fast and funny and genuinely talented with the particular gift of making complex logistics seem effortless and the particular habit of making difficult days feel lighter.
He'd become over 9 weeks the person she grabbed coffee with between meetings and texted when the documentary director was being impossible. And she had not thought of him as anything other than a colleague until the Wednesday morning in week 9 when she mentioned him to Andre in their morning call. It was not what she said. What she said was ordinary. Marcus thinks we should restructure the volunteer schedule and I think he's right.
But something in the way she said it was apparently different from the way she had said other names and other contexts because Andre was quiet for a second in a particular way. Who's Marcus? He asked. And the question was neutral. It was genuinely completely neutral.
But she heard under the neutrality a thing she recognized because she had felt it herself in the second before she said the name a small self-consciousness, a micro awareness that this name was going to require context. Senior producer. She said he's been here since the project started. Good at the work. Okay.
Andre said two letters, one syllable containing a full and complex paragraph that he was choosing not to say. Andre, I said okay. You said okay in a way. That means something. A pause.
I'm not. He stopped. Tried again. I'm not doing anything. I heard the name.
It registered. I moved on. Did you move on, Claire? I need to know if you moved on. A longer pause.