Her mother stood in the doorway of the shop and looked at the room the way her mother looked at rooms, which was with an attention that missed nothing and commented on very little. She looked at the shelves, the pendant lights, the honey-stained floors, and she didn't say anything for a while.
"You did the floors yourself," her mother said. "The color is right."
"Thank you."
Her mother walked the length of the room. She ran her hand along one of the shelves and stopped at the back. She turned.
"Noelle."
"Yes?”
“Your father—he’s not good at apologies. I know he’s sorry for putting you in that position. Terribly so. But … I also owe you an apology."
Noelle could see, in her mother's face, that her mother had been composing the words in the car and possibly the night before.
"For what?" Noelle said, though she knew.
"For training you," her mother said. "For training you to hold your face, hold your voice, hold your composure and hold everything, everything inside, because I was afraid that if you didn't hold it you'd end up — " She stopped. "I was afraid you'd end up like me."
"Mother—”
"Let me finish. I trained you to survive a marriage," her mother said. "I trained you to endure it. I didn't train you to leave one, because I didn't know how. I'd never done it. I'd never — " Her mother's voice did something Noelle had heard it do perhaps twice in her life, which was to thin at the edges. "I'd never been brave enough to do what you did."
"That isn't — "
"It is. It's what it is, Noelle. You walked out of that hall and you didn't look back and you built this." Her mother gestured, once, at the room around them. "You built this without asking anyone's permission, and I am — " Her mother stopped again. Her mother pressed her lips together. “I’m proud of you. I’m proud of who you've become, and I'm sorry for every piece of the training that made it harder for you to become her."
Noelle crossed the room and put her arms around her mother. Her mother put her arms around her and they stood like that, in the middle of the bookshop, for a long time without saying anything else.
The package arrivedon the day before the shop opened.
It was left at the Mathieus' building by a courier. It was wrapped in brown paper with her name written on it in a handwriting she recognized before she'd finished reading the first letter.
She stood in the entryway of the apartment with the package in her hands and she didn't open it immediately. She took off her coat, made tea. Then she got up and brought it to the chair and opened it.
It was a book. A first edition ofThe Gardens of the Île-de-France, which she'd mentioned to the professor in Hyde Park as the one book she hadn't been able to find for the Gardens section, which she hadn't mentioned to anyone else, which meant that Elias had, at some point in the weeks since Clark Street, found out what she was building and had gone looking for the one thing she was missing.
Inside the front cover was a note. His handwriting.
Noelle —
I won't be contesting the proceedings any further. James is withdrawing the extension motion today. You'll have what you asked for by the end of the month.
I saw what you're building on Clark Street. I didn't go in. I won't.
I hope the shop is everything you want it to be.
Elias
She read the note twice. She held it in her hand and she looked at the window of the library where the elms on Astor Street were, she noticed, beginning to bud. The winter was ending, which meant the season in which she'd left her marriage, built a bookshop, cried on a hotel floor and put her hand against a brick building on Dickens to keep her knee from failing was a season that was, at some point in the next weeks, going to be over.
He'd let her go.
Noelle sat with that. She sat with it for a long time. He'd let her go. He'd let her go by finding the one book she was missing and sending it to her without asking for anything in return. He'd let her go by telling her he wouldn't go in.
It was, she saw, the first thing he'd ever done for her that hadn't also been for himself.
She didn't know what to do with it yet.
