The space between trying

Alexandria’s POV

Two weeks after the scan, Jamie started leaving work before seven.

I noticed the first time because I was in the middle of making dinner and wasn’t expecting him and the sound of his car caught me off guard enough that I burned the onions. The second time I was ready for it. The third time I stopped counting because I didn’t want to track it like evidence. That was the old way of living in this house — cataloging everything, building cases, filing grievances in careful mental folders. I was trying not to do that anymore.

It didn’t always work.

The pregnancy was making itself known in new ways every few days, like it had a checklist of symptoms it was working through methodically. The nausea was tapering but the tiredness had arrived to replace it, a deep bone-level exhaustion that hit at around three in the afternoon and turned everything slightly underwater. I’d started napping, which I hadn’t done since I was a child, and I’d wake up disoriented in the guest room with the afternoon light gone orange and the house quiet around me.

I was still in the guest room.

Jamie hadn’t asked about that. Hadn’t made it a point of discussion or pressure. I’d moved back into the main bedroom for two nights after the anniversary and then migrated back without explanation and he’d simply let it be, which was either respect or strategy and I hadn’t decided which yet.

Some days I thought I was being fair to both of us.

Other days I thought I was punishing him and disguising it as self-protection.

Probably both.

He knocked on the guest room door on a Thursday evening.

“Come in,” I said.

He opened the door and leaned against the frame in that way he’d developed lately of not fully entering a space unless invited, which was new behavior and still slightly strange to witness on a man who used to move through every room like he owned it. He did own it, technically. But that wasn’t the point.

“Elaine’s off tomorrow,” he said.

“I know. Her daughter’s birthday.”

“I was going to cook.”

I looked up from the book in my lap. “You were going to cook.”

“I can cook,” he said, mildly defensive.

“I’ve never once seen you cook.”

“You’ve never been looking at the right time.” He crossed his arms. “I make eggs. And one pasta.”

“Which pasta?”

“The simple one. Garlic, olive oil, parmesan.”

Aglio e olio. I almost smiled. “Okay.”

“Okay you’ll eat it or okay you believe I can make it?”

“Both,” I said. “Tentatively.”

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Adjacent to one. He pushed off the door frame.

“Eight o’clock,” he said.

“I’ll be there.”

He left. I looked at the door he’d pulled mostly closed behind him and turned the interaction over in my mind. It was such a small thing. Knocking. Asking. Giving me an out if I wanted it. Three months ago he would have texted an instruction and expected execution.

Three months ago I would have been the one standing at the stove.

He could, in fact, cook.

Not elaborately, not with any particular flair, but the pasta was good in the simple way that food made with decent ingredients and real attention tends to be good. He’d set the island with actual placemats, which was either Elaine’s influence or a conscious decision, and there was bread and olive oil and water already out when I came downstairs.

We ate without the evening news on, without his phone face-up between us, without any of the ambient noise he used to fill silences with to avoid having to sit in them.

“How was therapy,” I said.

He considered the question in the way he’d started considering things — actually thinking before answering instead of producing the most efficient response available.

“He asked me about my father today,” he said.

I kept my expression neutral because this was information I needed to receive carefully. Jamie did not talk about his father. Not to me, not to anyone that I’d ever heard. Marcus Grayson was a fact in Jamie’s biography the way a scar was a fact on skin — present, permanent, not discussed.

“And?” I said.

“And I talked about him.” He broke a piece of bread. “For about forty minutes apparently. I lost track of time.”

“Was that—”

“Terrible,” he said. “And probably necessary.” He looked at the bread in his hand. “He used to—” A pause. Long enough that I thought he’d decided not to continue. “He used to leave. Not permanently. He’d just disappear for days and come back like nothing had happened and my mother would rearrange herself around his return every time. Smooth everything down. Make it normal.”

I was very still.

“I watched her do that my whole childhood,” he said. “Rearrange. Accommodate. Disappear pieces of herself so there was room for him.”

He set the bread down.

“The therapist thinks I married someone I could have that kind of control over,” he said. “Replicating something familiar.” He finally looked at me. “He was fairly direct about it.”

“Good therapist,” I said quietly.

“Expensive one,” he said, which was the closest Jamie got to deflecting with humor. Then, more seriously, “I don’t want to be my father, Alexandria.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m not sure that’s enough.”

“It’s a start,” I said. “Knowing what you don’t want to be is the first part. The second part is the work.”

He nodded slowly. We ate for a while in the comfortable quiet that had started appearing between us occasionally, different from the old silences that used to cost me something. This one was just two people in a kitchen with food between them and a lot of history and somewhere at the bottom of it all something that hadn’t finished deciding what it was.

“Can I ask you something,” he said.

“You can ask.”

“Are you happy. Right now. Not about us, not the big question. Just — today. This week. Are you okay.”

I thought about it genuinely. The tiredness, the nausea, the suitcase still packed in the closet that I hadn’t unpacked but also hadn’t moved toward the door again. The garden in the mornings. The book. Kendrick’s voice on the phone saying I’m on your side. The scan photo in my bedside drawer that I looked at every night.

“I’m getting there,” I said.

He looked at me across the island.

“That’s enough,” he said. “For now, that’s enough.”

And the strange thing was I believed he meant it.

That was the part that kept catching me off guard — not the gestures, not the therapy, not even the pasta. Just the moments when Jamie said something and it landed true and I couldn’t find the angle in it no matter how hard I looked.

Those moments were becoming harder to dismiss.

I wasn’t sure yet if that was hope or just exhaustion.

Maybe at this point they felt the same.