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Home / Romance / The wife I forgot to love / Kabanata 121 - Kabanata 130

Lahat ng Kabanata ng The wife I forgot to love: Kabanata 121 - Kabanata 130

220 Kabanata

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty One The Reach

Adrian had known for a while.He had not said anything because saying it would require her to respond to it and she was not ready to respond to it and he was a person who understood the difference between the right time and the available time. He had learned that distinction early in his career. You could say a true thing at the wrong moment and the truth would not land the way truth was supposed to land. It would just sit there in the room between two people and make everything harder than it needed to be.So he had not said anything.He had been patient instead. Patient the way he was patient on set when a scene was not ready yet and pushing it would only break it. You waited. You stayed present. You gave the thing room to become what it needed to become. You did not force the becoming.He was good at not forcing things.He sat on Helena's sofa on a Tuesday evening. She was beside him reading. He had a book of his own open on his knee that he had stopped reading twenty minutes ago b

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Two A Good Evening

On a Thursday they had a good evening.It started with dinner at a place she had been meaning to try for three months. Adrian had suggested it two weeks ago and she had said yes immediately without checking anything which was unusual for her and she had noticed the unusualness of it and let it stand. They walked there because it was close enough to walk and the evening was the right temperature for walking. Not warm. Not cold. Just the particular temperature that made the city feel like itself.The restaurant was small and the tables were close together and the lighting was the kind that made everyone look slightly better than they did in daylight. They were given a table by the window. She ordered wine. He ordered the same without looking at the menu because he had seen what she ordered and made a decision. That was a small thing. She noticed it the way she noticed small things.Dinner was good.Not just the food. The conversation. It moved the way it moved when neither person was wo

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Two A Good Evening

On a Thursday they had a good evening.It started with dinner at a place she had been meaning to try for three months. Adrian had suggested it two weeks ago and she had said yes immediately without checking anything which was unusual for her and she had noticed the unusualness of it and let it stand. They walked there because it was close enough to walk and the evening was the right temperature for walking. Not warm. Not cold. Just the particular temperature that made the city feel like itself.The restaurant was small and the tables were close together and the lighting was the kind that made everyone look slightly better than they did in daylight. They were given a table by the window. She ordered wine. He ordered the same without looking at the menu because he had seen what she ordered and made a decision. That was a small thing. She noticed it the way she noticed small things.Dinner was good.Not just the food. The conversation. It moved the way it moved when neither person was wo

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Three The Thread

The next afternoon she was on the phone to her publicist when she remembered the Thursday evening.Not the dinner or the walk or the record. The thread. The fraction of herself that had not been entirely in the room. She had gone to sleep thinking about it and woken up with it already there and she had been carrying it all day like something in her coat pocket that she kept putting her hand on without meaning to.She finished the call. She made coffee. She stood at the kitchen counter and looked at the rosemary jar.She thought about where the thread was connected.She had been not looking at that question all morning. She was an honest person. She had made honesty a practice over the past two years because she had found that the cost of dishonesty with yourself was always higher than you thought it was going to be when you chose it. You ended up paying it later with interest. She had paid that interest for seven years.She sat down at the kitchen table.She followed the thread.It le

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Four Thursdays

She saw Eleanor at the market on a Saturday morning.She had not planned to. She had been there for bread and something for dinner and she had been moving through the stalls with the particular focus of someone who had a list and intended to stick to it when she turned a corner and Eleanor Graves was standing at the cheese counter with the expression she wore when she was deciding between two options she considered equally worth considering.Helena stopped.Eleanor looked up. Something in her face settled the particular way it settled when it saw something it was glad to see. Not surprise. Something warmer than surprise.She said Helena.Helena said Eleanor.They stood for a moment on the pavement outside the cheese counter with the market moving around them.Then Eleanor said come and help me decide between these two. Helena came and looked at the cheeses. She pointed at one. Eleanor said that is the one I was leaning toward. Helena said then trust the lean. Eleanor smiled and asked

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Five Almost Ready

On a Wednesday morning Helena sat in her apartment and did nothing for an hour.Not reading. Not working. Not on the phone. Not thinking about the next thing. Just sitting at her kitchen table with coffee that was still hot and the morning outside the window doing its ordinary Wednesday things.She had been learning to do this.It had taken most of two years. The first year she had not been able to sit still without the particular discomfort that said you should be doing something. That stillness was waste. That a person who was not moving was falling behind. She had filled every available space with work and calls and preparation and the constant forward motion of someone who had decided that motion was the same as progress.It was not the same as progress.She had learned that slowly. Through the documentary sessions with Sione when he would turn the camera off and ask a question and wait without filling the silence. Through the Thursday calls with Cassidy that sometimes ran out of

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Six Her Name At The Top

He dialled at eleven fifteen on a Tuesday night.He had been at his desk in the apartment since nine. Not working. He had been sitting at his desk the way he sat there sometimes when he needed to think in a space that felt like thinking rather than on the sofa or in the kitchen where the apartment's domestic textures got in the way of whatever he was trying to work through.He had been thinking about the photograph.He had been thinking about it all day. It lived on his desk now. The copy he had made of Eleanor's summer photograph. He had looked at it in the morning when he sat down and at lunchtime when he came back from a meeting and at eight in the evening when everyone else had left the floor and the office had gone quiet. He looked at it the way you looked at something that was asking a question you were not yet ready to answer.The girl near the water.Steady hands. Half turned face.He had known for three months. He had told Marcus. He had sat in Eleanor's garden and said the w

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Seven Five Years

They were at her apartment on a Friday evening when he asked.Not a planned question. Not something he had been building toward. They had been talking about something else entirely and there had been a natural pause and he had looked at her across the kitchen where she was making coffee and he had said it.He said what do you want your life to look like in five years.She looked at him.He said I am not asking about the career. He said I know what you want professionally. He said I mean the rest of it. The shape of it. What you actually want.She turned back to the coffee.She thought about it properly. Not the performance of thinking about it. Actually thinking about it. The kettle had boiled and she poured it and she thought about five years and what she actually wanted the shape of her life to be.She said I want to keep building things that are mine. She said I want the work to stay honest. She said I want Cassidy to be happy. She said I want to still be in the apartment or somewh

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Eight Not Thinking About Me

He called on a Sunday afternoon.She picked up and he said can I come over. She said yes. He was there in twenty minutes which meant he had been close when he called. She had thought about that after she put the phone down. He had been close and he had called first. That was Adrian. He always called first.She opened the door. He came in. He was not performing anything. He never performed anything. He stood in her apartment and looked at her and she could see in his face that he had been thinking about what he wanted to say and had decided how to say it and was going to say it.He said I want to say something.She said okay.He said you are not thinking about me when you look at your phone.She did not answer.He said I have known that for a while. He said I thought about not saying anything. He said I thought if I was patient enough the direction of it might shift. He said I have been patient. He said I do not think the direction is going to shift. He said I think I have known that f

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty Nine What She Wants

The morning after was a Monday.Helena woke at seven and lay in the dark for a while before she got up. Not because she was sad. Because she was sitting with something and sitting with something required stillness and the bed was where she had the most of that in the mornings.She thought about Adrian.She thought about him specifically and clearly and without the particular sideways quality that thinking about him had sometimes had in the past weeks when she had been approaching the truth from an angle. She thought about him directly. What he had been. What she had been grateful for. What it had cost him to say what he had said on Sunday and what it had cost her to receive it.He had been good to her.She had been good to him in the ways she had been able to be. She had not performed anything with him. She had not pretended to be more present than she was. She had been as honest as she had been capable of being given that she had not yet been fully honest with herself about the threa

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