This was the harder part. The part that felt like stepping off something without being certain there was ground below. I also understand some of what you're saying about me, about how I can be, and that's an uncomfortable thing to have to hold at the same time as the anger." Sophia looked at him with those impossible eyes and she said very carefully, "I'm not telling you any of that to excuse what I did. I want to be clear about that, too. I'm not saying it was your fault that I left.
It wasn't. The choice I made was mine. I'm telling you because I think she steadied herself. I think if we're going to have any kind of honest conversation about any of this, we both have to be in the room. All the way in.
James looked at her for a long time. Then he said, "Tell me about the miscarriage." Sophia's breath went out of her all at once. You don't have to protect me from it. He said, "I know it happened. I know it's done.
I'm asking because it was my two and I never got to." He stopped, pressed his lips together. I never got to acknowledge it. Tell me. So she told him. She told him about the morning she woke up in her cousin's guest room and knew immediately that something was wrong.
She told him about sitting on the bathroom floor for 2 hours because she couldn't make herself stand up. She told him about calling the clinic alone, driving herself alone, sitting in the waiting room alone, surrounded by people who were there for entirely different reasons and feeling like she was invisible, like she was walking through a world that couldn't see her. She told him about the drive back, about pulling into the parking lot of a grocery store because she needed to stop somewhere. Needed to be around ordinary life for a minute. Needed to see people buying milk and bread and doing the small continuous things that meant life was continuing whether you could feel it or not.
She told him that she sat in that parking lot for 45 minutes and she thought about calling him. She had her phone in her hand. She had his number. She still knew it by heart. Hadn't deleted it.
Told herself she hadn't deleted it because she might need to call for an emergency and not because the inadwanchi needed the opiov to be there. She told him she put the phone back in her purse and she told him this was the part where her voice went very thin and very quiet that what she had lost was not just the pregnancy. It was the last physical connection to the future she had walked away from. And she had had to grieve that alone, entirely alone. James listened to all of it.
When she stopped, the room was still. He did not say anything for almost a full minute, which was long enough that Sophia finally asked in a very small voice. James, I'm here. He haven't. I'm process.
He said, give me a minute. She gave him a minute. Then he said, "I'm sorry you went through that alone." Sophia went completely still. "I'm still angry," he said immediately because he needed her to know that nothing had dissolved. Nothing was resolved.
The anger was still there and was not going to pretend to be otherwise. What you did keeping that from me, I don't know how long it's going to take me to work through that. Sophia, yeah, I genuinely don't know. But I can be angry about the choice you made and still be sorry about what it cost you. Those two things can both be true, she closed her eyes.
One tear got out just one, and she caught it quickly, pressed it away with two fingers, and then she was composed again. Okay, she said. Her voice was barely there. There's something else, James said. She opened her eyes.
He looked at her with the expression of a man who has decided to say the thing he's been not saying because not saying it has run out of usefulness. Why did you come here Sophia? Not the job, not the apartment. Not the practical version, the real version. Why here?
She looked at him. Because you are the only place I have ever felt safe, she said. Even now, even after everything, even knowing you had every reason to turn me away at that door, she held his gaze. You are still, for reasons I clearly have not been smart enough to make peace with. The only place I have ever felt like I was allowed to be exactly what I was.
James said nothing. And I know that's not fair to you, she said. I know I don't have the right to say that. I know I gave that up when I left. I'm just She exhaled.
You asked for the real version. That's the real version. He stood up. He went to the kitchen and he stood at the sink with both hands on the counter and he looked at the window and the night outside it and he breathed slowly in and out. Sophia stayed on the couch.
She didn't follow him. She understood somehow that this was one of those moments where the best thing she could do was stay exactly where she was and let him have the room. He stood there for three full minutes. Then he came back. He sat at the kitchen table this time, not on the couch.
And he said, "Sit over here." She came and sat across from him. He looked at her. "Here is where I am," he said. "Honestly, I am angry. I am going to be angry for a while, and I am not going to pretend I'm not.
There was a child ours and you carried that alone and then you lost it alone and then you kept it from me for 6 years and I am going to need time to process that because it is one of the most significant things that has ever been kept from me and I deserve to feel everything I feel about it. She nodded and he said he stopped and I am not going to make you leave. I am not going to make you take that baby and go out and start over again in the middle of nothing just because I am angry because two things can be true. Sophia looked at him. We are going to have to talk about this more.
He said a lot more at a level I am not capable of tonight because I need sleep and I need time to think and I need you to give me that without interpreting it as rejection. Okay, she said. And you are going to have to be patient with me going through this. You don't get to manage my reaction. You don't get to decide what's reasonable for me to feel.
You just have to let me feel it. Okay. She said again. And one more thing, she waited. Tomorrow, he said, I want you to tell me the rest.
Whatever else is in there, whatever other room you haven't let me into yet, because I can feel that there's more and I am done finding things out in installments." Sophia's expression shifted in a way that told him with absolute clarity that he was right. There was more. Tomorrow, she said. "Tomorrow," he said. He stood up, looked at her one last time across the kitchen table.
"Go get some sleep, Sophia." She stood. She walked past him toward the hallway and stopped and he felt her stop without turning around. James, she said, "Yeah, for whatever it's worth, I never stopped. She didn't finish the sentence." She seemed to decide against it at the last moment. He heard her exhale.