8. The Argument About the Future

December arrived and with it, the quiet catastrophe of exam week, which Nora survived by treating sleep as a resource to be rationed and coffee as a food group. She passed everything. She got a ninety-one on the economics final, which her professor called exceptional and which she called the absolute minimum required by the plan. She also, in the first week of December, found a part-time bookkeeping position at a small accounting firm two stops from the apartment, which paid enough to meaningfully change the math on the transfer timeline. She got the call on a Thursday and sat in the stairwell of the pharmacy for six minutes feeling something that took her a moment to identify as uncomplicated happiness, which was a rarer quality than she gave it credit for. She told Eli first. Before she called her mother, before she texted Sofia. He was in the kitchen when she got home and she said "I got the job" and he looked at her with something in his face that she had stopped pretending was just neighborly goodwill, and he said "obviously you did" with the particular certainty of someone who is not surprised because they never doubted. She had cried, briefly, which she had not planned. He had handed her a paper towel without comment. She appreciated this. But the good week had a difficult end. On the second Saturday of December, Eli's father came to the apartment. She wasn't supposed to be there. She had planned to be at the library, but the library's heating had failed and she'd come home to find a man in his mid-fifties sitting on the living room futon across from Eli, talking in the measured tones of someone performing reconciliation. Sofia was not there. The man looked like Eli in the way of someone who'd been used as a template and then diverged significantly from the original design. Nora went straight to her room and closed the door, but the apartment was small and the walls were not thick. She did not listen. But she heard. The conversation lasted twenty minutes. At some point Eli's voice changed register in a way she had not heard before — not louder, but compressed, the way a thing sounds when it has been held under pressure for a long time. Then the front door opened and closed. Then silence. She gave it fifteen minutes and then came out because she had decided, sometime in October, that she was the kind of person who came out rather than stayed behind a door when someone might need not to be alone. Eli was sitting on the kitchen counter, which she had never seen him do. He had a glass of water and was looking at nothing in particular with the expression of someone surfacing after a long time underwater. "You don't have to say anything," she said. "I know." She got herself a glass of water and leaned against the counter on the other side. "He wants to meet for dinner," Eli said, after a while. "He's in the city for three days. He wants to have a conversation." A pause. "He says that every eighteen months. We have a conversation. He explains why things are the way they are. I explain what that cost. He nods. Then another eighteen months pass." "Are you going?" He looked at his water glass. "Probably. Because not going feels like giving him something too." Nora understood this precisely: the specific trap of a relationship where every choice was a concession. "I think," she said carefully, "that you should go if you want to go and not go if you don't, and that neither choice has anything to do with what he deserves." He looked at her. "The choice is yours," she said. "Not his. It doesn't have to be about him." Something in him shifted. She watched it happen. Then he said: "I've been thinking about sending the demos out." The non-sequitur wasn't, she understood, a non-sequitur. It was: I am thinking about choosing. "You should," she said. "It means possibly failing again." "Or possibly not." "You're relentlessly optimistic for someone who plans everything." "I plan because I'm optimistic," she said. "I think things are worth building toward." He was quiet for a long time, looking at her with the steady, careful attention she had gotten used to and would, she acknowledged to herself, miss with a precision she didn't want to examine too closely. "I'm going to tell you something," he said, "and you can do whatever you want with it." She waited. "I think about you," he said. "A lot. In the way that's not — convenient, or good timing, or simple. I know you have a plan. I know what the plan means to you. I'm not asking anything." He looked back at his water glass. "I just — wanted you to know I see you. Not the plan. You." The kitchen was very quiet. "Eli," she said. "You don't have to —" "I know," she said. "Let me — give me a second." She held the water glass and thought about the plan and about what she actually wanted, which were two different questions that she had spent two years treating as the same question. She thought about the Post-it note and the coffee and the backup highlighters and the eggs after the scholarship email and the three songs that had moved her like weather. "I see you too," she said. "In the same inconvenient way." He looked at her. Something in his face did the thing that she had been watching all semester and had been calling by other names. "But I need it to be real," she said. "Not just proximity and good timing. I've done that. I need to know it's — a choice. That you're choosing, not just — falling into it." "That's fair," he said. "I know it's fair," she said. "I'm asking anyway."