Chapter 12: After
Paula and I had lunch on a Thursday, six months later, at a small Italian place she liked near her office.
We had done this four times now.
It had become a quiet, regular thing — not dramatic, not heavy, just two people who had been through something together and found they still had things to say to each other.
"Donna called me," she said, over the bread basket.
"She got the first restitution payment last week."
"How is she?"
"Good.
Relieved.
She's renting an apartment near her sister." Paula broke a piece of bread.
"She said it feels strange to have money again that's actually hers."
"I understand that," I said.
We ordered.
The restaurant was half-full, warm, unhurried.
A couple near the window were sharing a dessert.
An older man at the bar was reading a newspaper.
"I've been thinking about something," Paula said, after a while.
"What?"
"What you said at the hotel.
That first morning.
You asked me how long it took before I stopped feeling like it was my fault." She looked at her glass.
"I've been thinking about whether I answered you honestly."
"What would the honest answer be?"
"That it wasn't eight months," she said.
"It was longer.
But the eight months part is when I stopped saying it out loud.
The rest of it — the quiet part, the part I didn't tell anyone — that took longer." She looked up.
"I'm telling you now because I think you might be in that part.
The quiet part."
I looked at her.
"Maybe," I said.
"It gets smaller," she said.
"Not gone.
Smaller."
The food came.
We ate.
We talked about other things — her work, a book she was reading, a trip she was thinking about taking in the spring.
When we were leaving, standing on the pavement outside, she hugged me briefly and said: "Same time next month?"
"Same time next month," I said.
I walked back to my car through the afternoon.
The street was busy — people coming out of offices, a school letting out nearby, the ordinary noise of a city in the middle of a Thursday.
I had a meeting at four.
A project I was genuinely interested in.
An apartment that was mine alone, with a kitchen I had stocked myself and a bed I had chosen and a window that got good morning light.
I got in the car and sat for a moment before starting the engine.
Fourteen hours.
That was all it had been.
Fourteen hours of a marriage, and then a locked door, and then a woman at a garden wall with a photograph.
And then everything that came after.
I started the engine.
I had a meeting at four, and I didn't want to be late.
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*Some people show you who they are not with words, but with a single moment — and the hardest thing is trusting what you saw.*
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