"Good. At least we're on the same page."
Three days later, Sophie's cane was finished. It was a reason to see Emily that wasn't entirely selfish, even if the fact that I would have invented one didn't contradict that.
I found her in the library.
At our table.
I stopped and simply looked at her, and the memory hit me with such force that it almost made me smile despite myself. Six months ago I had seen her there for the first time, all focus andquiet irritation, and thought, with the arrogance unique to men like me, that she might become an interesting distraction. Since then she had managed to alter the entire shape of my life and become the altar I wanted to worship at every single day.
She looked up.
“It seems I see you more in this building now than I did when you were still a student,” she said. “You know it’s vacation, right?”
I walked over and sat across from her. At least the sharp frown of disapproval that had greeted me the last time was gone, which I chose to interpret as wildly encouraging.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m considering doing a master’s in economics and history.”
She shook her head, and for one precious second she looked almost amused.
“Very funny. You have a job to do.”
And then it hit me, so simply I almost hated myself for not saying it this plainly sooner. I straightened in my chair.
“I can be serious, if you want me to.”
She closed her highlighter slowly and leaned back. “What do you mean?”
I held her gaze.
“I mean that in the life I was born into, I can’t honestly promise you safety. I can’t promise that my world will never reach for you again or that I’ll always be able to separate blood from home the way I want to. I can’t promise I won’t hide things. I can’t promise I won’t lie sometimes. I can promise I’ll fight for it, but I know now that wanting to keep a promise and being able to keep it are not always the same thing.”
She said nothing.
So I kept going.
“And if that life is too much, if the cost of loving me as I am is more than you should ever be asked to pay, then I can step down.”
For the first time since I’d sat down, her face changed.
“What?”
“I can stay in Boston,” I said. “Take over the company here. Build something legitimate and let the rest become someone else’s burden. I’m not saying it lightly and I’m not offering it as manipulation. I’m saying that if the life and the choices I make in it are what makes us impossible, then I am willing to remove the life from the equation and let the decision be about me.”
She stared at me.
“You would do that?”
“In a heartbeat.”
The silence after that stretched so long I stopped breathing.
Then she said, very quietly, “No.”
For one strange, weightless second I could not tell what she meant. No to the idea? No to me? No to us?
“No,” I repeated carefully. “To what exactly?”
She looked down at the table for a moment, then back at me, and when she spoke her voice was calm enough that it made my chest ache.
