On December 2, Celia arrived at the depot with a sleeping baby, a revised route, and no intention of staying to hear Adrian explain himself in front of other people.
His voice reached her before she saw him.
“We aren’t taking the bus on Thursday.”
The little office door stood open. Gavin was inside, his coat still on, a rolled display plan braced against his knee. Adrian stood beside the desk. There was nothing furtive about the meeting; Imogen had asked Celia to bring her proposal at ten. But Celia stopped on the other side of the doorway, one hand resting on Nell’s stroller.
“The invitations are out,” Gavin said.
“I know.”
“And the space is booked for the entire installation. We can change the display, but we can’t pretend this is a small adjustment.”
Adrian rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I’m not pretending. I authorized something we didn’t have permission to offer. You’ll have to tell the venue that.”
“I have to tell the venue?”
“No. I do. You have to find something else to put there.” He glanced toward the door, saw Celia, and straightened. “Hello.”
She had imagined several versions of seeing him. In one she was gloriously composed. In another she asked whether he had missed her, which was humiliating because she already knew the answer she wanted. Instead she said, “Imogen asked for these,” and lifted the papers.
“She’s in the bus,” Gavin said. His politeness did not hide his irritation. Celia could not blame him for being annoyed at the loss of a thing his employer had told him he could have.
“I’ll find her.”
“Celia,” Adrian said.
She waited.
“The original two hours on Sunday are still a request. If Imogen wants to pull that too, she can. I have told Gavin.”
He looked as tired as she felt. His hair needed cutting at the back, and there was a pale mark on his chin where he had missed some shaving cream. She loved him so abruptly that it seemed almost an aggravation. It would have been convenient to stop wanting him while she was angry.
“I’m glad,” she said.
Then she took the stroller down the ramp to the bus.
Inside, the heater had made the windows opaque. Imogen was crouched beside the returns box, extracting a picture book with a jammed corner. She accepted Celia’s papers without standing.
“Two school stops,” she read. “Collection pickup at the community center.”
“The third school can send their requests over in a crate. Their aide offered. I checked that she meant once a week, not whenever I need something.”
Imogen raised her eyes.
“I know.” Celia unfastened her coat. “I heard myself.”
“Good. I’m getting tired of being the only unpleasant person in the room.”
“You enjoy it a little.”
“Only when I’m very well rested.”
Nell woke with a small indignant breath. Celia lifted her from the stroller and sat on the bench seat while Imogen moved beside her with the pages. Nell’s warm weight settled against Celia’s chest. There were mornings when she could still scarcely believe that she was allowed to carry this person everywhere, that nobody would appear and say there had been a mistake.
“I don’t like dropping a stop,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
“The children will think we forgot them.”
“Then we need to tell them what we’re doing.” Imogen tapped the second page. “This is a service. It’s allowed to have hours.”
Celia watched a bead of condensation travel down the nearest window. She had rewritten the route three times the previous evening. In the first version she covered a missing afternoon herself; in the second she left the covering person unnamed, which was much the same thing. The third version was this one. It looked offensively small beside the hopes she had entertained in September.
“I’ll go to the school,” she said. “When the decision is made. I’ll talk to the class teachers. Not promise them something to soften it.”
“You can bring books.”
That helped more than it ought to have done.
Imogen read the rest. Nell caught Celia’s finger and held it with a determination entirely disproportionate to its purpose. At the front of the bus somebody had hung a paper snowflake from the mirror. It turned in the heater’s draft, showing its folded edges.
“I’ll put this to the board on the nineteenth,” Imogen said at last. “With the applications we have, it has a chance. A chance, Celia. Not a promise.”
“I can live with a chance.”
Outside, Adrian was on his phone, walking slowly past the workshop. His free hand opened and closed as he spoke. Through the fogged window she couldn’t hear him, but she saw the moment his shoulders lowered, the moment an apology perhaps ceased to be a statement and became a conversation he could not control.
She turned back to Imogen before he saw her watching.
At four, he sent a message asking whether he could come over. Not bringing dinner unless she wanted dinner. Not staying unless she wanted that either.
Celia read it while Nell lay on a blanket regarding the underside of a wooden arch. The apartment was dim already. A damp pair of baby socks lay over the radiator; Celia’s own lunch plate sat beside the sink. It was an unpromising setting for seeing the man she had missed badly enough to find his name in every unrelated sound her phone made.
Six, she wrote. I’ve got soup. Bring bread.
Then, because she could hear how chilly that might seem, she added, The kind with the crust I steal from you.
His reply arrived a moment later. I’ll defend it poorly.
She laughed, and Nell turned toward her voice.
“Yes,” Celia told her. “I know. Extremely sophisticated courtship.”
At six she opened the door wearing the green sweater that Nell had already drooled on. Adrian held a paper bag in both hands. Neither of them moved immediately.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
She stepped aside. He took off his shoes, put the bread on the counter and looked at Nell in her bouncer beside the table.
“You got bigger,” he told her, quietly enough that Celia’s throat tightened.
“She’s been working on it.”
He smiled without looking up. Nell waved both arms. Adrian crouched and offered a finger, waiting until she closed her hand around it. Celia turned to the stove so she wouldn’t stare at the familiar bent head. Missing somebody in the room with her was somehow worse than missing him from a distance.
Over soup, he told her what had changed. The venue would charge them for unused space. A demonstration set would have to be built quickly. Gavin was annoyed, and Adrian would be the one explaining the change to the investors who had expected him to take them through the bus.
“What will you say?”
“That I promised them something I didn’t own.”
She tore a corner from the loaf. “That’s going to sound bad.”
“It will sound worse if Gavin has to say it.”
“You were very angry with me.”
His eyes came up. “Yes.”
The admission hurt, although she had asked for it. “Because I wouldn’t go to the dinner?”
“Because I wanted to see you. Because I thought we could talk in the car and make the evening good anyway.” He stopped, pressing his thumb against the handle of his spoon. “And because you wouldn’t let me get to the good evening without dealing with what I’d done.”
“I wanted the good evening too.”
“I know that now.”
She wasn’t certain he had known it. She had spent the night of the company dinner in her apartment, furious and longing, washing baby clothes while imagining him sitting beside an empty chair. There had been no satisfaction in it at all.
“I didn’t decline to make you miserable,” she said. “I couldn’t have smiled through people congratulating us on an arrangement I hadn’t agreed to.”
“I made you part of the display.”
“Yes.” The word came harder than she expected. “And you said it as though I should be pleased.”
He pushed his bowl away a little. For a moment she thought he was going to defend himself. Instead he looked around the room—the socks, the bouncer, the narrow table with one leg that needed a folded square of cardboard beneath it.
“I wanted you in my house,” he said. “I wanted to stop leaving. Then I took everything I wanted and called it a solution to your problems.”
Celia let her bread rest on the edge of the bowl. That was closer to the thing she had been trying to reach.
“I might want to be in your house.”
He looked at her.
“You don’t get an answer to that tonight.”
“I wasn’t asking for one.” He sighed. “I was about to. In a more devious way.”
Her laugh caught them both unprepared. She put a hand over her mouth, and his face changed with such naked relief that she had to look down.
“I’ve made a smaller route,” she said after a moment. “It’s on the table behind you. I left out all the bits where I was going to manufacture another ten hours in the week.”
He turned the pages, then turned back to her. “Does it work?”
“We think so. It’s not everything I wanted.”
“Can I look at it properly?”
“After supper. Now I’d rather you ate.”
He obeyed, which should not have been moving, except she remembered how seldom she had allowed herself to give somebody such a small and useless instruction. Eat. Stay in the kitchen with me. Stop being sorry long enough for us to have soup.
Nell began fussing. Adrian reached toward the bouncer, then glanced at Celia. She nodded. He lifted Nell carefully, settling her against his shoulder. Celia watched his hand cover the back of the baby’s head, then found herself watching the open collar of his shirt.
She had not expected desire to return in the middle of an apology, with the soup cooling and crumbs on the table. It came with an almost embarrassing force.
Later, after Nell’s feed and a lengthy disagreement with sleep, Celia came out of the bedroom to find Adrian washing their bowls. He had taken off his sweater. His sleeves were pushed crookedly up his forearms.
She stood behind him and put her forehead between his shoulder blades.
He stopped moving. The tap ran until he reached forward and shut it off.
“Celia?”
“Just stand there.”
He did. She wrapped her arms around his waist. Beneath her cheek his breath moved slowly, deliberately, as though he were trying not to startle her. The care of that undid her more than being pulled immediately into an embrace would have done.
“I’m calling him on Friday,” she said. “We’ve agreed a time.”
Adrian’s hand came down over hers. “Do you want me here?”
“Not for the call.”
“After?”
“I don’t know yet.” She lifted her head. “I want to know I can ask.”
He turned within her arms. There was water on his wrist, cold against the side of her hand. “You can ask.”
She looked at his mouth. He saw, because his thumb went still beneath her palm.
“I missed kissing you,” she said.
He made a small sound, scarcely a laugh. “I’ve been trying very hard not to mention that.”
“Don’t try now.”
His first kiss was careful, his hand warm beneath her ear. She rose onto her toes and caught the front of his shirt, and the second was not careful at all. He backed against the counter; a spoon fell into the sink with a startling clatter. They broke apart, listening for Nell. The apartment remained quiet.
“Your kitchen has opinions,” he murmured.
She laughed against his shoulder, then kissed the place just beneath his jaw that she had been thinking about while he ate. His arm tightened around her.
It was possible to want more time and still be ready for this much. She had feared that letting him touch her would make the argument evaporate, that afterward she would lose the right to remember it. But his face when she drew back was serious. He was here, in her small kitchen, with the difficult parts still between them.
“Stay for a while,” she said.
They sat on the couch with her feet tucked beneath his thigh, neither pretending they had finished talking. Adrian picked up the route pages. Celia leaned against him while he read. Once he asked a question; she answered it. Once she moved his hand from the paper to her knee.
When it was time for him to leave, she went all the way downstairs with him, carrying the baby monitor as far as its reach allowed. Cold air entered through the outer door.
“Bread was good,” she said.
“I’ll tell the baker his work survived.”
She took hold of his coat and kissed him once more, slowly enough that he set his keys down on the windowsill.
Upstairs, Nell called out. Celia rested her forehead against Adrian’s for one more second, then let him go and went up to her daughter.