A pause. Like a relieved idiot. That's a good combination. We talked for an hour and a half. He heard her exhale.
I forgot how much I missed her voice. People do that. Let time make a thing feel permanent when it isn't. I do that," she said, correcting herself. Owning it.
I let it become something I couldn't fix instead of something I just hadn't fixed yet. And now you fixed it. I started to fix it. There's more. She was quiet for a moment.
She wants to have dinner next week. Is that I mean, that's fast, right? To go from 2 years of silence to dinner next week or it's just right on time. He said she made a small sound that might have been a laugh or might have been something more complicated sitting right next to one. Go read to your daughter, she said.
How do you know I'm reading to her? Because it's 8:15 on a Friday and you mentioned it was her week with you and you have a system. You're a man with systems. He was quiet a moment. You were listening.
He said, "I always listen," she said. "Good night, Darius." She hung up. He stood in the hallway for a moment. Then he went back to the room where Amara was waiting with the patience of a child who had calculated exactly how long she could tolerate an interruption before the reading momentum was lost.
"Ready," she said. "Ready," he said, and sat back down and opened the book. But the chapter about the girl who could talk to plants seemed that night to be about entirely different things than it had been 20 minutes before. The dinner with Victoria's sister happened on a Wednesday, and Darius knew because Victoria texted him at 11:17 that night, long after any reasonable person would have expected a message with three words. It was good.
He texted back, "I know." She sent back a question mark. He sent, "You would have texted differently if it wasn't a pause. Then you're annoyingly perceptive." He put his phone down, smiling at the ceiling, and went to sleep.
Three weeks into what they were both carefully not calling anything specific. The pattern had established itself with the organic inevitability of something that was going to happen regardless of whether either of them had planned it. Victoria came to his apartment after late nights when the office felt like a machine she couldn't turn off. Darius met her for lunch occasionally at the coffee shop near the South Loop facility, which had become, by unspoken agreement, their place neutral ground. Four tables, no one watching them.
They talked on the phone in the evenings with the easy frequency of people who have discovered that the other person's mind is a place they like to spend time. They had not talked about what it was. Neither of them was quite ready for what naming it would require. What Darius had started to notice in the slow, careful way, he noticed everything the way you notice a bearing starting to fail before it announces itself. The way you notice weather changing before the rain was that Victoria had a different face in his apartment than she had anywhere else.