Dorothy answered the phone with Celia’s name spoken as a question.
For a moment, Celia was back outside their old apartment on an ordinary afternoon, carrying too many shopping bags, with Dorothy calling to ask whether she was eating properly while Quentin was away. There had been years of those calls. Dorothy knew which fruit Celia hated and which television programs she watched while pretending to fold laundry. There was no way to tell her this as though she were a distant relative who had missed an announcement.
“Have you spoken to Quentin?” Celia asked.
“Last night.”
“Then you know.”
“I know what he told me.” Dorothy’s voice was stiff. “I’d like to hear you say it.”
Celia sat down. Nell lay in her bassinet beside the couch, kicking at the air under the blanket. Rain ticked against the window.
“I have a daughter. Quentin is her father. Her name is Nell, and she was born in August.”
There was a small sound at the other end. Dorothy might have been setting down her cup. Celia knew the cup she would be using at this hour, the wide one with the chipped handle that nobody could persuade her to replace.
“August fourteenth,” Dorothy said.
“Yes.”
“He said he saw her.”
“On the call. She’s here with me now.”
“May I?”
Celia changed to video and waited while Dorothy found the button. Her face appeared too close, then retreated. She was in her kitchen with a tea towel over one shoulder. Her hair had grown longer since January; she kept pushing it behind her ear.
Celia angled the phone toward Nell. The baby turned at the movement, fists opening and closing against the pink sleeves of her sleeper.
“Oh,” Dorothy said.
Nothing else came. Celia held the phone until her arm ached. Nell became displeased with the arrangement and made a noise that gathered force by the second.
“I’ll pick her up.”
She set the phone on the shelf, lifted Nell and came back into view. Dorothy had a hand over her mouth. When she lowered it, her face was wet.
“She’s got your eyes,” she said.
Celia tried to smile. “People keep changing their minds.”
“Babies do change.” Dorothy wiped beneath her nose. “I remember Quentin looking like my father one day and a small furious policeman the next.”
Celia laughed, a startled sound that made the baby blink. Then Dorothy looked at her directly.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The laugh left a miserable space behind it.
“I didn’t tell Quentin. I knew if I told you, you couldn’t keep it from him.”
“No. I couldn’t have.”
“I was afraid at first. Then I kept waiting for a time when it would be easier.”
Dorothy looked down at something on the table. Her hands moved together, rubbing one thumb over the other.
“I sent you a message in September,” she said. “You told me you were settling in.”
“I was.”
“Celia.”
“I know. That’s what I said instead.”
Nell twisted toward the brightness of the window. Celia shifted her onto her other arm. She wanted the baby to settle so she could concentrate; she wanted the baby to cry so she would have a reason to stop.
“Did you think I would stop loving you?” Dorothy asked.
It was so much worse than an accusation. Celia looked at the tea towel, the familiar cupboard handle behind Dorothy’s head, and felt the room she had shut herself out of.
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Because of what Quentin did?”
“Because you’re his mother.”
Dorothy’s mouth trembled. She pressed it closed, and Celia could see the effort it took to leave the silence unfilled.
“I am,” Dorothy said eventually. “I’m not going to stop being that.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.”
“You didn’t ask me anything.”
Celia held Nell closer. That was true, in a way none of her explanations could make less true. She had imagined Dorothy’s loyalties as a door already shut and saved herself the sound of it closing.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You should have had the chance to know her.”
“I would have come.” Dorothy looked at the baby. “I’d have brought food. Too much of it. I’d have worried and irritated you. You could have told me to go home.”
It broke something small and stubborn in Celia. “I know.”
“Well.” Dorothy breathed in, shakily. “I don’t know what to do with all this today.”
“You don’t have to do anything for me.”
“I wasn’t offering.”
The bluntness stung. Celia nodded. She had been about to make Dorothy’s anger easier too, to turn it into another task at which she could be useful. Instead she stroked Nell’s back and waited.
After a while Dorothy asked whether the baby slept. Whether Celia had been alone at the birth. Had she been frightened? The last question she asked while looking away, as though it had slipped out without permission.
“Yes,” Celia said. “But Ruth was there. She was wonderful.”
“Good.” Dorothy nodded twice. “Good.”
Celia told her a little about Nell. The noise she made before she laughed. Her dislike of being put into a coat. The way her whole body went still when she heard running water. Ordinary things, nearly nothing, suddenly difficult to surrender to a person who would cherish them.
“I’ve got photographs,” Celia said. “I’d like to send you some. If you want them.”
Dorothy’s eyes came back to the screen. “Of course I want them.”
“And a visit. Quentin’s coming next Sunday. Perhaps after that, once we’ve—”
She stopped. They had not even reached the visit and already she was delaying Dorothy behind a condition.
“You could come the following week,” she said. “We can choose a day. You don’t need to wait for him to arrange it.”
“I’ll have to look at my calendar.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Don’t sound as though you think that means no.” Dorothy reached for the tea towel and wiped her hands, though they were not wet. “I need to look at it. I have things now. A walking group. The charity shop on Wednesdays.”
“I’m glad.”
“I didn’t know what else to do with retirement.” A pause. “I do now, apparently.”
There was hurt in it, but there was humor too. Celia did not take either as permission to rush ahead.
They chose December 18. Dorothy would come for an hour in the morning, bringing nothing unless she wanted to. At the end of the call she asked to see Nell once more. Celia moved the phone closer, and Dorothy said, with a steadiness that cost her something, “Hello, sweetheart. I’m your grandmother.”
Nell looked beyond the screen, captivated by a patch of pale light on the wall. Dorothy smiled anyway.
By evening Celia had sent six photographs and twice stopped herself from sending a seventh. She had wanted to choose the prettiest ones, the ones in which nobody looked tired. Then she’d included one of Nell asleep on Ruth’s shoulder with a dish towel draped over her sister’s knees and washing drying behind them. Dorothy had answered that one first.
Thank you. Please tell Ruth thank you too.
Celia was reading it again when Adrian arrived. He came in out of the rain, shook water off his coat in the hall and immediately stepped in the tiny puddle he had made.
“Elegant,” Celia said.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t see that.”
He held up a bag of mushrooms. She looked at him, then at the bag.
“You said you had everything else.”
“I do. I just enjoy a man appearing on my doorstep with fungus.”
“I could have brought wine.”
“Then I’d have had to send you back.”
He kissed her, one hand briefly cupping her cheek, and went to wash his hands. Celia watched him roll his sleeves before she joined him. The ordinary hunger to touch him remained, even through a day she had spent feeling like a particularly disappointing person.
They made dinner badly. Adrian cut the mushrooms too thick; Celia turned the heat up to compensate and burnt the first piece of garlic. Nell objected to being placed where she could not see either of them. They moved her bouncer beside the doorway and carried on, taking turns showing her spoons.
At the table, Adrian tried the pasta and said, “That is mostly pepper.”
“You put it in.”
“I thought the top twisted.”
“It does.”
“It also comes off.”
Celia took a sip of water and started laughing. She was still laughing when her eyes filled. Adrian set down his fork.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just—”
He waited.
“She was kind. Dorothy. And she was furious. I think she was trying very hard not to be more furious.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“For her, yes.”
“For you too.”
Celia pushed a mushroom around her plate. The room smelled of burnt garlic. Adrian’s foot rested beside hers under the table, close enough that she could feel the warmth through her sock.
“I miss her,” she admitted. “I hadn’t let myself say that. It made leaving sound like a mistake.”
“Was she part of the reason you stayed?”
“Sometimes. Their kitchen. Family lunches. Somebody keeping the last bit of something because I liked it. I didn’t grow up with much family left by the time I met Quentin.”
Adrian nodded. He didn’t look jealous, but she saw him working to find something to say that would not diminish it.
“You don’t have to compete with that,” she said.
“I wasn’t planning to. Their lunches sound organized. Ours involved my father saying we’d run out of potatoes while holding the bowl.”
She smiled. “I wish I’d known him.”
“He’d have liked you.” Adrian shook his head. “He’d have fed you. Liking you would have happened while you ate.”
She reached across the table and took his hand. A sadness passed between them that belonged to neither one exclusively. He turned his palm up beneath hers.
After dinner they walked downstairs with Nell, not for exercise or fresh air, but because she would not settle and Celia needed to move. The rain had stopped. The pavement shone beneath the streetlamps. Adrian carried the baby inside his open coat while Celia pushed the empty stroller, a piece of nonsense that would have looked extravagant to anyone who didn’t know its necessity.
“She’s very comfortable,” he said after half a block.
“You’re warm.”
“I’m useful.”
Celia glanced at him. He was smiling faintly, not seeking reassurance. She slipped her hand through his arm.
At the corner a bakery was closing. The woman inside turned the sign and recognized Celia through the glass, lifting her hand. Celia lifted hers back. A year ago she would have been walking home to a man who did not know he would leave her. Tonight there was no clean division between loss and happiness. Dorothy was hurt, Quentin was coming, the baby needed another layer, and Adrian had fallen quiet because Nell had closed her hand around the front of his shirt.
“Come on,” Celia said softly. “Let’s get you both home.”
Upstairs she set the kettle on while he took off his coat. Nell slept at last. Adrian lowered her into the bassinet with such elaborate slowness that Celia had to turn away to hide her smile.
“Don’t,” he whispered without looking at her.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You breathed sarcastically.”
She went to him. They stood beside the sleeping baby, her arm around his waist, his mouth brushing her temple. This time the tenderness did not ask her to be less sad. She stayed there until the kettle clicked off, then a little longer.