She stopped. I'm sorry you don't have to answer that. It's okay. He thought about it genuinely.
It used to be harder in the first year. Now it's just it's Lily. It's her face. I don't really see Sandra in it anymore.
I just see her. Clare nodded slowly. Sandra misses her. She doesn't say it right, but she does.
I know. His voice didn't change. The schedule is the schedule. I don't interfere with it.
I wasn't implying you did. I know you weren't. She turned her glass in her hands. You're very careful with your words.
I learned to be. The divorce, among other things, he paused. When someone's willing to say things about you in a courtroom that aren't true, you get careful about what you give them to work with. Clare went very still.
What did she say in court? It doesn't matter now. Nathan, it's done. His voice was steady but final.
It doesn't matter. What matters is that Lily is healthy and I have her half the time and that's more than some guys get. Clare looked at him for a long moment. He could see something working in her face, something complicated, something she was pressing down.
"I want you to know," she said slowly, "that I was not told everything, and some of what I was told, I'm now fairly certain was shaped to produce a specific effect." I figured, I'm angry about that. Her voice was quiet, but the edge in it was real. I'm angry that I was used and I'm angry that I let myself be used because it was easier than asking hard questions. You were loyal to your friend.
Loyalty isn't the same as blind, she said sharply, then softer. It shouldn't be. He didn't say anything. The apartment was quiet.
Lily's breathing was slow and even. Doorstop had not moved. Then Clare said, "Can I ask you something I have no right to ask? You've been doing that.
Do you still love her?" The question landed flat and clean. No softening around it. Nathan set his glass down on the side table. He was quiet long enough that Clare started to say, "Forget it." But he spoke first.
"No," he said. "I don't think I loved her the way she needed by the time it ended. And I think she stopped loving me the way I needed about a year before that. We stayed because of Lily and because neither of us wanted to be the one to say it first.
He exhaled. She said at first and then she decided she also needed the story to be different than it was. And that part, he paused. That part I haven't fully forgiven.
Clare nodded. She didn't offer anything easy. She just sat with it and that was the right thing. After a while, she said, "For what it's worth, I think you deserved someone who chose you, not just stayed with you." The words went somewhere in him that he wasn't prepared for.
He picked up his glass again, looked at Lily. She chooses me every day," he said. "That's enough for now." Clare watched him, and her expression then he couldn't entirely name it. It wasn't pity.
It wasn't sympathy. It was something more unguarded than either of those. Something she probably didn't intend to show and didn't fully catch before it was already visible. He saw it.
He looked away first because he knew if he sat with that look too long, he was going to want something he had no business wanting. And the last thing Lily needed was her father making a disaster of something new before the old disaster was even fully cleaned up. He woke Lily gently at 6:00. She protested, said goodbye to doorstop with the gravity of someone departing for war, and hugged Clare with complete unself-consciousness.
Clare hugged her back the same way. At the door with Lily already on her way down the stairs, Clare touched Nathan's arm lightly, just her hand on his sleeve for a second. Thank you for the truck and for all of it. Anytime.
She looked at him same as she had in the car that first night like she was reading something in him she wasn't sure she was allowed to read. Nathan, she said, "Yeah, she seemed to catch herself a small breath. Drive safe. Always do." He went down the stairs, got Lily buckled in, started the truck, and he sat there for exactly 3 seconds longer than he needed to before he pulled out.
He didn't look up at her window. He almost did. He didn't look up at her window, but he thought about her the entire drive home. That was the problem with almost things.
Almost looking. Almost saying. Almost letting yourself want something you'd spent 3 weeks convincing yourself you didn't want. The almost didn't disappear just because you'd kept it from becoming a whole.
It just sat there half-formed, taking up the same amount of space as a real thing without giving you anything clean to do with it. Lily fell asleep in the truck before they hit the freeway. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the radio low, and he had a very honest conversation with himself that he would not have had out loud with another human being. He liked Clare.
Not in the old way, not the background furniture of my previous life way. In the new way, the way that had showed up sometime between a diner at 1:00 a.m. and a woman sitting on her apartment floor telling him he deserved someone who chose him. The way that made him check his phone four times an hour and feel something embarrassing when it wasn't her. He knew what that was.
He wasn't an idiot. He also knew it was the single most complicated direction his life could go. She had been Sandra's best friend. She had sat across from him in a mediator's office and looked at him like he was the problem.