All Chapters of Go Away Chris : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Chris's POVI saw them on a Sunday afternoon in June and I was not prepared for it, which I should have been because the city was not large and their lives overlapped with mine through Iris and through the gallery network and through the specific way that unavoidable things eventually make themselves unavoidable.I was in the park with Iris on one of her weeks with me, which had become one of the things I looked forward to most in a life that had reorganized itself considerably in the preceding year. The park on a Sunday had a particular quality, families and couples and individuals with dogs and the general atmosphere of a city allowing itself a day without agenda, and Iris and I had settled into a Sunday park routine that involved the pond at the north end and then the small café on the east side where she was permitted one of the small iced biscuits they sold in a jar on the counter and which she had decided were the single most important food item available to humanity.We were at

Ayesha's POVThe opening night of Fault Lines began at seven and by half past the gallery was full in a way that was different from any previous fullness I had experienced in that space, not simply full of bodies but full of the specific quality of attention that serious work produced in serious people, the collective stillness of a room where something real was happening on the walls and everyone present could feel it.Diana arrived at five past seven, which was later than I had expected and exactly when she had planned to arrive, wearing something dark and architectural that suited her the way everything Diana wore suited her, as though her clothes understood who she was and organized themselves accordingly. She walked through the rooms once, slowly, with the expression she wore when she was seeing her own work in context for the first time, the specific complicated face of an artist encountering what she has made from outside rather than inside the making of it. When she came back

Ayesha's POVThe first person I told was my mother and I told her the same day, in the afternoon, because some news belonged to certain people before it belonged to the world and my mother was the person who had always occupied that particular position in my life, the first recipient of anything that mattered, the one whose response I needed before I could fully understand what I felt about a thing myself.I drove to her house with the ring on my finger and the specific warm awareness of it that a new ring produces in the hours after it arrives, that occasional catching of light at the edge of your vision that keeps reminding you that something has changed in the most visible and permanent way. I had looked at it eleven times before leaving the apartment, which I counted with the particular self-awareness of a woman who understood she was behaving in a way that was entirely unlike her usual composure and was finding that she did not mind at all.My mother opened the door before I knoc

Ayesha's POVTelling Iris about the engagement required more thought than telling any adult, not because I was uncertain about the engagement itself but because I wanted to give Iris information that was true in a form that was manageable for a two year old who was beginning to understand that the world had a structure and who had opinions about changes to that structure that deserved to be respected.I had talked to Chris first, which was the right order of things, because Iris moved between two homes and whatever I told her in one would travel immediately and without editing to the other, which meant that Chris deserved to know before Iris did rather than hearing it from his two year old daughter over building blocks on a Wednesday morning.I called him on a Sunday evening and told him directly and simply, the same way I tried to do everything with Chris now, which was with the minimum necessary words and the maximum available honesty. He was quiet for a moment after I told him, the

Chris's POVThe wedding invitation arrived on a morning in February, a clean white envelope addressed to me in Ayesha's handwriting, and I held it in my hands for a moment before opening it the way you hold something you know is significant before you look at what it contains.It was simple and considered, which was entirely consistent with her, with a date in late April and a venue I recognised from the Azul building network as a space that had been used for significant creative events in the city for several years and that had in its architecture the specific quality of a place built for real things rather than decorative ones.Ken Adler's name was beside hers on the card.I put the invitation on the kitchen counter of the apartment I had bought the previous autumn, the one with the second bedroom that was Iris's on the alternating weeks, and I stood at the counter and looked at it for a while in the morning light. The kitchen was mine in the current tense in a way the mansion had n