I did it. The coffee was already lukewarm. Even so, it sustained me.
We remained silent for a moment, listening to the drawers opening upstairs, the nervous footsteps, the dull thud of a suitcase falling onto the bed.
“I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing,” I murmured.
Harrison looked at me with weariness and a strange sweetness.
“It probably hurts because it’s the right thing to do.”
At nine forty-three, Wyatt came down with a black suitcase, a backpack, and a garbage bag full of clothes.
He did not apologize.
He didn’t say he understood.
He stopped at the door, his hand on the handle, and for a second I thought he was going to make one last threat. Something to inflict a fresh wound before he left.
But he just looked at me.
Not like when he was a child. Not like last night. It was a strange, confused, almost empty look. As if he didn’t know who he was without that house swallowing everything he did.
“Are you really not going to stop me?” he asked.
It took me a second to reply.
“No.
Not this time.
He opened the door and went out.
I heard his footsteps on the wooden porch, then the thud of the suitcase going down the steps, then nothing.
Nothing.
And that nothing was so big that it left me breathless.
I didn’t run after him. I didn’t look out the window. I didn’t do what I would have done my whole life.
I sat in my kitchen, facing an untouched plate, with the Christmas tablecloth under my elbows and my face still burning a little.
Harrison gathered the remaining papers and put them back in the folder.
Then he began to lift the plates as if that domestic gesture could restore the room to a normal state.
