Chapter 9: Six Weeks Later
Richard did not leave that night.
He did not leave the following week either, or the one after that.
He slept in the spare room for the first two weeks, and then the spare room door started staying open instead of closed, and by the fifth week Maya had noticed that her parents were sitting in the same room in the evenings again, not talking much, but present.
Maya had gone back to her flat three days after the kitchen.
She needed to.
She called Ethan every other day, and he always answered, and he talked about school and his football team and occasionally, with the careful precision of an eight-year-old who has decided something, he would report: "Mum and Dad ate dinner together tonight."
She did not ask Nicole to explain more.
Not yet.
She wasn't ready.
She was ready for something else.
Six weeks after the kitchen, Maya drove back to the house on a Saturday morning.
Her father was in the garden.
She went outside and sat in the other chair and they had coffee and said nothing useful for about twenty minutes, which was its own kind of useful.
"Has she decided?" Maya asked.
"Yes," Richard said.
"And?"
"She's not keeping it." He looked at his cup.
"She told me last week.
She'd already made the appointment."
Maya nodded.
"She told me she didn't want to make a decision about our marriage at the same time," Richard said.
"She said she needed one thing to be separate from the other."
"Is that okay with you?"
"I don't know yet." He looked at the garden.
"I think so.
I think it was the right order to do it in."
"How are you doing?" Maya asked.
He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
"Some days I'm very angry," he said.
"Some days I'm just tired.
Some days I look at her and I see twenty-two years and I can't quite make the arithmetic add up to the thing she did." He paused.
"The anger comes in waves.
I think that's probably normal."
"Are you two talking?"
"More than we were." He turned the cup in his hands.
"She's been honest.
I'll give her that.
Since that night, she's been honest about everything I've asked.
I haven't always wanted to know the answers.
But she's given them."
"That matters," Maya said.
"Yes," he said.
"It matters."
They sat for a while longer.
"What about Diane?" Maya asked.
"Diane's good," Richard said, and there was something that was almost pride in his voice.
"The papers went through last week.
Paul's contesting the terms — the house, primarily — but her solicitor is thorough.
Diane says he's already backed down on two things." He set his cup down.
"She came for dinner on Thursday."
"With you and Mum?"
"Yes."
Maya was quiet for a moment.
"How was that?"
"Difficult," Richard said.
"And important." He looked over at her.
"Diane said something.
She said she wasn't ready to forgive Nicole, but she wasn't willing to lose her sister.
She said those are two separate things that can coexist."
"She's right," Maya said.
"I thought you'd say that." He looked back at the garden.
"I've been thinking about it too.
Whether it's possible." A pause.
"Whether they're two separate things."
Maya let that sit.
"For what it's worth," she said after a moment, "the mum I grew up with is still in there.
She did something terrible.
And she's still the mum I grew up with.
I don't know what to do with that yet, but they're both true."
"Yes," Richard said.
"They are."
The back door opened.
Nicole came out with a third cup of coffee.
She set it beside Maya on the table.
She didn't stay.
She went back inside without asking anything or expecting anything, and the door closed quietly behind her.
Maya looked at the cup.
May you like
She picked it up.
It was made exactly the way she liked it.
