The answer about Ava watching the answer that was true but was not the whole truth. He stood in his kitchen on a Saturday afternoon 3 weeks and 4 days after the knock on his door and he looked at this woman who had broken something in him and had come back carrying the pieces and he gave her the real answer. Because I never stopped, he said. She understood immediately. She understood because she had said almost those exact words the night before and had stopped Ethel before the last word came out and he had heard the silence where the word should have been and had known what it was.
She looked at him for a long moment. James, she said. Her voice was careful. That doesn't fix what I did. I know that I hurt you.
I made choices that I cannot take back. And the anger you feel is real and it's yours and you have every right to it. I know. So, what are we doing? She asked.
Not challenging. Honest. What is this? He looked at her. He took a breath.
I don't know yet, he said. I know what it's not. It's not simple. It's not picking up where we left off because where we left off was built on things we hadn't said to each other, and it doesn't exist anymore. He paused.
But I also know that whatever this is, it's real. And I have spent too much of my life running from real things because they cost too much. Sophia was quiet. So, here is what I think we do. He said, "We go slow.
We stay honest. Every time one of us is about to make a decision for the other person instead of with them, we catch it and we stop and we see what's left when we do that." She looked at him for so long that he started to wonder if he had said too much. Then she said, "Slow, slow," he confirmed. Honest, honest, she nodded once, like a contract being signed.
Okay, she said. Okay, he said. Down the hallway, Noah woke from his nap and began his announcement of this fact to the general world. And from Ava's room came the sound of her chair, scraping back and her footsteps moving fast toward the guest room. Because Ava had appointed herself Noah's official wakeup committee and took the role extremely seriously.
James and Sophia looked at each other and in the middle of all of it, the legal situation, the history, the careful new terms they had just laid down, the anger that was still real, and the feeling underneath it that was also real. They both at the same moment almost smiled. Not at each other, not exactly, just at the irreducible fact of the life happening around them which had not waited for them to resolve anything before continuing. It never did. That was the thing about real life.