In March, the Whitmore Foundation extended an offer to Mara for a second year. She called him when she got the news, and he could hear in her voice the same complex brightness he had heard in January of the previous year — the thing that was both joy and a bracing, the enormous thing held carefully.
She said: 'I don't know what to do.'
He said: 'What does the work need?'
She said: 'Another year. Or close to it. The piano piece — it wants to be something larger. I can see it but I can't reach it yet. I need more time.'
He said: 'Then you already know.'
A long pause. Then: 'And you?'
He thought for a while. He had been, in some part of himself, preparing for this possibility all winter. He had been sitting with the question of what he needed — not what he hoped for, not what he feared, but what he genuinely needed — and he had arrived, carefully and honestly, at an answer.
'I've been writing,' he said. 'The novel is almost done. I've been talking to an agent in New York. And I've been — thinking about what I want the next chapter to look like. I want to be where you are, Mara. Not because I can't manage here. I can manage here. But I've been doing the work I needed to do and I've arrived at the other end of it, and what I find on the other end is that I want my life to be in the same place as yours. If you want that.'
The silence was long enough that he was briefly afraid.
Then she said, in the voice she used for the truest things, quiet and clear and entirely certain: 'I want that. I have wanted that. I didn't let myself want it out loud because I didn't want to ask you to give anything up.'
'I'm not giving anything up,' he said. 'I'm going where I want to go. There's a difference.'
He heard her exhale. He heard, in the exhale, the shape of something resolving.
'Eliot,' she said.
'I know,' he said.