Nia walked to the waterfront after that meeting and called Xavier. "A woman just gave me permission I didn't know I was waiting for."
"Take it," Xavier said. "Then come home and help me decide what to do with the Christmas tree. Mr. Vasquez says the stand is in the basement and I don't trust the basement."
Domestic sentences as ballast.
On December twentieth, the Trust sent the formal offer. Nia signed it at the high wooden table in the loft, with Xavier and Solomon as witnesses, and then they went out for dinner at the Thai place on Flushing because unfinished circles bothered Nia more than superstition did. The owner asked if they wanted the usual. They did. When the food came, Xavier lifted his water glass.
"To daylight," he said.
"To daylight," Solomon echoed.
"To daylight," Nia said, and drank, and did not pretend the water tasted like champagne.
XV.
January fourteenth was their last full day before her flight.
They spent the morning at the loft packing Nia's work hard drive, labeling folders, leaving passwords in the shared manager Solomon insisted on. Jamal brought cupcakes. Sefi brought a playlist. Amara brought a printed checklist so thorough it made Nia laugh until she cried. In the afternoon Xavier and Nia went home and finished the suitcase that had been half-packed for a week, a monument to ambivalence. Ifeoma came over with pepper soup and forced them to eat. Bertrand sent a message that simply read: Landing is a practice. So is leaving. Both count.
That evening, alone, Xavier stood in the bedroom doorway and watched Nia fold a grey ribbed sweater — the same one from the night of the sticky note — and something in him cracked open in a way that was not collapse.
"I need to say this before the airport turns us into polite strangers," he said.
Nia looked up.
"I have not forgiven you fully," Xavier said. "I may not, for a long time. The sticky note still lives in my head. Client Meeting. Please do not disturb. I understand why you wrote it. Understanding is not the same as erasing. If you go to Accra thinking we are clean, you will be living inside another kind of lie."
Nia's face tightened, then eased into something sturdier than ease. "Good. I don't want clean. Clean is how we got the sticky note. I want us true enough to survive dirt."
He came into the room and sat on the bed beside the open suitcase. "I also need you to know I am proud of you. Not the Instagram kind. The kind that costs me. I am proud in a way that has grief in it. I am not asking you to carry my grief as punishment. I am asking you to remember it exists so you don't mistake my support for simplicity."
"I will remember," she said. "Will you remember that my going is not a verdict on your worth."
"I am in therapy for exactly that sentence," he said, and she smiled, wet-eyed. "Dr. Okoro would like me to repeat it until my nervous system gets bored."