Thirty days to fall in love

Chapter Three: "Thirty Days Is Enough to Learn Someone's Hands

Chapter Three: "Thirty Days Is Enough to Learn Someone's Hands"

POV: Ava Reese — First Person Present Tense

I do not unpack my suitcase fully. I never do anymore.

The guest room in Nathaniel Cole's penthouse is larger than my entire apartment on West Twenty-Third Street, and it smells of cedar and fresh linen and the specific absence of anyone who has ever lived in it warmly. There is a painting on the wall above the bed — abstract, expensive, chosen by someone with taste and no particular feeling. I set my one suitcase on the luggage rack without opening it past the first layer. My ink supplies go on the writing desk by the window. My chamomile tea goes on the bedside table. These are the two things I always place first, in every room I have slept in for the last two years, because they are the two things that make a space feel inhabited rather than merely occupied.

I am hanging my green dress in the otherwise empty wardrobe when my phone rings and Henry's voice comes through with the particular gentleness he uses when he is worried and trying not to show it, saying: "Ava. There is a man outside the bookstore taking photographs of the front window," and I understand immediately, with a calmness that surprises even me, that Nathaniel Cole's world has already begun to find the edges of mine.

"What kind of photographs?" I ask, keeping my voice even.

"The kind a person takes when they're being paid to take them," Henry says. I can hear the old printing press in the background, its familiar rhythmic knock, and the sound of it settles something in my chest the way it always does. Henry's shop is the only place in the city that has ever felt like it was waiting for me specifically. "Should I be concerned?"

"No. It's nothing to do with the shop." I close the wardrobe door. "Go back to your press, Henry. I'll explain when I'm in on Thursday."

A pause. Henry's pauses are weighted things, full of the things he has decided not to say yet. "Are you all right?"

"I'm in a penthouse with a wardrobe the size of your stockroom," I say. "I'm spectacular."

He makes the low sound that is his version of laughter and ends the call, and I stand in the cedar-smelling silence of the guest room and look at the one photograph I have placed on the writing desk — my mother at forty-one, laughing at something outside the frame, her head thrown back, completely unguarded — and I think: thirty days. I can do anything for thirty days. I have done harder things for much less.

I go to find the kitchen.

Nathaniel is already there, standing at the counter in a suit that is not the same one as last night but is cut from the same ideology, holding a coffee mug and reading something on his phone with the focused intensity of a man who has never in his adult life been in a kitchen without a purpose. He looks up when I come in. Something in his expression adjusts — not unfriendly, precisely, but recalibrating, the way a room's acoustics change when someone new enters it.

"Coffee," he says, which is not a question and is not quite an offer. It is a statement of available resources.

"Chamomile," I say. "I brought my own."

He looks at the box of tea I am holding. He looks at me. He nods once, as if this information has been filed accurately, and returns to his phone. I find the kettle. I find a mug in the cabinet above it — plain white, the same as the one in his office, the kind of mug chosen for function with no opinion about beauty. I make my tea. I stand at the window while it steeps and look out at the city forty-one floors below, at the particular quality of morning light on glass and steel, a light that does not warm so much as illuminate, and I think about Walter in Chair Seven, about white knuckles and a hand held like prayer, and I think: I did not come here for the penthouse. I came here for something I have not yet found.

On Day Two, I find a coffee outside my door.

Not chamomile. Not a note. Just a coffee, in a paper cup from the café two blocks south, set on the floor with the precision of someone who knocked and then thought better of it. It is exactly the temperature of something that has been walked eight blocks in November air. I hold it with both palms and drink it standing in the doorway, and I think about what it means that a man who commands rooms full of people cannot bring himself to knock on a door.

I learn this about him before I learn almost anything else: Nathaniel Cole knows how to be in charge. He does not know how to be present. These are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where his loneliness lives.

The charity dinner is on Day Three and the green dress is the right choice, which June told me when I texted her a photograph of it that afternoon and she replied: Stop. You look devastating. Don't let him see you in it until you're at the door. I take this advice seriously because June has never been wrong about anything that matters.

Nathaniel is waiting in the living room when I come out. He is in black tie, which on most men looks like a costume and on him looks like the logical conclusion of his natural state of being. He turns when he hears me cross the floor and looks at me in the green dress with the expression of a man briefly unable to locate his next sentence.

I find this privately satisfying.

The dinner is full of people who have the easy confidence of those who have never needed to perform their worth to a room, and Nathaniel moves through them with the efficiency of someone who has attended a thousand events exactly like this one and found every single one of them marginally insufficient. He introduces me to twelve people over the course of the evening.

He says my name every time. Not my wife, Ava, with the name as afterthought, but Ava, my wife, with my name first, like it is the thing that matters and the rest is context, and by the fourth introduction I understand that this is not an accident, and by the eighth I understand something about him that he does not yet know about himself.

At the table, I mention once, to no one in particular, that I cannot eat salmon. I do not make a thing of it. I reach for my water glass and the salmon on my plate is quietly removed by a server who has appeared with the timing of a conjuring trick, and in its place is a small dish of roasted vegetables that were not on the menu, and when I look across the table at Nathaniel he is in conversation with the man to his left and his eyes do not come to mine, and he does not acknowledge what he has done, and I sit with my roasted vegetables and feel something shift inside my chest like a door opening on a room I had sealed shut.

He notices things.

In the car home, I hold my own hands in my lap and look out the window at the city unspooling in the dark and practice not making it mean more than it is.

I fail at this, quietly, all the way back to the penthouse.

In bed, I open my journal. I write the date. I write seven words that I will not let myself expand into more: He notices things. I didn't think he would.

I close the journal.

I lie in the dark of the cedar-smelling room and think about his hands — the way they reach for his phone the moment a silence develops between us, the way the reaching is not boredom but armor, the way a man who built four billion dollars worth of company from architecture and strategy still does not know what to do with his own hands when there is nothing to manage.

I think: I have twenty-seven days left. I think: that is enough to learn someone's hands. I think: it will have to be.

My phone lights up on the bedside table. A text from June: How was it?

I type back: He said my name first. Every time.

Her response takes thirty seconds, which means she is choosing words carefully, which means she already understands what I have not yet admitted.

Ava, she writes. Just my name.

I know what she means.

I turn my phone face-down and I lie still in the dark and I listen to the sound of the city far below, and from somewhere down the hall I can hear, very faintly, the sound of Nathaniel Cole still awake at midnight, still moving, still unable to stop managing the silence.

I close my eyes.

I do not sleep for a long time.