I was the one who had decided that shrinking was the same as being safe. You were the one who saw something worth seeing and decided to keep looking at it even when it cost you. He looked at her with the full unhurried attention that she had come to understand was simply his natural way of being present with another person. Something that had once been so unfamiliar she had not known how to receive it and was now something she could not imagine being without.
I think we saved each other. I think that’s what the math actually says, if you run it honestly. She considered this carefully, the way she considered things that mattered. She thought about the board meeting and the photograph on the shelf and the note that had said nothing happened.
You’re safe, written in careful handwriting by a man who could have walked away and didn’t. She thought about the $40 in the rain and the sandwich from the deli two doors down and the voice that had said whatever happened tonight is not the last thing that’s going to happen to you, spoken by someone who was a stranger and would remain a stranger for 10 years and then turn out to have been, in some essential way, the person the whole decade had been leading toward. She thought about all the invisible years in between, all the mornings both of them had woken up in different kinds of quiet and the morning question in the office, have we met before, that had opened the door to all of it. She nodded slowly.
Okay, she said. That’s what the math says. He reached over and picked up the photograph. He looked at it for a moment and then set it back down, face up in the light.
Should we keep this on the shelf? he said. Or put it somewhere else? She thought about it. The shelf, she said.
I want to be able to see it. Outside, the light was still doing that thing through the bare branches, catching the edges of everything and making them briefly luminous. And somewhere in the other room, Lily was watching something on the television with a laugh track that was a little too enthusiastic, the way laugh tracks always were. And in the kitchen, the coffee maker was making its particular sound of completion.
And the world was continuing to be ordinary and astonishing in equal measure, the way it always does for anyone paying close enough attention to notice both things at once.