She smiled slightly. I want to live with you eventually. Right situation. Not because the lease is up and it's convenient, but because we've decided it makes sense. She paused.
I'm not in a rush. I'm not going anywhere. I'm asking you what you think. He thought about it. The real thought.
He thought about Maya, who was at a sleepover tonight at Jada's house, and who had been for months building her own relationship with Clare, not as a replacement mother, not as a performance of family, but as a specific adult woman who texted her pictures of badly hung curtains she found online, and who asked genuine questions about her ecosystem project, and who respected the boundaries of what she was and wasn't in Maya's life without being told where they were. He thought about his business and the van outside and the name on the side of it and the life he was building from the ground up and how building something from the ground up required good ground. He thought about the 63 days after Renee when he had not been able to sleep in his own bed and had slept on the couch and how slowly he had rebuilt the interior architecture of his own home into something that felt livable again. He thought about what it had cost him and what it had given him and whether the cost of losing something was a reason not to want it or just information about how much it mattered. Not August, he said.
That's too fast. Clare nodded. But I want to look at places, he said. Together. Something with enough room, a porch, a yard big enough for Maya.
He paused. Something that belongs to both of us from the start. Not something where one of us moves into the other's space. Clare was quiet for a moment. Her expression did the thing it did when she was feeling something she wasn't going to make a production of.
Went very still, very open, very present. Okay, she said. Okay. Like, okay. Like, yes.
Let's look for a place. She picked up her chopsticks. Is non-negotiable. And I want a room I can use as a studio. And I want a garage.
And Maya gets input. Maya absolutely gets input. He paused. She's going to have opinions about everything. She has excellent taste.
The curtain endorsement alone. Please stop rewarding her for the curtain thing. She was right about the curtains. She was nine and lucky. She was nine and right.
Clare looked at him. This is our future and she's part of it. Her being right about things is a feature. He looked at Clare across his kitchen table over leftover Chinese food on a Wednesday night in April and thought, "This is it. Not the dramatic moment, not the grand gesture, this the chopsticks and the lease question and the porch being non-negotiable and his daughter's curtain opinions being a feature.