Chapter 8 — What Is Actually Happening

She called her best friend Deepa on a Sunday.Deepa was in Seattle, had been in Seattle for two years, was a software engineer with a very large apartment and a very small dog and the specific self-possession of someone who had figured out what she wanted and arranged her life around it. She was also the person who knew Inaaya most completely, which made her the most important and most dangerous person to call."Tell me," Deepa said, which was her opener for all significant conversations.Inaaya told her. From the first night to the farmers market to the Saturday coffee.Deepa was quiet throughout. Not the silence of someone not paying attention — the silence of someone who was filing and analyzing in real time.When Inaaya finished, Deepa said: "What are you afraid of?"Inaaya had expected something else — careful questions, cautionary statements. Not this."That I'm constructing something in terrible conditions," she said. "That I'm — that we're both damaged right now and we're finding comfort in each other and comfort isn't the same as—""As what?""As something real. Something that could survive ordinary daylight. That isn't just two people holding each other up in the dark."Deepa was quiet."Or," Deepa said carefully, "you're two people who met at the worst time in both your lives and are somehow able to be honest with each other when most people can't manage that in the best circumstances. And the fact that you met in the dark doesn't mean what you have only works in the dark.""You got that from the farmers market story," Inaaya said."I got it from the whole story." A pause. "Inaaya. He walked you home in the rain after a patient died. You were a stranger.""I wasn't quite a stranger by then.""Even better." Deepa paused. "What does he know about Rohan?""He knows the situation. We told each other on the same night. Not everything — just the shape of it.""And he's — you said he's separated.""Divorce isn't final yet. She's in New York.""Does that bother you?"Inaaya thought about it honestly. "Not in the way it should, maybe. I know he's not — I know this isn't someone who's equivocating. It's done. It's just paperwork.""How do you know?""Because I'm good at reading people and I've been reading him for six weeks in a diner at three in the morning, which is when people stop performing." She paused. "And because he told me he still doesn't understand it fully. That's not what someone says when they're still hoping. That's what someone says when they're trying to accept something that doesn't have a satisfying answer."Deepa was quiet for a moment. "You like him.""I like him.""Not just as the person at Manny's.""No. Not just that." She looked at the window. November in Chicago. Grey and specific. "I also haven't felt like myself in three months and he makes me feel — adjacent to myself. Which isn't the same as myself. But it's closer than I've been.""Adjacent to yourself is allowed," Deepa said. "You don't have to be completely recovered to begin something.""But should I wait until I am?"Deepa made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was in that neighborhood. "If you waited until you were completely recovered to begin things, you would wait forever, because being in something is part of how you recover." A pause. "What does he think is happening?""I don't know," Inaaya admitted. "We haven't said anything.""Because?""Because—" She stopped. Tried again. "Because what we have at Manny's is something that works. And saying something could break it. And I don't want it broken.""I hear that," Deepa said. "But the thing you're afraid of breaking — the not saying it — is probably already not quite the same as what you started with. These things move even when you're not naming them."Inaaya sat with this."I know," she said. "I know.""You'll figure out when," Deepa said. "You're very good at knowing when. You have terrible timing with some things, but you know when.""Thank you. I think.""It was entirely a compliment," Deepa said.