Chapter 10 — What They Don't Say

There were things they still hadn't said.Inaaya was aware of this with the precision of a person who had been cataloguing what was and wasn't spoken for weeks. They had told each other the facts of their situations — the marriage, the engagement, the ending of both. They had not gone beyond the facts into the feeling-structure underneath, which was the more important territory.She knew, because she was paying attention and she was good at reading people, that Arjun was still inside something — not paralyzed but moving through it. He'd mentioned Priya by name twice since the first time, both times in the context of talking about the apartment in New York, the mechanics of the separation. He had not talked about what it was like to love someone and watch it change into something unrecognizable and not know when the change happened. That was the harder conversation.She hadn't had that conversation herself, about Rohan.She also knew — because she was paying attention — that something had shifted in what was between them. It was in the specifics: he saved her the stool, she adjusted her walk home to pass by the light of his building's lobby. He remembered what she said about her patients by name; she knew which days his work was going poorly from the specific way he carried his shoulders. They had each other's numbers, which they had not used once during daylight hours until the last two weeks, and now used regularly — he'd texted her a photograph of a structural problem on a building he'd walked past, she'd sent him an article about a bridge collapse from decades ago and he'd responded with three paragraphs of precise and delighted analysis.The thing between them had a shape. It was not the shape of two people passing time at a diner.On a Thursday, six weeks after the first night, he said: "Can I tell you something?"They were at the counter. It was 3:30. Dana was, unusually, awake and aggressively doing sidework in the manner of someone who had decided she was going to be competent, which happened occasionally."Yes," Inaaya said."I realized something yesterday." He turned his mug. "I was on a call with my colleague in New York — we're working on the same project — and after the call I thought: I have to tell Inaaya about the thing with the suspension cables. And then I thought: that's the first person I thought of. Not any of the people I've known for years. You." He paused. "I'm not saying this to—" He stopped. "I don't know what I'm saying this to. I'm saying it because it's true and I've been — I've been not saying it, and I don't want to keep not saying it."She was quiet for a moment."I made you tea," she said. "On Monday. I made it at home and put it in my thermos and was going to bring it to Manny's in case you wanted something other than the coffee, and then I thought that was—" She stopped. "I thought that was presumptuous. So I drank it on the walk here. But I made it for you."He looked at her."That's what I'm saying," she said. "I do things for you that I don't tell you I'm doing. And I think we are both very carefully not saying the obvious thing.""What's the obvious thing?" he said."I think you know," she said.He was quiet for a long moment. Outside, it had started snowing — the first snow of the winter, soft and directionless, coming through the window light."I'm afraid," he said. He said it plainly, without dressing it up. "Not of you. Of — I had a marriage that I thought was solid and it turned out I'd missed something fundamental. And I'm aware that it's only been two months and I'm in a new city and I've been sleeping badly and these are not the conditions under which I should be trustworthy about my own feelings."She looked at him."But I'm also—" He stopped. "You're the most real thing in my life right now. And I know how that sounds, given that most of what we've done is sit on counter stools and drink bad coffee. But it's true."She felt the weight of this — the full weight, not the part of it she wanted."I'm scared of the same thing," she said. "That I'm — using you. Not intentionally. But that you're the warm thing I've found and I've attached to the warm thing and that's not fair to you.""You're not using me," he said."You can't know that.""I can tell the difference between someone using warmth and someone sharing it." He looked at her. "You share it. You ask about my bridge more than you ask about my feelings. You made tea you ended up drinking yourself. You share."She looked at the snow in the window."I don't want to rush this," she said. "I don't want to do the thing where two broken people hold each other up and then discover they've been so focused on the holding that they forgot to actually look at each other.""I've been looking," he said quietly."I know," she said. "I have too."The snow came down. Dana had stopped being competent and was on her phone again. Lou was scraping the grill with great commitment."So," Arjun said. "What do we do?""I think," she said, "we keep doing what we're doing. But we stop pretending we don't know what it is."He thought about this."That seems right," he said. "That seems like the honest thing."She turned her mug. He turned his.They sat in the snow-light of Manny's at 3:30 AM, and they didn't say anything else, and it was enough.