Christian’s POV
The Singapore deal closes on a Friday, which should feel like something, and does not feel like much.
I have been working on this particular acquisition for eleven months. It involves three firms across two continents and a regulatory approval process that required more patience than I have had to deploy in years.
My assistant comes in with the confirmation documents and I sign them and she says congratulations and I say thank you and she goes, and I sit at my desk looking at the signed pages and I think about Emily at her kitchen table with the settlement documents. About the way she stood at the counter and said thank you and meant it for something much larger than the words.
I pick up the confirmation documents and file them. I open the next thing on the list.
This has been happening all week. I will be in the middle of something — a call, a negotiation, a document that requires my full attention — and I will be in it entirely and then I will not be, and what has replaced it is a kitchen, or a corridor, or an office with containers of Thai food open across the paperwork, or the fractional pause before I moved toward her and did not stop myself.
I am not a man who gets distracted. I have been running this firm for eight years. I have sat across tables from people who were trying to take things I had built and I have remained entirely present and entirely composed.
I have spent twenty years not getting distracted by the one thing that could distract me, and apparently the eleven weeks we have been living in the same house have undone fifteen years of practice.
My assistant knocks and comes in with the afternoon schedule. I look at it. There are six things on it and I am going to do all six of them, and I am going to be entirely present for all six of them, and I am going to stop thinking about a kitchen and a table and a woman who said I'll count that as yes and then went to her room and did not sleep.
I know she did not sleep because I heard her moving at three in the morning, and I lay in the dark and thought: she is twelve feet away and I have been in love with her since we were nineteen and she is twelve feet away.
I do the six things on the schedule.
At six I come home. The house has the particular quality it has when Sabrina has been in it since four — the specific evidence of a teenager who has been home alone: shoes in the hall, a glass on the counter, the television on in the background at a volume that is ambient rather than attentive.
Emily comes home at half past and I watch her do the thing she does when she comes through the door — the small exhale, the setting down of the bag, the moment of recalibration from the world outside to this one — and I think: she does that. She has been doing that every evening for eleven weeks and I know the shape of it as well as I know anything.
The settlement is done. The gallery is hers. The custody is secured. She has income and housing and financial independence and every practical reason she had for this arrangement has been met, and the arrangement continues because neither of us has moved to end it, which is its own kind of answer.
We don't talk about it. The knowledge sits in the house the way certain things sit — present, low, not requiring immediate attention but there whenever you reach for it.
I am choosing not to reach for it. She is choosing not to reach for it. Sabrina, apparently, has had enough of our choosing.
We are at dinner when she sets her fork down with the deliberate care of someone who has made a decision.
"So," she says. "Are you two actually together now, or is this still the thing you're not talking about?"
Emily picks up her glass. I look at the table. Neither of us says anything that constitutes an adequate response, and Sabrina watches us not-respond with the expression of someone who has been patient with a very slow process and is running low.
"Right," she says. She clears her plate, puts it in the sink, and goes to bed. Her door closes. The kitchen is quiet.
Emily is looking at the table. I am looking at the table. The question Sabrina put in the room is still there, exactly where she left it.
I think about Emily at three in the morning moving around her room. I think about the fractional pause and the way she sat very still and let it be happening and then pulled back carefully, both hands on the desk, and said I can't give you the same answer yet.
I think about the twenty years before that, the two proposals, the step back, the Singapore clipping in the drawer, and I think: I have been waiting a very long time and I am good at waiting and I do not want to wait anymore.
But I also think: she said yet. She did not say never. She said yet, and she meant it, and pushing before she is ready is the one thing that could actually break this, and I am not going to break this.
I get up. "Let’s come and watch something," I say. "You're about to spiral and you don't need to tonight. Daniel is done for a while. The legal part is over." I hold out a hand. "Come on. An hour. Something that requires nothing."
Emily looks up at me. There is the particular expression she gets when she is deciding whether to argue, and she considers it for a moment, and then she takes my hand, and I help her up from the chair.
We go to the living room. I put something on that requires nothing — something light, something that will make her laugh at least twice, something she can actually watch rather than think over the top of.
She sits at one end of the sofa and I sit at the other, not touching, the correct distance for two people who have not said the thing yet.
She laughs twice in the first twenty minutes. I watch her laugh and I think: I have been waiting twenty years. I can wait a little longer.
I am not sure I am entirely convincing myself.