Chapter 6 — What I Chose

DAVID'S POV

Nina made pancakes on a Saturday morning.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table watching her move around the kitchen and thinking — this is what I wanted, this is exactly what I chose.

A woman who is active and intentional about my feelings.  She was warm and present and real in a way that Lydia, with her late nights and her case files and her world that always seemed  more important than the one we shared.

I picked up my fork and ate and told myself  “I am happy right?”. I muttered to myself.

The pancakes were good.

She moved in three weeks after Lydia left.

Not at once. She was intentional about her moving in-- gradually, quietly, so smoothly that by the time I noticed it was already done. A bag here, a toiletry there, a set of hangers in the closet that weren't mine, her shoes by the front door, her products on the bathroom shelf.

One morning I woke up and she was there, fully settled. Like the space had been waiting for her.

I told myself it felt right, I don’t need Lydia anymore.

 Nina was easy to be around.

That was the word I kept coming back to. She was easy. No arguments, no late nights, no awkward space between us like we were strangers.. Nina laughed at my stories, Nina asked about my day and waited for my response. Nina was there when I got home and there when I woke up. I was grateful for her presence.

I had forgotten what easy felt like.

What I didn't let myself think about —was that being easy wasn't the same as right, a woman being present wasn't the same as a woman being the right one. That filling a space wasn't the same as belonging in it.

I didn't let myself think about any of that.

I was too busy being grateful for the pancakes.

Work was the one place nothing had changed.

Cole and Associates ran the way it always ran. Projects, deadlines, site visits. An architecture firm that had built its reputation on precision and delivery.  I threw myself into the work rhythm, the way I always had when the rest of life got complicated .

My assistant Marcus noticed before anyone else.

"You good?" he asked one afternoon, dropping a file on my desk.

"Yea, fine," I said without looking up.

He stood there for a second.

"Marcus?"

"Nothing," he said. "You just look like a man who's trying very hard to look fine."

I looked up at him.

He picked up his coffee and left.

I looked back at my work.

Marcus was twenty six years old and already too perceptive for his own age.

The first time I called Lydia was three weeks after she left.

It was the normal thing to do, there were things that needed sorting. The joint account, the insurance, small administrative threads that a divorce left hanging. I had real reasons to call.

I called at seven in the evening. It rang four times and went to voicemail, her voice on the recording was professional and clean

“You have reached Lydia Cole, please leave a message”, I sat there listening to it and said nothing for a long moment before I hung up.

I called again the next evening.

Voicemail.  And the next day, another voicemail.

I stopped calling after that, not because I didn't want to. Because I understood she wasn't going to pick up and calling a woman who wasn't answering was something I refused to become.

But the craving didn't stop, that was the part I hadn't planned for.

Nina found me one night standing in the doorway of the bedroom closet.

I don't know how long I had been standing there, long enough that she had noticed I was gone from the living room. I was just standing there with the door open looking at the left side. Lydia's side. It was empty now. Nina's things were there instead, neat and arranged, taking up exactly the same space.

"David." Nina's voice was soft behind me. "Come to bed baby." She said stroking the back of my neck with her fingers.

I closed the closet, turned around.

She was standing in the bedroom doorway in the low light, her hair loose, her face warm, I told myself, this was what I wanted.

The warmth her presence brings.  My old school crush, all to myself. I should be excited.

I crossed the room and got into bed.

Nina curled against my side the way she always did--familiar, her finger tips crawling through my stomach all the way to my bare chest. I wasn’t ready for what she wanted tonight. Probably the stress from the day, nothing else.

 “Hey babe, can…can we do this another night?”  I stuttered.

Her face shifted. “What’s the problem, Dave?” She stared at me, confused.

“Nothing, I…I am just tired tonight, long day at work” I said.

She wasn’t buying that--her face told me what her mind whispered. She didn’t say a word, just laid on my chest and slept off.  Her breathing slowed.

Mine didn't.

I lay there and stared at the ceiling and in the quiet of that room with Nina asleep against me, I let myself think about Lydia again.

I thought about the way she laughed when something actually caught her off guard. The way she looked in the mornings before she was fully awake. The way she said my name when she was happy, how she attached so much emotions calling my name.

I thought about the anniversary dinner.

The white dress.

The way she had looked at me across the table before I destroyed everything.

Nina shifted against me in her sleep and made a small sound and I looked down at her and felt what I had been pushing down for weeks rise up anyway, clear, cold and impossible to ignore.

I had made a mistake.

I closed my eyes.

Told myself it was just the adjustment. It’s change and I would get used to it.

I told myself I was fine.

In the midst of the conflict going on in my head, I wondered if Lydia was sleeping.

I wondered if she was okay.

Nina's arm tightened across my chest in her sleep.

I didn't move.

I just lay there with a question I wish I never had to ask myself.

“What have I done?”.