She was sitting up, sheet pulled loosely around her, hair disordered, watching me with that expression—the controlled one she deployed when she was working out whether she was going to be furious or simply done. She looked like a problem I’d created for myself with both hands and all my capacity for poor judgment, and she also looked like the most honest thing I’d seen in longer than I was prepared to calculate.
“It’s early,” I said.
It was a useless thing to say. She knew that. I knew that. The words landed in the space between us and immediately communicated their own inadequacy.
“I can see that,” she said. She watched me for a moment. Then: “This is what you do.”
“Sofia—”
“You show up.” Her voice didn’t rise. That was the thing about her anger—it didn’t climb, it deepened, took on density, became something you felt in your chest rather than your ears. “You show up and you—stay, and then you leave like you were never here. Like I’m a hotel room you had business in.” She paused. Her eyes were steady on mine. “And every time you do it, you expect me to close the door and say nothing about it.”
“I’m not good at this,” I said. It came out with less armor than I’d intended.
“I’m not asking you to be good at it.” The words arrived precisely, without heat, which made them worse. “I’m asking you to be honest about it. There’s a difference.” She tilted her head slightly, and something moved across her face that might have been exhaustion—not physical but the other kind, the kind that came from repeatedly extending something you couldn’t afford to keep extending. “Every time you walk out that door without saying anything real, you’re making a choice, Gregory. I’m just asking you to own it.”
I said nothing.
She got out of bed. She found her robe on the chair in the corner and put it on with her back to me, and the particular set of her shoulders communicated everything she was choosing not to say, which was considerable. Then she moved to the kitchen, and I heard the sound of water running, the quiet domestic percussion of a morning she was apparently going to proceed with regardless of whether I was in it.
I should have left then. That was the cleanest exit. She had given me the shape of an out—turned away, occupied herself—and I could have used it, and I didn’t, and I couldn’t fully account for why except that the thought of walking out of this apartment again with nothing resolved between us sat in my chest like something I wasn’t willing to swallow.
I came into the kitchen.
She was standing at the counter with both hands around a mug of water she was waiting to boil, staring at the wall with the expression of someone running a private calculation. She glanced at me when I moved into her peripheral vision. She didn’t tell me to leave.
“You want to know why I keep coming back,” I said.
“I want you to want to tell me,” she said. “There’s a difference there too.”
We stood in the six feet of kitchen tile between us, and I looked at her, and I thought:This woman is going to be the thing that breaks me, and she’s going to do it by telling the truth, which is the only way anyone has ever broken me in my life.
“I can’t explain it in a way that makes sense,” I said.
“Try.”
“I come back,” I said slowly, “because I can’t stay away. Because I’ve told myself to stay away, made the argument, used every reason I have, and I still end up at your door.” I paused. My jaw was tight. “I don’t have an explanation for that that reflects well on me.”
Something shifted in her face. Not softening exactly—she was too careful for softness right now—but a slight change in her expression.
“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me since we met,” she said.
“I know.”
She set her mug down. She turned to face me fully, and the morning light through the kitchen window found her face, and I made myself look at it—the dark circles under her eyes she hadn’t been sleeping enough to prevent—and I felt the weight of what I’d done to this woman.
“If you walk out of here right now without answering me,” she said, “I will never open this door again.
The answer I owed her was the one thing I couldn’t give her. I knew exactly why I kept coming back. I knew exactly what it would mean to say it out loud. And I knew what I’d already told Matvey—or hadn’t told him yet, because I’d been here instead of making that call—and the shape of those two things together was not something I could give her and then look at myself.
I chose silence.
I turned, and I walked out, and she let me go, and the sound of her door closing behind me was not loud. It was barely anything—a soft click, which somehow made it worse. A slam would have meant heat still burning. That click meant something else.
I walked the length of her corridor and pushed through the door to the stairs and went down them in the grey morning quiet, and I didn’t rush because rushing would have looked like escape, which it was, and I’d at least enough dignity left to do it with some composure.
On the street, I lit a cigarette.
I stood beside my car in the cold air, smoking it without tasting, while I looked at the front of her building and thought about the click of her door.