Chapter 10: What Fourteen Years Actually Looks Like
Three months later, Pam came for dinner.
She'd been asking to visit since everything happened, and I'd kept putting her off until I felt like there was something worth showing her.
Not a performance.
Just something real.
She arrived with wine and the particular energy of a woman who had been holding back questions for ninety days and was now considering letting a few of them out.
Grant made dinner.
He'd been doing that on Thursdays.
It had started as a practical thing — I had a late work call on Thursdays, and he'd started cooking so there was food when I got home.
The first time he'd done it I'd stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment longer than necessary.
He'd made pasta.
Nothing complicated.
But he'd made it.
Tonight he made roast chicken with vegetables, which he'd looked up on his phone and followed step by step, texting me twice to ask questions I answered from my desk.
Pam sat at the kitchen island while he finished plating and watched him with an expression I recognized as cautious approval.
"This looks good," she said.
"It's the second time I've made it," Grant said.
"The first one was drier."
"He's not wrong," I said.
"The first one was dry."
"She told me while she was eating it," Grant said.
"Which I deserved."
Pam looked between us.
"You seem different," she said.
"We are different," I said.
"Good different?"
Grant set a plate in front of her.
"Ask me in another three months."
"That's honest," Pam said.
"We're working on honest," I said.
Dinner was easy in the way that things are easy when the hard work has already been done somewhere else.
We talked about Pam's job and a trip she was planning and a book I'd read that she wanted to borrow.
Grant cleared the plates when we were done and loaded the dishwasher — all the way, not just to the sink — and brought out the dessert I'd made without being asked to announce it.
Pam caught my eye across the table.
I gave her a small nod.
After dinner, while Grant was in the other room, she leaned toward me.
"How are you?
Really."
"Really?" I thought about it.
"Better.
Not perfect.
But better."
"Do you trust him?"
"More than I did three months ago.
Less than I did before the kitchen conversation." I picked up my wine glass.
"Which is probably where I should have been all along."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I trusted the version of him I wanted to see.
And he trusted the version of me that would keep managing everything without needing anything back." I set the glass down.
"We were both comfortable in a way that wasn't actually comfortable."
Pam was quiet for a moment.
"That's very grown-up of you."
"Dr.
Voss gets the credit."
Grant came back in and sat down.
He looked at Pam, then at me, with the slightly uncertain expression of a man who knew he was being discussed and was choosing to sit down anyway.
"Good talk?" he said.
"Excellent talk," Pam said.
He nodded.
"Good."
He reached over and refilled my wine glass without being asked.
Pam watched him do it.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't need to.
Later, after she left, Grant and I stood in the kitchen doing the last of the cleanup.
The radio was on low.
The window over the sink was dark.
"She approves," I said.
"I know.
She stopped looking at me like I was a problem to be solved around the chicken."
I laughed.
He handed me the dish towel.
"Are we okay?" he asked.
I dried the last glass and set it on the shelf.
"We're getting there," I said.
He leaned over and kissed the side of my head.
Not a grand gesture.
Just a quiet, ordinary thing.
The kind of thing that only means something after you've almost lost it.
I hung the dish towel on the oven handle.
He turned off the kitchen light.
We went upstairs together.
---
Some relationships don't end with a dramatic goodbye — they almost end with silence, with small things ignored for too long, with two people forgetting to actually see each other.
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