Chapter 43
They moved into a proper apartment in January, in a building in Kingston that Nia had vetted with the particular rigorousness she brought to all spatial decisions checking not just the rooms but the light at different times of day, the ventilation, the neighbours' relationship with noise, the accessibility of the market and the school where Marcus worked.
'You are the most thorough person I know,' Marcus told her, standing in the centre of the empty living room on moving-in day.
'You're marrying me,' she said, measuring a window for curtains. 'You knew this.'
'I'm already married to you.'
'Then stop being surprised.'
He was never surprised, actually. He was regularly delighted.
The apartment had two bedrooms and a small study where Marcus's books accumulated at a rate that caused Nia to institute a rule about new books requiring the removal of old books, a rule he agreed to and violated consistently.
She had a drafting table in the corner of the living room where she worked on projects proposals, drawings, the occasional freelance design commission she took alongside her core work at an architecture firm. In the mornings, before he left for school, he would make two coffees and bring one to her at the table, and they would sit in the early light for ten minutes before the day pulled them in its separate directions.
This was the small thing he was most grateful for: those ten minutes. He had understood, from watching his mother, that a life was built in the small things the steady ones, the ones that happened without ceremony every day. The ten minutes were steady. They were the ground.
Leroy visited regularly. Sandra came and the four of them cooked and argued and talked, which was the shape of their friendship. Priya called every Sunday, still. Tunde called when he had something to share.
His mother came every third Sunday for dinner and Nia cooked and his mother ate and asked specific questions and was satisfied not in the conditional way of someone waiting to be proved wrong but in the genuine way of someone who had known what she was hoping for and was watching it be true.
He was twenty-three years old and building a life, deliberately, from the inside out.