He took her hand under the sheet. Their fingers laced with the old familiarity and the new caution. They did not make love. They did not perform reconciliation for an invisible audience. They slept in pieces, waking to check that the other was still there, as if Accra had already begun taking attendance.
IX.
The next week Threshold Studio ran on a strange fuel: transparency so bright it felt almost aggressive.
Nia put the fellowship documents in the shared drive under a folder named, with deliberate ugliness, ACCRA_FELLOWSHIP_OPEN. Solomon invited their two junior designers, Jamal Ortiz and Sefi Boateng into a meeting and told them, in clean language, that one of the principals was considering an eighteen-month external placement and that no one's job was ending and that rumors would be met with facts. Jamal asked if this meant Red Hook was in trouble. Solomon said Red Hook was in work, which was different from trouble. Sefi asked Nia if Accra was home. Nia said, "It is a home I have visited. It is not yet a home I have earned. That is part of what the fellowship is for."
Xavier sat through the meeting with his arms crossed and his face carefully neutral. Afterward, in the kitchenette, Jamal poured coffee and said, quietly, "You okay, X?"
Xavier almost gave the automatic fine. Instead he said, "I'm trying to be a person who can want good things for someone even when those good things rearrange my map. Some days I succeed for whole hours."
Jamal nodded like a man who had rearranged maps before. "My wife took a residency in Detroit for ten months when our kid was two. I thought I would die. I did not die. I also did not enjoy it. Both true."
"Did she come back."
"She came back. Different. Better in some ways. Worse at pretending. We had to learn a new marriage on top of the old one. It took longer than the residency."
Xavier filed that away like a tool he might need.
On Thursday, Ifeoma came to Brooklyn after her shift with a bag of chin chin and the expression of an older sister prepared to be useful or ruthless, whichever the hour required. She hugged Xavier first, which surprised him, and then held him at arm's length.
"You look like you haven't been eating," she said.
"I've been eating."
"You look like you've been eating anger." She turned to Nia. "You look like you've been eating guilt. Sit down, both of you. I did not take the PATH train to watch you perform dignity in silence."
They sat. Ifeoma set the chin chin on the table like an offering and an order.
"Here is what I know," she said. "Our uncle Bertrand is not a villain. Accra is not a betrayal. Lying is a betrayal. Xavier jumping to an affair is a wound speaking, not a verdict. Nia, you do not get to be so afraid of being selfish that you become selfish in secret. Xavier, you do not get to make every closed door into your father's hotel. You are both doing too much ancestral work in a loft that needs present-tense adults."
Nia laughed helplessly. Xavier stared at the chin chin.
"What do you want us to do," he asked.