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“What do youmean?”
“You’re not getting out of our conversation that easily. We were just getting to the good part, the honest part.” He hesitated. “Unless you really don’t want to talk about it, in which case, I’m happy to tell you about mytravels.”
He was being careful with her, letting her know he was interested in what she had to say, but the choice was ultimately up to her. It was a simple choice: treat her past with kid gloves, like a bomb that might explode in her hands, or ownit.
It wasn’t much of a choice. Shame wasn’t a good place to build somethingnew.
“I’m just figuring some of it out for myself,” she said. “I can’t promise it will becoherent.”
“Coherent is overrated,” he said. “You were talking about beingstranded.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he remembered where they’d left off. Underneath his easygoing air, he clearly had a mind like a steeltrap.
“By the time you reach your mid-thirties,” she continued, “you’re an anomaly if you don’t have kids, in the suburbs anyway. Everything revolves around them — friendships with other adults and weekend activities and grocery shopping. It’s like everyone else has traveled to some exotic locale. They’ve come back different…expanded.”
She braced for him to ask why she didn’t havechildren.
“And you can’t expand if you don’t have kids?” heasked.
She laughed. “Not where I wasliving.”
“Is that why you moved to the city?” he asked. “So you couldexpand?”
It was such a nice way to put her decision to leave the suburbs. At the time it had felt like she was running away — from all the expectations she couldn’t meet, from the suffocation, from the sorrow of dreamsunfulfilled.
She liked Liam’s version better. It spoke of running toward somethinginstead.
“I guess so,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it that way, but given the choice of clinging to what I had — to something that wasn’t working — or reaching for somethingelse…”
“You chose something else,” hefinished.
He was right. Shehadchosen something else. No one had done that for her, and if she’d taken that leap once — and she had — she could do itagain.
He looked into her eyes for a long moment, that lazy smile creeping across his lips. “Well, Nina, I’m honored to be part of your…expansion.”
She reached for her beer, hoping the movement would hide the flush she felt spreading across her cheeks, grateful he couldn’t see the heat blowing through the rest of herbody.
