Chapter 26
Adrian was.
I stopped thinking about her.
That felt like its own freedom.
My life expanded in ordinary ways.
I became director of brand strategy at work.
Not because heartbreak transformed me into some unstoppable professional force.
Mostly because I had been doing good work for years and a position opened.
I took a trip to Maine with Emily.
I painted a watercolor of a lighthouse so ugly that Emily framed it as a joke.
Mrs. Alvarez continued bringing soup.
I finally learned how not to kill basil.
I bought a larger couch.
I hosted Thanksgiving in my apartment, squeezing eleven people around the oak table and borrowing folding chairs from neighbors.
After dinner, I looked around at the crowded room.
My father was telling the same story he told every year.
Emily was arguing with her husband about pie.
Mrs. Alvarez had somehow ended up invited and was criticizing my gravy.
Someone had spilled wine on the rug.
The windows were fogged from cooking.
It was perfect.
For years, I thought home was something you achieved by maintaining enough beautiful things.
The right neighborhood.
The view.
The furniture.
The rituals.
But home turned out to be simpler.
It was the place where I did not have to shrink my instincts to keep the peace.
A year and a half after I left Adrian, I began seeing someone.
His name was Daniel.
He was a civil engineer, divorced, father of a sixteen-year-old daughter, and completely unimpressed by my ability to analyze everyone's emotional subtext.
On our fourth date, he said, "You know you're allowed to ask what I mean instead of figuring it out yourself."
I laughed.
"You have no idea how threatening that is."
"I can take it."
He was not perfect.
Neither was I.
We disagreed.
Once, he canceled dinner because his daughter needed him, and I reacted more sharply than I should have because old abandonment fears appeared before reason.
Later, I apologized.
He did too, for communicating badly.
Then we talked.
No disappearing.
No punishment.
No one called the other's feelings drama.
I did not know whether Daniel and I would last forever.
For once, I did not need to know.
I cared more about whether I could remain myself while loving someone.
That was new.
Two years after the night I left Unit 2304, I returned to the marina for a completely ordinary reason.
Emily's company was hosting a small summer dinner at a seafood restaurant along the waterfront, and she asked me to come.