DIVROCED AT 40, DESIRED BY HIM

The Empty Side

He woke up at six and reached for her before he remembered.

The bed was still warm on her side.

Desmond lay there for a moment with his hand on the sheet and his eyes on the ceiling and the sound of the ocean coming through the window, and it took him a full three seconds to understand what the warmth meant not that she was still there, but that she had only recently not been. Three seconds of the specific disorientation of waking up somewhere that still holds the shape of a person who has already left.

He sat up.

The room did its inventory without him asking. Her dress: gone.

Her gold sandals, which caught his attention when she wore them as if to make a statement, were gone. The unfinished glass of water she had poured at two in the morning was still on the nightstand.

Everything of hers, erased. The water was the only evidence that she had been in the room at all, as if she had reverse-engineered her own existence.

Desmond moved to the window.

At this hour, the beach was nearly deserted, with just the calm, self-assured sea conducting its early morning routine and a man farther down the shore stringing up a fishing line with the leisurely patience of a lifelong fisherman.

No woman in a gold dress. No one walking away.

He'd missed her by minutes. Maybe less.

He stood at the window long enough to feel the sun shift on the water and then went to shower, because he was twenty-five and he had been left before not like this, not from this particular angle but the general architecture of wanting someone who wasn't there was not new territory.

This time, it was different because he was unaware of her last name.

For the remainder of the weekend, he couldn't help but think about her.

Not in the manner he approached problems to be solved; as an architect, he understood how to sit with an object's geometry and manipulate it until it made sense.

This was different. This was the kind of thinking that arrived sideways, in the middle of conversations about other things, while his friend Tola was doing his birthday speech and someone was laughing too loud at the back of the restaurant.

She'd said: twelve years.

She'd said it the way you say something you've been carrying alone long enough that the weight of it has become the shape of you. Not looking for a reaction. Not setting up for more. Just twelve years, and then she'd looked away, and he'd known, the way you sometimes know things before you have the information to know them, that the twelve years was not the half of it.

He'd asked if she was okay.

He still thought about her face when he'd asked that. The way something moved in it that she hadn't wanted to let move. The half-second before she put the careful version back.

Tola caught him staring at nothing during the birthday dinner and dropped into the seat next to him. Tola was twenty-seven and constitutionally incapable of minding his business, which was either his best or worst quality depending on the day.

"You're doing the face," Tola said.

"What face."

"The one you get when something's already under your skin and you haven't decided what to do about it yet."

Desmond sipped his beer.

"There was a woman."

Tola's expression quickly accomplished a number of tasks. "Was?" Before I woke up, she was gone.

"Ah." Tola was quiet for approximately four seconds, which was a record. "How gone are we talking? Gone-gone, or gone and left a trail?"

Desmond looked at him.

"Her name is Catherine," he said. "She was just divorced. Twelve years. She's here with friends. She's—" He stopped. Started again.

"She's not the kind of woman you meet on a Friday night at a bar in Zanzibar and that's the whole story."

Tola was quiet again. Six seconds this time, which meant he was actually thinking.

"So find her," Tola said.

"I don't know her last name."

"You know her first name. You know she's here with friends. You know what she looks like." He spread his hands. "Desmond. The island is small."

Desmond thought about this. About whether she'd left before sunrise specifically because she didn't want to be found. Whether respecting what she'd done meant letting it be what it was.

He spent two days not looking.

On the third day, he happened to see her.

She was at the beach cafe with her two companions, the quieter one who had been observing him closely like someone conducting an internal evaluation, and the boisterous one wearing the yellow dress he recognized from the bar.

Catherine had her back to him, barefoot, one leg folded under her on the bench, laughing at something the loud friend had said with her whole face not the careful measured version from the bar, this one reached her eyes and stayed there and he stopped walking.

Just for a second.

Just long enough to understand that whatever he'd felt at the bar, looking at her now in broad daylight with nothing between them, was not smaller than it had been. Useful information. Inconvenient, but useful.

The loud friend saw him first.

Her expression went through several stages before she said something to Catherine, and Catherine turned, and they looked at each other across the cafe terrace in the full honest light of the Zanzibar morning.

She didn't look away. He'd half expected her to.

He went over because he had made the decision to avoid looking two days prior. He had succeeded in doing so, but it hadn't stopped him from thinking about her, so obviously the plan needed to be modified. When he was close enough for just her to hear, he muttered, "You left."

"I know," she said. Direct. Not sorry, not defensive. Just acknowledging a thing that had happened.

"You could have woken me up."

"I know that too."

She kept her eyes fixed on him. "I didn't want to have the conversation that comes after waking someone up."

He gave her a brief glance.

The loud friend had stopped pretending not to listen. The quiet one was looking at her phone with visible effort.

"What conversation is that?"

"The one where you ask what this is," she replied, "and I don't have an answer, and we both feel worse than we would have if we'd just left it."

He considered this.

He believed it to be the most sincere thing someone had said to him in a long time. "All right," he replied. "All right?" I refuse to inquire as to what it is. Without being asked, he took a seat in the vacant chair at her table. "I will ask if I can buy you breakfast."

The loud friend made a sound like approval. Catherine looked at him the way she'd looked at him from across the bar the real look, the one she didn't soften and then something at the corner of her mouth moved.

"The coffee here is terrible," she said.

"I know. I had it yesterday." He flagged the server down. "I'm having it again anyway."

She watched him order. He could feel it and didn't make a thing of it.

What he didn't tell her what he filed away quietly, the way he filed things he needed to come back to was that he had three weeks left before his next project started, and right now he was in no hurry to go anywhere.

She left Zanzibar two days later. She shook his hand at the end of that breakfast like he was a business acquaintance, which made Ngozi visibly suppress a laugh, and he let her because she needed to. And because he had learned something in the last forty-eight hours about Catherine Adeyemi that he suspected she didn't fully know about herself yet.

She had given him her full name. It slipped out when Ngozi introduced them all properly at the end of the meal but it had, and he'd heard it, and he had a very good memory.

Catherine Adeyemi.

He sat with it for three weeks.

He was then allocated to the merger by his company.

On a Tuesday morning, the briefing document arrived in his email.

Eight pages, key contacts, corporate structure. He read the first two pages with his coffee and then turned to page three and stopped.

Adeyemi & Cole. Strategic Partners, Atlanta.

Senior Partner and founder: Catherine Adeyemi.

He read it twice. Set his coffee down. Read it a third time.

He was not a man who believed in signs, not technically he was an architect, he believed in structures and load-bearing walls and the way you could tell everything about what a building was trying to do by what it was willing to hold up. But sitting in his D.C. office on a Tuesday morning with Catherine Adeyemi's name in a briefing document for a merger he hadn't asked to be assigned to, the thought arrived anyway:

The universe, apparently, had opinions.

He picked up his coffee. Pulled up the project files.

Went to work.

Six weeks later, on the plane to Atlanta, he promised himself he would handle it professionally.

He told himself this twice more in the car to the office building, and once in the elevator on the way up, and then the boardroom door opened and she was standing at the head of the conference table in a dark blazer with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a document in one hand and the particular expression of a woman who has command of a room so completely she doesn't have to announce it.

She looked up.

She saw him.

Something moved across her face fast enough that he almost missed it. Almost. He'd spent six weeks thinking about the way things moved across her face, so he caught it.

The room had four other people in it. Nobody was watching them. He crossed to his side of the table and set his portfolio down and looked at her steadily, the way he'd looked at her from across a bar in Zanzibar, and let the corner of his mouth move.

She looked away first. Back to her document. Back to the room. Her voice, when she called the meeting to order, was perfectly level.

His wasn't rattled either. He was a professional. He knew how to function inside a room when something beneath its surface was enormous.

He just couldn't make himself care even slightly that she was here, in his merger, in his project, six weeks after Zanzibar.

He cared, actually. Quite a lot. In the direction of relief.

The most amazing thing to enter a boardroom in a long time was Catherine Adeyemi, seated four feet across a conference table with her reading glasses in her hair.

It was unclear if she would take any action.

He was already aware of his response.