She comes over on a Friday. This is what they do now, without having said that it is what they do — he calls or she calls, and they have dinner, and sometimes it is a restaurant and sometimes it is his apartment or hers, and there is no formal name for it and neither of them has used one.
Tonight it is his apartment. He makes dinner, which he is better at than she expected from a man who described his relationship with food as functional. He makes something simple — pasta, because it is reliable — and it is good, and she tells him so, and he says he read the recipe from a journal article about the Mediterranean diet, which she does not believe, and he does not clarify.
After dinner, they sit at the kitchen table with the second glasses of wine and the specific quality of a quiet evening between two people who have stopped needing to fill it.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"You always ask."
"This one is different."
He looks at her. She is very still. She has the quality she gets when she is about to say something she has been carrying for a while.
"Ask it," he says.
She looks at the wine glass. Then she looks at him. "Are you okay?"
He is quiet.
"I don't mean medically. I don't mean professionally. I mean—" She stops. She starts again. "You carry a lot. I've seen it. The way you go somewhere inside yourself when you think I'm not watching. The way you get very quiet after certain things." She is looking at him with those dark, still eyes. "I'm not asking you to tell me what it is. I'm asking whether you're carrying it okay."
He holds the wine glass. He is aware of all the things they have not said. He is aware of the board in her apartment and the coffee cup and the three months and the specific decision she has been not quite making for all of that time.
He is aware that she is not asking as a journalist right now.
"Some days better than others," he says.
"Yeah." She nods. "Yeah, me too."
She does not push. He does not elaborate. They sit with it — the honest, imprecise answer and the quiet that is not empty.
After a while she says: "I made a decision today."
"About what?"
She looks at him. Something in her face has the quality of something settled, something landed. "About a story I've been working on. A story I've been trying to figure out for months." She pauses. "I decided it's not ready. It might not ever be ready. And that's okay."
He does not move. He does not ask.
She looks at the table. "It's okay to know something and not be able to make it into a story," she says. "Sometimes knowing is enough. Sometimes knowing is what you have."
He thinks about the list. He thinks about the thirteen dates in the third column of the spreadsheet. He thinks about the woman standing at the corner of Lehigh Avenue outside a house that has the same bones and a different door.
He thinks: sometimes knowing is what you have.
He looks at Deborah. She is looking at the table, and her face has the quality of someone who made a hard decision and is sitting with its weight.
He reaches across the table. He puts his hand over hers.
She looks at his hand. She looks at him. Something in her face changes — not dramatic, not sudden. Quiet. Like something settling into its right place.
She turns her hand under his and holds it.
They sit at the kitchen table for a long time, not saying anything, while December does its thing outside — the cold, the lights, the city moving through the dark — and inside, in the amber lamp light, two people hold onto something they do not yet have words for but that both of them, separately and together, recognize as something they are not ready to let go of.
Outside, the city hums.
Inside, the tree lights glow, red and green and steady.