“I thought you’d be gone,” she said.
“I was getting my papers.”
She looked at the warped baseboard. “Then why are you sitting there?”
He almost said he did not know.
“Because I can finally see what you were trying to tell me.”
Leah set down her bag.
Thomas touched the damaged wood. “I fixed the valve from another ocean. Or told you how. I thought that counted as showing up.”
“Sometimes it did count,” Leah said.
He looked at her.
“That’s the part that makes this difficult,” she continued. “You were helpful. You remembered things. You worked hard. You weren’t some terrible husband who never cared. I just needed more than being managed efficiently from far away.”
Thomas nodded.
“I keep wanting there to be one thing I did wrong.”
“Because then you can repair it.”
“Exactly.”
Leah leaned against the doorframe. “Maybe we built a system that worked until it didn’t.”
“That’s an annoyingly reasonable thing to say.”
“I’ve had practice talking to myself.”
The joke hurt, but Thomas did not defend himself.
He stood and gathered his papers. At the door, Leah asked whether he wanted coffee. The invitation was small enough that he almost misunderstood it as progress. Then he corrected himself. Coffee was coffee.
They sat at the kitchen table for twenty minutes and talked about Mateo’s terrible driving and Leah’s sister’s new neighbor. Nothing was solved.
When Thomas left, he felt hopeful for the first time precisely because he had not tried to convert the visit into a sign that Leah was coming home.
Dr. Chen later called that restraint “tolerating ambiguity.” Thomas called it miserable. Leah called it necessary. All three descriptions were correct.
A month passed before Leah invited him to the house.
The washing machine had been replaced while he was away. The new one hummed quietly in the laundry room.
Thomas stood in the kitchen, seeing evidence of all the ordinary decisions Leah had made without him: a different brand of coffee, a new lamp, the rug moved six inches to avoid a worn floorboard.
His first impulse was to feel excluded.
Then he remembered the cereal boxes of their life were not required to wait in exact positions for his return.
“The rug looks better there,” he said.
Leah watched him.
“You hate it.”
