Elias hadn't known it at the time. He'd been too busy cataloguing her to see her, too busy reading her for evidence to read her for what she was, and what she'd been, all along, was a woman who'd walked into his apartment and tried to make it a home and been told, in a dozen different registers across a dozen different rooms, that the making wasn't necessary.It isn't necessary.He'd said that. She'd heard it, adjusted, and the adjusting had been her way of telling him she was still there. He'd read the adjusting as evidence.
He'd read everything as evidence. He'd read everything as evidence because reading things as evidence was the only way he'd known how to be in a room with another person, and the reading had, in the end, been the thing that had cost him the person.
Elias made the decision on a Wednesday. He made it on a walk — on Clark Street, because Clark Street was the street he walked on now. He made it standing on the far side of the street from the bookshop, watching through the window as his wife arranged a display in the front section. She'd put a hand-lettered sign in the window that saidOPENING SOON, and beneath it a row of books he couldn't read the titles of from across the street. She was adjusting the angle of the sign with focused attention.
He watched her. He watched her the way he'd watched her from the doorway the night he'd come home early and found her in the chair with the Morisot biography, with the attention of a man who was seeing a woman clearly for the first time and knowing, in the seeing, that the seeing had come too late.
Noelle was happy. That was the thing that settled in him, standing on the sidewalk. She was all right without him. Thriving, even.
Elia turned from the window and walked back to the office. He called James.
"Withdraw the motion," he said.
A pause. "The extension?"
"All of it. The extension, the discovery objections, everything outstanding. Withdraw it."
"Elias — "
"I'm going to sign, James."
James didn't speak for a moment. "All right."
"Today. Can you have the papers ready today?"
"I can have them ready by four."
"Four is fine."
"Elias?”
"Yes."
"You're sure."
He thought of Noelle. Happy. Thriving.
"I'm sure," he said.
"All right. I'll have the papers at four."
"Thank you, James."
"Elias?”
"Yes."
"For what it's worth — this is the right thing."
"I know."
He signed at four-fifteen in James's office. It took less than ten minutes.
When it was done, James gathered the papers and left. Elias sat at the table for a while.
That evening, in his study, he thought about what he wanted to give her.
He'd tried apology and it had been, correctly, refused. She'd told him, on a sidewalk in Lincoln Park, that explanations weren't going to close the thing he'd opened.
