Chapter 2 — What He Left

Arjun Mehta had moved to Chicago fourteen days ago.He had not moved so much as relocated — there was a difference, which he was still working out. Moving implied intention. Relocation implied urgency. He'd packed two suitcases from the apartment in New York that still had Priya's books on two of the shelves and her half of the closet and her shampoo in the shower, because she'd left so fast she'd left things, and he'd called his company's Chicago office and said he needed a transfer and didn't give reasons, and his manager — who knew, because everyone knew — had said "absolutely, whenever you're ready" and he'd said "Monday" and it was currently Friday, which meant he'd given himself a weekend to pack a marriage into two suitcases.He hadn't done it well. He'd left too many things.The apartment they'd given him in Chicago was a furnished corporate rental in River North — a perfectly functional space that belonged to no one and knew it. Clean lines, neutral colors, the specific impersonality of a place that had been optimized for temporary occupation. He'd put his two suitcases in the bedroom and looked at the space and thought: this is exactly the right place for someone who has just become very unsure of who they are.He was a structural engineer. He spent his days calculating load and stress and what held things up. He was, professionally, very good at understanding what kept structures standing under pressure.He had not seen this collapse coming.That was the thing he kept returning to at 3 AM, which was when his mind had decided to do its thinking regardless of his wishes. Not the pain of it — the pain was there, large and familiar, he was learning the contours of it the way you learn a new city, block by block. What he couldn't stop circling was the fact that he hadn't seen it. That Priya had been unhappy for a year, maybe longer, and he had been — present, he'd thought, he'd been present — and somehow presence had not been enough.She had said, in the way that people say the truest things when they're exhausted from not saying them: "You're here but you're not with me. You haven't been with me in a long time. I don't know where you went but I know you're not here."He had tried to argue with this. He'd been gentle about it — Arjun was generally gentle, it was not a pretense, it was just how he was built — but he'd tried to show her evidence. He was here. He had been here. The dinners cooked and the weekends and the things remembered."That's not what I mean," she'd said. "You know that's not what I mean."He'd known. He just hadn't wanted to know.Now, in Chicago, in the corporate apartment, at four in the morning after his third night at the diner with the broken neon sign, he was thinking about knowing and not wanting to know. Which was a particular kind of dishonesty that looked like everything except dishonesty.He thought about the woman at the counter.Inaaya. Six weeks of not sleeping. A doctor — he'd guessed that from the pager she'd had clipped to her jacket; he'd seen enough medical people to recognize the posture of someone who was always waiting to be interrupted. The way she held her coffee like it was the one warm thing in reach.