Chapter 9 — Three AM

The knock came at 3:16 on a Saturday morning.Maya was not asleep. She had been not sleeping for three days — lying down and closing her eyes and going through all the motions of sleeping without any of the actual results. She'd been reading the same page of a novel for forty minutes when she heard it.Two knocks. Then nothing. Then two more.She knew who it was before she opened the door.He was standing in the hallway in the grey hoodie she'd seen him wear a hundred times. He had no coat. It was October. He looked like he hadn't slept either.He said: "I'm sorry."She said: "I know."He said: "I can't explain everything right now. I'm not ready. But I need you to know that it's not what you think it is. It's not cold feet or — it's not that I don't—"He stopped. He pressed his lips together. She watched him look for words that weren't coming.She stepped back from the door.He came in. He stood in her living room and looked around at it — the drawings her students had made that she'd tacked to the wall, the red umbrella by the door, the half-finished cup of tea on the coffee table — like he was memorizing it."I'm keeping something from you," he said. "I know you know that. And I know that's not fair.""No," she said. "It's not.""When I'm ready — when I can — I'll tell you. I promise."She looked at him. She thought about her father and closed doors and the way she'd built her life around the principle that people who left without explanation were people she couldn't afford to keep.She thought about the seventy-three photographs and the old man in Lisbon and the red umbrella that wasn't hers.She thought: I am making a choice. Right now. I am choosing this with my eyes open."Okay," she said."Okay?""I trust you." She said it plainly, because that was the only way she knew how to say true things. "I don't like not knowing. I hate it, honestly. But I trust you."He crossed the room and his arms went around her and she let them. He held her like she was something he'd found after a very long time of looking."I'm sorry," he said again, into her hair."Stop apologizing," she said. "Just stay."He did. They sat on the floor against the sofa, and they talked until four, and then until five, and at some point they were lying on the floor with their heads together and Maya was thinking: this is the right place. This is exactly the right place.He kissed her again at dawn. Not the way he had after the farmers market. This was different — slower, more deliberate, the way you do something you've been thinking about for a very long time. Like a decision made in full.Later, she thought that she should have noticed how much it felt like a goodbye.She didn't. She only noticed how much it felt like arriving somewhere.