The House Between Them

In March, they went to see the lakeside house.

The decorators had finished. Spring light lay across pale walls and dark wood floors. Through the windows Clara could see a newly planted garden, a small pond, and roses waiting to climb their frames.

Someone had copied the curve of the path at Bennett Row.

She noticed it before anything else.

"You remembered."

Damian followed her gaze.

"You like that path."

Owen stood by the door with a folder, visibly relieved that the first words spoken about the renovation had been good ones.

Vince came back from the ground floor.

"Those rooms by the laundry ours?"

"Yours are upstairs," Clara said.

"Upstairs?"

"Second floor. Owen's faces the garden. Yours faces the water."

The two men looked at each other and went to investigate.

A moment later Vince shouted from above.

"We're next to the nursery! This is unpaid childcare, isn't it?"

Damian laughed.

Clara smiled despite herself.

It was a lovely house. There was room for her books, a studio with northern light, and enough spare bedrooms that nobody had to pretend family were visitors.

Damian came up behind her at the window.

"Do you like it?"

"Yes."

"Better than the apartment?"

Her smile faded.

"Why does everything have to be compared?"

He looked out at the pond.

"Give it back to him."

The old apartment. Julian's gift after their separation, the sale she'd requested and never completed, the property that remained hers because returning keys had been easier than resolving ownership.

"We've talked about selling it."

"Then don't sell it. Return it."

She turned.

"Why now?"

Because he remembered a window, a man's arms around her, the surprise he'd carried all the way to Westbridge and never given her properly.

He said none of that.

"Because I don't like it."

Clara's shoulders lowered with tiredness.

She hadn't asked Julian for the apartment. She had accepted it after years of making herself smaller to suit his family. At the time it had seemed a clean ending, a practical acknowledgment that something had cost her too.

Now even the ending needed to be negotiated again.

"Fine," she said. "I'll arrange it."

Relief crossed Damian's face.

He bent and kissed her cheek.

"Good girl. See? You can listen."

She went still.

He noticed a second too late.

"Clara?"

"Listen?"

"It was a joke."

"Then find a better one."

She moved past him and walked out through the front door.

By the time Vince came downstairs, she was in the front passenger seat of the car.

He looked from her to Damian, who got into the back without a word.

"You want to drive, boss?"

Damian stared at him.

Owen took the keys.

"I'll drive. Vince, sit in the back."

"What did I do?"

"Nothing. Let's preserve that."

***

At lunch, Damian put a piece of roast chicken on Clara's plate.

She moved it back.

"Too fatty?"

"I'm not hungry."

He peeled a shrimp instead.

She set that beside the chicken.

Vince reached for it.

"If nobody wants it—"

Damian's look stopped his fork halfway across the table.

"Right," Vince said. "I'll get my own."

Clara wished she could laugh. She was tired of being angry and too angry to stop.

The restaurant was quiet, full of people holding conversations in measured voices. Damian's chair scraped loudly when he pushed it back.

"Can we get through one meal?"

She stood.

"I've finished."

"Sit down."

The words were low and sharp.

She looked at him.

"You don't get to order me about."

A manager came toward them, smiling the cautious smile of someone approaching a large unfamiliar dog.

"Is everything all right with your lunch?"

"Leave it," Damian said.

The manager hesitated.

Damian took out a cigarette.

"Sir, we don't allow smoking."

"I haven't lit it."

People were looking now.

Clara felt the heat of it on her face: the disapproval, the little glances, the easy way strangers decided what kind of man he was.

She hated them for looking at him that way.

She hated him for making it easy.

"Put it away," she said.

His eyes returned to hers.

For a moment nobody moved.

Then he slid the cigarette back into the packet.

She sat down.

Owen began a determined conversation with Vince about a delivery neither man cared about.

Damian ordered soup. When it arrived, he set the spoon beside Clara's hand rather than feeding her anything else.

She ate because she was hungry after all.

They both pretended that meant the argument had ended.

***

The furniture showroom was bright enough to make her eyes ache.

She hadn't slept well. There had been too many early meetings, too many evenings spent on applications after a full day of work. She wanted an hour in a dark room without anybody asking her to choose anything.

Damian wanted to choose everything with her.

"That bed?" he asked. "Or the one by the window?"

"This one's fine."

The salesperson blinked.

"Would you like to try the mattress? We have several—"

"It's fine."

Damian smiled, trying.

"First thing you pick is somewhere to sleep."

Her phone rang.

The admissions tutor had an opening for a consultation that afternoon. Clara stepped aside, listened, and accepted it.

When she returned, Damian was looking at fabric samples.

"They do the whole house," he said. "We could get the sofa and dining table here too."

"Then ask them to match it."

"You haven't looked."

"I trust the decorator."

He put the samples down.

"Do you care at all?"

She shut her eyes briefly.

"Please don't start again. I'm tired."

"It's our house."

"And it will still be our house if I don't personally inspect every cushion."

"I don't want a showroom," she said more quietly.

Damian glanced at her.

"Then what do you want?"

It should have been an easy question. A sofa she could curl up on. A table where he would leave his keys and complain that she had put books over his place. Something that looked as though two people lived there rather than waited to be photographed.

She could picture it clearly enough.

She couldn't find a way to say it while she still heard good girl in his voice.

"I'll know when I see it."

"Then look. That's why we're here."

He wasn't wrong. That annoyed her too.

She touched the linen sample, imagining it beside the lake-facing windows. Pale blue, almost gray. The color of his shirt the afternoon he'd first listened to her talk about buildings.

For a second she wanted to show him.

Then the salesperson came back with a price sheet, and the moment passed.

The salesperson studied a catalog with intense interest.

Damian looked at the display bedroom. It had been arranged for two imaginary people who apparently agreed about everything.

"Fine."

He asked Owen to settle the deposit.

In the car, Clara leaned her head against the window. Damian sat beside her this time, a space between their coats that neither crossed.

At the hotel she took off her shoes and lay down.

He went into the shower.

The tutor sent a reminder. Clara looked at it, then at the bathroom door. If she said she was going to discuss graduate school, there would be another conversation she didn't have the energy for.

"I have something to finish," she called. "I'll be back later."

"Wait a minute."

"It won't take long."

The shower was still running when she left.

Damian came out with a towel around his neck and found the bed empty.

The fabric samples lay beside her abandoned shoes.

He picked one up, a pale blue linen she'd touched for half a second before answering her phone.

He put it down again.

Then he called Vince.

"Bring the car around."

"Where are we going?"

Damian looked at the closed door.

"I don't know yet."