Chapter 6 — The Name He Did Not Take Back
1524 Words
She did not sleep.
Not because of noise. Not because of rain or a message in the dark or anything external. Just her own mind at midnight running the same four seconds on repeat.
Goodnight Lily.
Not Miss Hayes.
Lily.
Said quietly, almost to himself, like it had gotten loose before he could decide whether to allow it. Like he had been thinking it for longer than one evening and it had finally found its way out.
She lay in the dark and told herself it meant nothing. Staff called by first name, completely ordinary, completely unremarkable in any normal household.
This was not a normal household.
And nothing about Ethan Xu was ordinary and he had called her Miss Hayes for fourteen days with the consistency of someone who had decided that was the correct distance and was going to maintain it.
Until last night.
Until it had slipped.
She turned over and looked at the ceiling.
She was in trouble. She had known it since day four when he had told her the coffee machine ratio without being asked. She had known it since the bench, since the almost-smile, since the flour on his shirt and the way he had stayed in the kitchen until the timer went off.
She had known it and filed it and locked it up and kept her hands moving.
It was not working anymore.
Morning came grey.
She went down at six fifteen and the kitchen was empty.
The cup was in the drying rack — he had been there at five thirty, same as always — but he was gone. Back upstairs. Which he had never done before. In fifteen days he had always still been there when she came down.
She stood at the counter and looked at the single cup.
Then she made her coffee and sat at the island and told herself this was fine. Normal. People changed their routines. It meant nothing.
It felt like something.
She drank her coffee alone and looked at the garden and thought about a man who had said her name like it was something he had been holding and finally put down and was now apparently upstairs deciding what to do about having put it down.
She understood that.
She was doing the same thing.
She did not see him until noon.
Noah found her in the garden at eleven with the careful expression of someone managing information delicately.
Mr. Xu has calls this morning, Noah said. He will not need lunch until two.
She nodded. Kept her hands in the soil.
Noah did not leave.
She looked up.
He is not avoiding you, Noah said quietly. He is trying to figure out what to do with himself. There is a difference.
She looked at Noah for a moment.
How long have you worked for him, she asked.
Six years, Noah said.
Have you ever seen him like this.
Noah considered the question the way he considered everything — seriously, without rushing.
No, he said. I have not. And I mean that as a good thing.
He went back inside.
She sat in the garden with her hands in the soil and the morning light on her face and felt something settle quietly in her chest that she was not going to examine too carefully.
---
He came to the garden at one.
She heard him on the path and did not turn around. Kept her hands moving. Kept her face still.
He walked across the garden and stopped a few feet away.
She looked up.
He looked like he had been inside his own head all morning. The careful expression was in place but working harder than usual. Something close to the surface that he had not yet decided what to do with.
I owe you an explanation, he said.
You do not, she said.
I disappeared this morning.
You are allowed to disappear. This is your house.
He looked at her for a moment.
I sat in my office for three hours, he said. Not working. Just sitting.
She waited.
Yesterday was, he said. Then stopped. Tried again. I have not talked about my mother to anyone. In two years. And then yesterday I did and last night I did not know what to do with having done it.
She understood that from the inside.
It feels strange, she said. When you let something out you have been carrying a long time. Like your hands do not know what to do with themselves when the weight is gone.
He looked at her.
Yes, he said quietly. Exactly like that.
She pressed soil around the base of the nearest plant.
It gets easier, she said. The strange feeling. It does not go away but it gets easier to carry.
He was quiet long enough that she thought he was going to leave.
Then he sat down on the garden path beside her.
Not the bench. The path. Like his body had made the decision before his mind could stop it.
She did not comment on it.
She handed him a trowel without asking.
He looked at it.
Then he took it.
They worked in the garden without speaking and it was the most ordinary extraordinary thing she had experienced in fifteen days.
She went inside at three to start dinner.
He followed.
Not immediately. She was at the counter for five minutes before she heard his footsteps on the path and then in the doorway.
She did not turn around.
You are going to watch, she said.
I am going to help, he said.
She turned around.
He was standing in the doorway with dirt on his hands from the garden and an expression that was almost uncertain which on his face was so unfamiliar it took her a moment to process.
You cook, she said.
My mother taught me, he said. I have not in two years.
She looked at him.
Then she moved to the left side of the counter and gave him the right without making a thing of it.
He came to stand beside her.
Close. Not three seats of careful distance. Just two people at a counter close enough that she felt the warmth of him and when they both reached for the same bowl their hands came within an inch of each other.
She pulled back first.
He pulled back half a second after.
Neither of them said anything about it.
She told him what she was making. He knew the dish. His mother had made a version. They compared — her way, his mother's way, the small differences that were not really about the recipe.
It was the most natural conversation they had ever had.
Which made it the most dangerous.
They ate at six.
Because the food was ready at six and neither of them suggested waiting. They just sat down and it was different from every dinner before because the careful distance was gone and neither of them had agreed to remove it.
It had just — gone.
Halfway through he said:
Thank you.
She looked up.
For yesterday, he said. For staying.
She held his gaze.
I was not going anywhere, she said.
Something moved through his face. Deep. Real.
I know, he said. That is what I mean.
She looked at her plate.
Her heart was doing the unreasonable thing again and she was completely out of ways to make it stop.
She cleared the plates at seven. Washed up. Said goodnight and walked to the door.
Ethan, she said.
She did not turn around.
She had learned not to turn around for certain things. Because some moments only existed if you were not looking directly at them.
She felt him go still behind her.
The lavender, she said. Your mother was right. It smells like patience.
She walked out.
She did not hear him move for a long time.
---
She was almost asleep when her phone lit up.
E. Xu.
She sat up.
One message. Four words.
She used to sing.
Lily stared at the screen.
He was telling her something about Clara. Unprompted. At eleven at night. Through four words because saying it out loud was still too much but not saying it at all was apparently no longer possible either.
She typed back.
What did she sing.
Three minutes.
Old songs. The kind nobody remembers anymore.
She looked at those words for a long time.
Then she typed:
The best ones always are.
She put her phone down and looked at the ceiling.
Fifteen days, she thought.
Fifteen days and he was texting her about his mother's songs at eleven at night and she was lying in the dark with her phone against her chest feeling something she had no safe name for.
Six months, she reminded herself.
Six months.
She was already gone and she knew it and the most frightening thing — the thing she could not file away or lock up or keep her hands busy enough to outrun — was that gone did not feel like falling.
It felt like landing.
End of Chapter 6
- Writer
