Love Has a Time Difference

Chapter 4 The Evidence

The thing about a test is that once you know you are being measured, you cannot stop measuring. I began to notice what Lena had seen long before I had, the small asymmetries that accumulate into a verdict.

When Lena's phone rang, she answered it in the middle of conversations because Julian would wait, but he would also call back within minutes. When my phone rang, it was usually Marcus, and it was usually about logistics, and it usually ended with him saying he had to go.

When Lena made plans, they held. When I made plans, they were conditional, adjustable, subject to the weather of Marcus's schedule.

I was not jealous of Lena. That was the strange part. I was not jealous of the money or the car or the photos of tea beside a rain-streaked window. I was jealous of being chosen, of being the person someone rearranged their day around. I was jealous of mattering in the way that made things happen.

I tried to talk to Marcus about it. I chose a calm evening, a Sunday, when he was not working and not tired and not distracted. I sat on his couch with a cup of coffee and I said, carefully, that I had been feeling like I was not a priority.

He looked up from his laptop. "What?"

"I'm saying I feel like I'm not a priority."

"That's not true. You know how busy I am."

"I know. But I'm not asking you to quit your job. I'm asking you to notice when I'm standing in the rain."

His jaw tightened. "I said I was sorry about that. I was working."

"You're always working."

"And you knew that when we started dating."

The sentence landed like a door closing. I sat with it for a moment. He was right in a way. I had known. I had chosen him knowing, or at least I had chosen not to look, which is not the same thing but produces the same result.

"I'm not trying to fight," I said.

"Then don't fight."

He turned back to his laptop. That was it. The conversation had happened and had not happened, and I was left holding the shape of the thing I had tried to say.

On Monday, Lena sent me a link to an article about emotional labor. On Tuesday she sent me a meme about partners who text back. On Wednesday she sent me nothing, which was her way of giving me space, and I spent the whole day thinking about how much I wished she would send something.

I went to see my mother on Thursday. She lived alone in a small house an hour north, and she asked about Marcus, as she always did, and I gave her the answer I always gave, which was that he was well and busy and working hard for our future. She nodded and poured me another cup of tea.

"Your father was like that," she said.

I looked up. She did not talk about my father often. He had died when I was seven, and the version of him I carried was made mostly of photographs and fragments, the smell of his coat, the way he had said my name.

"He was always working," she continued. "He missed things. Recitals, birthdays, my sister's funeral."

"I didn't know that."

"You were little. I didn't want you to know. But I believed he would change, and then one day he didn't, and now all I have is a house full of things he bought and a marriage I spent thirty years waiting for."

She said it without bitterness, which made it worse. She said it as fact, the way you state the date or the temperature. I sat at her kitchen table and I felt the list in my chest, the one I had been writing in pencil, and I understood that she had kept a list too, and that she had never shown it to anyone.

"Are you happy?" I asked.

She considered the question. "I have you," she said. "That's not nothing."

I drove home that night with the windows down and the radio off and my mother's words sitting in the passenger seat beside me. I thought about the thirty years and the house and the man who bought things. I thought about Marcus's laptop and the way he had tightened his jaw when I said the word priority. I thought about how easy it was to confuse a list of events with proof that something was missing.

When I got home, I opened the notebook. I read the whole list from beginning to end. Then I closed it and I set it on the shelf next to my childhood diaries, where I would not have to see it, and where I could not pretend it was not there.