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Chapter Six Hundred And Twenty-Eight
Lukas took the long way home.This was a choice Lukas made deliberately, standing outside the Prinsengracht café in the December cold after Elise had turned the corner and disappeared. Lukas could have gone directly. The direct route was fifteen minutes. The long route was nearly an hour, depending on how slowly Lukas walked, and Lukas intended to walk slowly.Lukas turned away from the canal and moved into the Jordaan, into the particular texture of those streets at that hour — the amber light from ground-floor windows, the smell of someone's dinner drifting from a half-open door, a bicycle propped against a wall with a child's seat on the back. The ordinary intimacy of a city in its evening. Lukas had walked these streets so many times and in so many different conditions that the streets themselves were a kind of record, layered with occasions Lukas could no longer fully separate from each other.Lukas passed the street where the first clinic had been. The building had been somethin
Chapter Six Hundred And Twenty-Seven
Lukas considered the question honestly rather than immediately, which Elise would have noticed and which was partly the point of asking it the way she had asked it. Not successful, not accomplished. She had taken care to exclude the categories that would have made the question easier to answer in the affirmative, and what remained after those exclusions was the harder thing."I need a moment with that," Lukas said."Take it."Lukas sat with it. Outside the window the canal went on doing what canals did in December, grey and unhurried and indifferent to the conversations happening alongside it. The café candles gave off their small warmth. Lukas turned the question over and looked at it from the side, from underneath, from the angle of actual honesty rather than reflexive reassurance."What I experience," Lukas said finally, "is something I've come to think is better than happiness. Though it took me a long time to understand the difference.""Tell me the difference," Elise said."Happ
Chapter Six Hundred And Twenty-Six
Elise was quiet for a long moment after Lukas finished. Not the quiet of someone managing their response or assembling the version of it they intended to present. The quiet of someone sitting with something real and letting it be real before saying anything about it.Outside the window the canal was doing its December thing. A cyclist crossed the bridge slowly. The café made its small background sounds."I knew," Elise said finally.Lukas waited."Not consciously. Somewhere underneath the hoping." She looked at him steadily. "I've been paying close enough attention to who you've become to understand what wholeness looks like in you. And you're whole in ways you weren't when we were married and weren't for years after. I could see that. I've been seeing it for a while." She paused. "And I knew, underneath the part of me that wanted a different answer, that wholeness meant you didn't need what I was offering. That you were going to tell me something like what you just told me.""Then wh
Chapter Six Hundred And Twenty-Five
They met at the Prinsengracht café a third time. Lukas had chosen it deliberately and Elise had agreed without comment, which meant she understood why Lukas had chosen it — the continuity of setting, the small acknowledgment that what they were concluding had begun there and deserved the same location. The green awning, the iron chairs moved inside now against the December cold, the afternoon light coming through the windows at the same angle it always had.Elise arrived a few minutes after Lukas. She sat down, ordered coffee, looked at Lukas across the table with the expression of someone who had been preparing for this for days. Not braced. Prepared. The distinction mattered and Lukas could see it."You've decided," she said."Yes.""Do you want to talk around it first or say it.""Say it," Lukas said. "And then talk around it if you want to."She looked at him. "All right.""I'm not going to pursue what you proposed," Lukas said. "I want to tell you why, because you've been honest
Chapter Six Hundred And Twenty-Four
Elise was watching Lukas with the patience of someone who had already said the harder thing and was now willing to wait for whatever came back from it. Lukas looked at her and let himself actually examine what was present rather than what Lukas had expected to find.The fear was there. It was real — Lukas was not going to pretend otherwise. Standing at the edge of vulnerability with Elise specifically carried a particular weight that came from direct experience of what she had been capable of in her worst configurations. But when Lukas held the fear honestly and looked at what was underneath it, the fear was not the thing running the hesitation. It was present and it was smaller than what was beneath it."Can I ask you something before I respond to what you said," Lukas said."Yes.""When you imagine what this looks like — the thing you're actually proposing — what do you need from me in it. Not what you want the shape of the relationship to be. What do you need from me specifically."
Chapter Six Hundred And Twenty-Three
Lukas called Elise the following morning and asked if she could meet. She said yes without asking why. She had been waiting for the response to the café evening and she knew this was it arriving.They met at a different café this time, one that belonged to neither of them — a place near the university that Lukas used occasionally for meetings with external collaborators. Neutral ground, Lukas's choice, which Elise would understand as deliberate. She was already there when Lukas arrived, sitting with coffee she had not yet drunk much of, wearing the same dark coat as the first café and looking like someone who had spent the intervening weeks in approximately the same internal condition as Lukas — working through something, not resolving it, carrying it with a care that showed."Thank you for coming," Lukas said, sitting down."Of course." She wrapped her hands around her cup. "You've been thinking.""I told you I would.""You did." She looked at him. "How did it go.""I found things I
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