It became a routine so gradual I almost didn’t notice it forming: Damian finishing with Noah, and then lingering in my kitchen for a coffee “to talk about progress,” and the talking about progress taking longer each week, stretching past the coffee going cold, past Noah falling asleep in front of the television, into the kind of easy conversation I hadn’t had with anyone since Michael.
He asked about my running. I asked about basketball, about his final year, about what came after graduation, and he gave answers that were true but strange around the edges, I’ve moved around a lot, my family’s complicated, I’ve been doing this a long time, answers I filed away and didn’t examine too closely, the way you don’t examine a bruise too hard for fear of how much it will hurt.
He never once made me feel the age gap. If anything, there was something old in the way he watched me, something patient and unhurried that had no business belonging to a twenty-two-year-old, and I told myself that was simply maturity, that some people were built old inside no matter the year on their birth certificate.
“You’re staring,” he said one evening, amused, catching me watching him across the kitchen island.
“I’m thinking you’re going to make some girl your own age very lucky one day,” I said, because it was the safe thing to say, the thing that put a wall back up.
Something flickered across his face, not hurt, exactly, but a kind of ancient patience, as though he’d heard that sentence in some form many times before and had simply decided not to argue with it yet.
“Maybe,” he said, and left it there.
I did not sleep well that night. I lay in the dark and made a list, silently, of all the reasons this was impossible, his age, my son, the whole small gossiping town of Glenfrost, the plain fact that a woman who’d buried a husband had no business wanting the way I was starting to want, and none of the reasons made the wanting go away.