Seven years, Emma said. Give or take. Another silence. The lake moved. Can I tell you something?
Jake said. He told her about Rachel. Not about the diagnosis or the treatment or the specific mechanics of how you lose a person to illness over 14 months. Those were facts, and he'd said those facts enough times that they had worn down to smooth stones. No edges left.
He told her about the Tuesday morning 6 weeks before she died, when Rachel had insisted on making pancakes from scratch, and they had stood in the kitchen together, and she had burned the first batch and laughed, and Jake had known, with the kind of knowing that bypasses logic entirely, that he was watching the last good morning. He stopped. Emma was looking at him. Lily was three, he said. She doesn't remember much of it.
Which is, I don't know. Emma nodded. She understood both things at once. They sat there for another hour. The conversation moved slowly, without agenda, through the kind of territory that people usually only cover after years, and which they covered now because the dark and the water and the specific honesty of exhaustion made it possible.
Jake had He was no longer sure what he was. Martin Lawson had a 20-ft wooden day cruiser in the boathouse that had not run properly in two seasons. He hadn't asked Jake to look at it. He had simply mentioned at breakfast that it had been giving him trouble. Jake asked what kind of trouble.
By noon, they were both in the boathouse. Jake had the engine cowling off. Martin was handing him tools with the methodical efficiency of a man who was accustomed to being useful and had not been for several hours. They worked mostly in silence, the comfortable kind, occasionally punctuated by Martin asking a question and Jake answering it without making the answer complicated. Emma stood on the dock and watched them through the boathouse window.
She had grown up watching her father operate in rooms full of people, boardrooms, charity galas, city council meetings with the brisk authority of a man who expected to be the most competent person present. She had never, in 31 years, seen him hand someone tools. Carol appeared beside her. Your father took apart a lawnmower engine with the neighbor's boy once, Carol said. 19 years ago.
I had nearly forgotten. Emma said nothing. He's been looking for someone to do that with again. Carol tucked her hands into her cardigan pockets. Not the engine.
Just that. The working side by side. Emma watched her father laugh at something Jake said. It was not the polished social laugh she had grown up hearing at dinner parties. It was the other one, the one that surfaced only when Martin Lawson was briefly entirely off duty.
She had not seen that laugh in years. That evening, there was a bonfire. Martin had gotten the cruiser running by 4:00 and had taken it out on the lake for 20 minutes with an expression of unguarded satisfaction. Carol made her pulled pork that took 6 hours and was worth every one. There were folding chairs and the specific scent of wood smoke that attached itself to everything and did not apologize.
Afterward, when the fire had settled to coals and Carol and Martin had gone inside, Jake and Emma walked along the waterline. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel shore. The stars were the kind that only appeared this far from a city. "Your parents are different from how you described them," Jake said. "How did I describe them?" "Pressure.
Expectation." "The impression that they were a problem to be managed." Emma was quiet for a moment. "They are those things. They're also just two people who miss having you around." She stopped walking. Jake stopped a step later and turned to look at her. "Don't," she said, but without heat.
"Don't what?" "Don't make it simple." "It isn't simple." "I know it isn't," Jake said. "I'm not making it simple. I'm just saying what I see." Emma looked at him for a long time. The moon had come up fully by now and the lake was silver and still. "Do you ever think about it?" she asked.
"What?" "Being with someone again." "Actually with someone." Jake looked out at the water. "I think about whether Lily needs it. Whether she needs someone to be there in the way I can't be sometimes. Whether I'm enough." "That's not what I asked." A pause. "No," he said.
"I don't think about it. Or I didn't." She kissed him. It was not dramatic. It was quiet and brief and it happened the way things happen when two people have been standing next to the edge of something for long enough not to fall. "Exactly." A step.
Jake was still for a moment. Then he kissed her back. They stood there in the gravel at the edge of the lake and there was nothing performed about it. No audience. No agreement.
Just two people who had found, without planning to, that the distance between them had been closing all weekend and was now gone. "This isn't in the contract," Emma said when they stepped back. "No," Jake agreed. "We should probably be careful." "Yes." They walked back to the house in a silence that had changed entirely. They returned to the city on Sunday evening.
The drive mostly quiet in the way that comfortable silences are quiet. The agreement was technically complete. Emma signed a transfer for the $10,000 Monday morning and sent it to the account he'd given her. Jake thanked her by text. Emma replied, "You were very good at it." He replied, "So were you." Then nothing for 3 days.
The specific suspended silence of two people who are not sure what the rules are anymore. On Thursday, Emma was in back-to-back acquisition meetings from 7:00 in the morning until 6:00 in the evening. On Friday morning, she was reviewing a due diligence report when her phone rang with a Claremont area code she didn't recognize. She almost didn't answer. "Miss Lawson?" The voice was a woman, elderly, slightly breathless.
"This is Diane Carter, Jake's mother. I'm sorry to call you. I found your number in Jake's phone and I" A pause. "Lily had an episode. They're at Claremont Memorial.
Jake asked me not to call you, but I thought you'd want to know." Emma was out of her office in under a minute. She drove the 3 hours to Claremont without stopping. She arrived at the hospital at 10:02 in the afternoon and found Jake in the waiting area outside the pediatric unit, sitting forward in a plastic chair, elbows on knees, hands clasped, staring at the floor. He was still in work clothes. There was engine grease on his left forearm that he hadn't noticed.
He looked up when she came through the doors. The expression on his face, the brief involuntary relief of it, was not something Emma was prepared for. "You didn't have to come," he said. "I know," Emma said. She sat down in the chair beside him.
He told her what had happened. Lily had come home from school complaining of tightness in her chest, not unusual. They'd managed it before, but this time the inhaler hadn't brought it under control the way it normally did. He'd been under a car when his mother called. He'd driven to the school in 11 minutes.
"She's stable now," he said. "They've got her on a nebulizer. The doctor says she's going to be fine. It's just it went faster than it usually does." Emma nodded. She didn't offer reassurances or cheerful reframings.