"You didn't tell me Tuesday."
"I wanted to tell you in person. I wanted—" He exhaled against the window's faint reflection of his own mouth. "I wanted the weekend to be soft first. Audra's weekend. Not another battlefield with gift bags."
"Soft," Sloane said. "While I packed maroon heels and a solo ticket."
"I deserve that."
"You deserve honesty going both directions," she said. "I should have told you about the early train. You should have told me about March. We keep protecting each other from information like information is weather we can outrun."
He nodded. Somewhere ahead, North Springs waited with wreaths on porch rails and opinions in every kitchen, with Dale's handwriting on welcome signs and Vance's destiny talk already warming up in his throat.
"I'm not saying yes," Felix said. "I'm saying I haven't said no. And I hate that those aren't the same sentence in any language I know."
Sloane turned from the window. In the fluorescent light his scarf looked greener, his face younger and older at once. She had married him in a courthouse with peonies and no constellation ceiling, on a Tuesday because Tuesdays were cheaper and somehow more honest, and she had believed then that love was a kind of architecture you could inhabit without redrawing the blueprints every season. She had been wrong in the ordinary way people are wrong when they confuse a good beginning with a finished structure.
"I love our life," she said. "I love the apartment that never gets enough light on the left side of the couch. I love my work, even when the donors want speeches that sound like absolution. I love that we can walk to a bookstore at midnight if a sentence fails us, or if we fail each other and need paper between us for an hour. North Springs is beautiful. It would also erase half of what made me choose you—not you as a hometown boy, you as the man who left and learned a different map."
"I know."
"Do you? Because your father talks about legacy like it's a coat you grow into if you're patient and grateful. And I talk about staying in the city like it's betrayal of something sacred I never agreed to worship."
Felix reached for her hand. She let him take it. His palm was warm from the paper cup he had finished. The thermos stayed in the bag at her feet, a blue fact neither of them could unpack at forty miles an hour without flooding the aisle.
"We don't have to decide on the train," he said.