He told Mrs. Leighton over soup — lentil again, the same soup as the first conversation about Mara, which he did not think was a coincidence, because Mrs. Leighton did not do anything accidentally.
She listened to his account of the decision — the fellowship's extension, his resignation, the plan to move to New York in May — with the focused patience she brought to important things. When he finished she was quiet for a moment.
Then she said: 'You're sure?'
'Yes,' he said.
'You're not doing this because you can't imagine her not coming back to you?'
He considered this. It was the right question, the one that needed asking. 'I've thought about that,' he said. 'I've sat with it for months. And I think — no. I think I'm doing this because when I imagine the life I want, it includes her in it. Not as the only thing, not as the thing that makes me whole. But as — the person I want to be doing my life alongside. There's a difference.'
Mrs. Leighton looked at him for a long moment. She was seventy-two years old and she had been married for forty-one of them to a man who had died of cancer six years ago, and she knew the difference between doing something from fear and doing something from choice.
'Yes,' she said. 'There is.' She picked up her soup spoon. 'The apartment on the ground floor is going vacant next month, you know. If you need to sublet yours.'
'I'll keep that in mind,' he said.
'I'll miss you,' she said, plainly, without sentiment. 'You were a good neighbor.'
'You were a good neighbor first,' he said. 'The soup, specifically.'
She waved this off. 'Anyone would make soup,' she said. 'You ate it, which was the point.'
He would think about this, later, as a kind of thesis statement for what she had taught him, without meaning to, over three years of lentil soup and plain speech: the point is not the offering. The point is the receiving. Both require something. Both are a kind of courage.