He walked back to his car. He sat in it for a moment. Then he pulled out his phone and sent one text to Greg. I think I'm going to be okay. Greg's response came 4 minutes later because Greg was apparently awake at 11:00 on a Saturday, which said something about the kind of brother he was.
I know. I've been waiting for you to figure that out. Ethan drove home through the Denver streets that he'd driven a thousand times, past the familiar corners and the lit windows and the ordinary geography of a life that was beginning at last to feel like his again. He went home. He checked on Lily asleep, hand under cheek, sloth pajamas, one sock on and one sock inexplicably gone.
He stood in her doorway for a long moment. Then he went to the nightstand. He opened the drawer. He looked at Sarah's glasses. He didn't move them, but he took them out and held them for a moment, the wireframes, the bent left arm, and he thought about her clearly and fully without bracing for the pain.
He thought about the white sands and the bad gas station food, and the way she laughed when she sat on the glasses and bent the arm. He thought about what she would say right now if she could see him standing in their bedroom holding her reading glasses at 11 on a Saturday night. She would say, "Ethan." Finally, he put the glasses back. He closed the drawer.
Not because it was time to close it. Not because he was done, but because the closing tonight was not an ending. It was something else. something he hadn't had a name for when he'd built those walls four years ago with his bare hands against the incoming dark. He had a name for it now. It was called being ready to try.
He got into bed. He lay in the dark. He thought about tomorrow, which had a phone call in it, and next week, which had a woman in it, and next month, which had a community center dedication and a building that was going to mean something to real people. and beyond that a future that he couldn't see but could for the first time in four years genuinely imagine. He closed his eyes. He slept well.
He called her at 9 the next morning, not because he'd planned to call at exactly 9, but because he woke up at 8:30 and lay there for 30 minutes, thinking about the fact that he was to call her, which meant by 9 he'd already waited longer than he wanted to, and the waiting was becoming its own kind of noise. She picked up on the second ring. "You're punctual," she said. "No, hello, just that in a voice that was slightly warm and slightly amused and told him she'd been awake for a while. I said I'd call you did a pause, the comfortable kind.
How'd you sleep?" "Well," he said, "Better than I have in a while." "Me, too." Another pause. And then she said, "I've been sitting here for an hour thinking about last night.
Good thoughts or complicated thoughts?" Both, she said honestly. Mostly good. A little complicated. Tell me the complicated part.
She was quiet for a moment. He could hear her moving the sound of her setting something down, adjusting. I've been here before, she said finally. The beginning of something that felt real. And I know that's not your fault, and it's not a comparison.