Before All These
1079 Words
Jade is already at the table when I arrive, and she has ordered my coffee without asking because she has known me for three years, and some things do not require asking.
She looks at me when I sit down. Not a greeting look, a reading look. Jade has always done this. She takes one full second to assess a person before she says anything, and in three years, I have never once been able to hide anything from that one second.
"You look different," she says.
"I look the same."
"You look different." She wraps both hands around her cup. "How is it actually going?"
"It's going well. He's —"
"That's your everything is fine voice." She sets her cup down. "I have known everything is fine since the Carlisle account almost collapsed, and you told the entire office it was fine for six weeks before you fixed it alone at midnight. Try again."
I look at her.
I put my coffee down.
"It's more complicated than I expected," I say.
"How."
"He's not who I thought he would be." I turn my cup slowly on the table. "I had a version of him built before I met him. Arrogant. Transactional. Someone I could keep at a clean distance for twelve months and walk away from without carrying anything."
Jade says nothing. She is good at knowing when to be quiet and let a person finish.
"That version was wrong," I say.
"Wrong how?"
I think about a coffee cup on the counter. A glass of water at two in the morning. A man standing at a window who turns when he hears me and says nothing about the time.
"Every way," I say.
---
Jade is quiet for a moment.
She picks up her cup. She puts it down again. She has a habit of doing this when she is deciding how direct to be, and she always lands on very direct, so the delay is just performance.
"Nora," she says. "When is the last time you let yourself want something that wasn't for someone else?"
I open my mouth.
I closed it.
She looks at me steadily. "That's what I thought."
"That's not —" I stop. "It's not that simple."
"I didn't say it was simple. I asked when."
I look at my coffee. I think about two years of holding Hayes Interiors together without a title or acknowledgment. I think about hospital hallways and creditor calls and a contract signed at six forty in the evening on a plastic chair.
I cannot find an answer that does not prove her point.
"We should talk about something else," I say.
Jade smiles. Not unkindly. "Sure," she says. "We can do that."
We talk about other things. Her new project. A difficult client she is managing. Something funny that happened in the office last week. Normal things. Good things.
But the question stays on the table between us for the rest of the hour, and we both know it.
---
I go back to my apartment at two in the afternoon.
I sit at my desk, and I open my notebook, and I write it down because that is what I do with things I cannot process any other way.
*When is the last time you let yourself want something that wasn't for someone else?*
I stare at it.
I went through the last ten days. The contract was signed for my father. The ground rules were built to protect me from something I was already afraid of. Every dinner, every public appearance, every carefully managed answer in every room.
I looked for one decision that was purely mine. One moment that had nothing to do with obligation or protection or the forty-seven people at Hayes Interiors or a man in a hospital bed who combed his hair for a meeting.
I found one.
The kitchen. Two a.m. I did not go out there for anyone. I was not performing, not protecting, not managing. I went because I could not sleep, and I wanted water, and I stayed because I wanted to stay, and I asked about Sofia because I genuinely wanted to know who she was.
That was mine.
Just that one thing.
I close the notebook.
I sit with the smallness of that for a while.
---
My phone rings at four.
Patrice.
I pick up before the second ring because Patrice does not call without a reason, and her reasons lately have all mattered.
"I found something," she says. No greeting. Patrice has never wasted time on greetings. "Not Hale. Your mother."
I sit up straight. "What?"
"A record. Old one. A name attached to a property transfer from about eight years ago. I don't recognize it, but something about it felt deliberate, like a thread left loose on purpose." She pauses. "The name is Margaret Solow."
I still go completely.
The apartment is quiet around me. My notebook is on the desk. The Chicago afternoon presses gray against the window.
Margaret Solow.
My mother mentioned that name once. I was seventeen, and I did not understand the context, and I did not ask because I was seventeen and seventeen-year-olds do not ask the right questions. But I remember the way my mother said it with a particular weight, like a name you keep for emergencies, like something you hold onto because you might need it someday.
*If I ever need to disappear properly,* she had said, *Margaret would know how.*
I did not understand what that meant at seventeen.
I understand it now.
"Patrice," I say.
"Does it mean something?"
"Yes." My voice is steadier than I feel. "It means my mother is findable."
Patrice is quiet for a moment. Then "How long have you been wanting to find her?"
I look at my notebook on the desk. The closed cover. The question I wrote an hour ago is still sitting inside it.
"Two years," I say. "I just didn't think I was allowed to."
I hung up.
I open the notebook to a new page.
I start writing everything I remember about Margaret Solow, every detail from a conversation I had at seventeen that I filed away without knowing I would need it. The words come fast and steady, and my hand does not shake.
For the first time in two years, I am not holding something together for someone else.
I am reaching for something that is entirely mine.
- Writer
