The Night Before

Theo came to her apartment on the tenth of August, the night before her self-surrender, and neither of them pretended it was an ordinary evening.

They didn't go out. He'd brought groceries, badly chosen, the way he always chose groceries, and they cooked together in the half-empty kitchen, most of her cookware already given away, working around the gaps with the particular improvised competence of two people who had learned, over the past year, that improvising honestly together was better than managing anything alone.

"I keep trying to think of something to say," Theo said, over the small, imperfect meal they'd made, "and everything I come up with sounds like a strategy. A way to make tonight land a certain way. I've spent enough time watching you build those to recognize when I'm doing it myself."

"Then don't say anything clever. Just say the plain thing."

He considered that for a long moment. "I don't know how to be without you for twenty-six months. I want to be honest about that, even though it's not romantic, even though it's not the kind of thing you say to someone the night before they go somewhere you can't follow. I've built an entire year of my life around figuring out how to be in a room with you honestly, and now I have to figure out how to be in the world without that room at all, for over two years, and I don't have a strategy for it. I just have the fact of it."

"You'll write."

"I'll write. I already know I will, the same way Jonah's already told you he will. I don't think either of us could stop ourselves at this point even if we wanted to." He looked at her across the small table, the apartment's bare walls holding the last of the evening light. "I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer honestly, even if the honest answer is one I don't want to hear. Do you want me to wait. Not because I'm asking permission, I've already decided I'm going to, whatever you say. I want to know if it's something you actually want, or if you're going to spend the next twenty-six months feeling guilty about it because some part of you still believes you don't deserve to have someone waiting."

Maren sat with the question a long time, the kind of long time she had learned, this year, not to rush past with a managed answer.

"I want it," she said, finally. "I want to tell you I don't need it, because some braver, cleaner version of the story would have me walk into that facility tomorrow asking nothing of anyone, needing nothing, complete on my own. That's not true. I want you to wait. I want the letters. I want, whatever's left of us on the other side of this, for it to still be something we're building. I've spent this whole year learning to want things plainly instead of strategically, and this is the plainest thing I've wanted in longer than I can remember."

Theo reached across the table and took her hand, and they sat like that for a long time, the small imperfect dinner going cold between them, the apartment's bare walls holding nothing now but the two of them and whatever came next, unmanaged, uncertain, and entirely, deliberately chosen.