Chapter 12 — The Hard Conversation

The dinner was on a Friday.A small Italian place in Wicker Park that he'd found from a list and then checked three times. She wore a blue dress she hadn't worn in months. He had clearly put effort into the jacket, which was the right amount of effort.It was a good dinner. The food was good, the wine was good, the conversation moved easily through everything they already knew about each other and occasionally into new territory, and they were relaxed in the way of two people who had run out of nervousness before it could become awkward because they'd already said too many real things to each other to perform anything now.At the end, over espresso, he said: "I need to tell you something I've been sitting on.""Tell me.""The divorce papers came last week. She — Priya — she's filed. Which I expected, it's the right thing, it just—" He turned his espresso cup. "Seeing my name on the papers was different from knowing it was coming. I cried in the car for ten minutes, which surprised me, because I thought I'd processed more than that.""That's not — that's not surprising," she said."I know." He paused. "I told you I wasn't sure what I was missing, in the marriage. Why she felt I wasn't there even when I was there. I've been working on that in therapy. And I think—" He stopped. Started again. "I think I had gotten very good at presence without openness. I was there, I was good at being there, but I'd closed something off inside. And she could feel it and I couldn't see it because it was mine." He looked at her. "I'm telling you this because I don't want to do that with you. I don't want to be present-but-closed. And I'm not sure I know how to be sure I won't."She looked at him."You're telling me this," she said."Yes.""You're telling me your fear, which is the fear of being closed off, by being open about it."He processed this."Yes," he said. "I suppose so."She turned her cup. "I need to tell you something too. About Rohan. The thing I haven't said."He waited."I was — I'd built the entire structure of my next phase of life around him. And not in a — I wasn't naive about it, I knew who he was, I thought. But I'd structured everything. The apartment, the timeline for when to finish residency, all of it. And when it collapsed, I didn't just lose him." She paused. "I lost the version of myself that was going to exist in that future. That person doesn't get to happen now. And I've been grieving her more than I've been grieving him, I think.""The future self," he said."The one who had things figured out." She looked at the table. "Which is probably good, actually. It's probably good that she didn't happen. Because she had things figured out but she'd done it by building on one specific foundation, and that's not — that's not structural integrity." She glanced at him. "I borrowed your language.""You can use it," he said. He was watching her with that attention. "What does the next version look like? The one without the pre-structured future?""I don't know yet," she said. "I'm still making her.""That's the right answer.""What about you?""The same," he said. "Except I think I know a few more things about her than I did two months ago." He paused. "She likes someone who makes tea she doesn't give them. She's a better engineer than she thinks she is."She looked at him. "I'm not an engineer.""You're a structural thinker who works on people instead of buildings." He held her gaze. "That's an engineer."She felt the door that had been opening since the night she'd held his hand at the counter open a little more."I'm scared too," she said. "Not of you being closed off. I'm scared that I'll — hold back. That I'll be so careful not to build everything on one person again that I'll be in it but not quite in it.""You should tell me when that happens," he said."You should tell me when you're closed," she said."Okay.""Okay."They split the check because that was who they both were, and he put her in a cab even though she said she could take the train, and before she got in he kissed her on the sidewalk — not long, not tentative, the specific quality of a first kiss that had been thoroughly earned.She went home. She called Deepa."Tell me," Deepa said.She told her."Well," Deepa said, after. "Good.""That's your whole response? Good?""Inaaya. I've been waiting for you to tell me something good for three months. I'm savoring it." A pause. "He kissed you on a sidewalk in December in Chicago.""Yes.""That's romantic as hell," Deepa said. "Don't overthink it.""I'm going to overthink it," Inaaya said."I know," Deepa said. "But let it be the good kind of overthinking."