“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
She looked toward the hallway. “Thank you for getting everything together.”
“No problem.”
We carried the boxes to her car in two trips. She'd rented a small apartment not far from her office, and she had already begun moving furniture into it. Ben had helped her assemble a bookshelf. Celia had given her an old dining table. I knew these details because our mutual families were not machines capable of keeping every story perfectly separate. Hearing them hurt less now. They sounded like the ordinary logistics of a person beginning a different life.
When we returned inside for the last box, Natalie stopped beside the coffee table. It was the same one that had held the divorce papers on the afternoon she came home. The table had a shallow scratch along one edge from a moving accident years earlier. We'd planned to replace it at least three times, but something else always needed money first. Natalie ran a finger near the scratch and smiled faintly.
“Remember when we tried to get that out with toothpaste?” she asked.
“We made it worse.”
“You said you could fix anything made of wood.”
“I was wrong about that one.”
She looked at me. The smile faded. “I have a question, and you don't have to answer it.”
“Okay.”
“Was there any point when you thought about letting me come back?”
I considered lying to protect us both from the conversation. The truth was complicated. There had been hundreds of points when I'd wanted her back: in the first two nights, after she left her voicemail, when she'd cried at the table, when I opened the Christmas decorations, when I woke from a dream in which none of this had happened. Wanting her back had never been the same as believing we could live together safely again.
“Yes,” I said. “Many times.”