Chapter Two: Construction
The fence takes three more Saturdays.
It is not complicated work, four posts, fresh concrete, panels levelled and re-hung, but Noah is careful, and careful work takes time. Every Saturday he arrives at eight with his tools. Every Saturday I carry out the tea. The heat of July settles over Millhaven like a hand, the hydrangeas sulk and then bloom back from the fence line, and the suburb slips into its August rhythm of sprinklers and weekday absences.
Michael is in the city five days out of seven. Some weeks he sleeps at the flat near the firm, the one the partners keep for late nights, and the house acquires a particular hush that I have been managing for two years with work, with coffee, with the slow, grudging accumulation of words on a novel that refuses to end.
I have not been managing it by thinking about it.
On the third Saturday I step outside at half past seven and find the garden empty. The tools are laid out neatly beside the last unset post, but there is no man bent over them. The panel nearest the house has been lifted out and propped against the shed, and through the gap I can see Noah sitting on his own garden bench, a thermos between his knees, staring at nothing.
Go back inside, says the sensible part of me.
I take two mugs and walk through the gap.
"Bad day?" I ask.
He looks up, and the hard line of his shoulders eases a little when he sees me. "Thinking day."
"Different from a bad day?"
"Sometimes." He shifts along the bench without being asked, and I sit, and the wood is warm from the sun and from him. "A client wants a house I'm not sure I can give them."
"What do they want?"
"Clean lines. Minimal, very particular. An aesthetic you could hang on a wall." He rubs the back of his neck. "The site is a slope, though. Steep grade change, and three mature trees the client insists on keeping. The clean lines and the hill don't agree."
"What do clean lines want?"
A small huff of laughter escapes him. "For the land to apologise."
"Can you design between the trees?"
"It changes the geometry."
"Maybe the geometry is what the site is asking for."
He turns his head to look at me, properly, and I feel it all the way down my spine, that grey attention, as if I have said something unexpectedly true.
"You think like a writer," he says.
"How does a writer think?"
"You look for what the thing wants to be. Not what you want to make it."
"Isn't that how you design?"
"On a good day. Clients tend to arrive with a picture already in their heads." He drinks from the thermos, then offers it to me, and I take it, and his fingers linger against mine a half second longer than the cup requires. The coffee is strong and sweet and tastes faintly of him. "Tell me about your book."
"A woman who doesn't know what she wants."
"Is she like you?"
"She isn't not like me."
"Four years," he says. "Is she getting closer?"
"Closer to admitting she doesn't know. Which is not the same as finding out." I turn the thermos in my hands. "But it's a start."
"It's the necessary first step."
"Is it?"
"Elena." He says my name slowly, as though testing its weight, and a shiver runs through me despite the heat. "Can I ask you something I shouldn't?"
"No," I say. "But ask anyway."
He is quiet. A bee blunders past us, drunk on the lavender. When he speaks, his voice is lower than before.
"Are you happy?"
The question goes into me like a blade slid between two ribs. I stare at the hydrangeas, the blue heads nodding in the haze, and at the fence panel leaning against the shed, and at the two gardens that, for this one morning, have become a single space.
"I don't know," I whisper.
He doesn't flinch, doesn't offer comfort, doesn't tell me everything will be fine. He only nods, slowly, as if I have handed him something fragile that he has no intention of dropping.
"That's honest," he says.
"You told me I was direct."
"You are." A pause. "It's one of the things I like."
One of the things. My heart does something undignified. "The woman in my book has been not-knowing for years. What I'm trying to work out is what keeps her there. What makes it easier to stay than to find out."
"The finding out is the risk."
"Yes. Because then she has to do something about it."
"And the not-knowing means she never has to."
"Exactly." My voice cracks, just slightly. "It's a very personal book."
He looks at me for a long, charged moment. Then he looks at my mouth. It is the briefest flicker, a second at most, and I would have missed it if I were not hyper-aware of every inch of him, and when his eyes return to mine they are darker, the grey gone smoky and unreadable.
Oh.
"I should get back," I say, standing so quickly the thermos almost tips.
"Elena."
"Yes?"
"The woman in the book. Does she find out?"
"I don't know yet." I hug my arms around myself. "She's at the moment before."
"The moment before," he repeats.
"The moment before everything changes."
He nods, and does not stand, and does not stop watching me as I go back through the gap in the fence. The hydrangeas brush my bare calves. My legs are not quite steady.
The honest version of wanting someone to be there, he said earlier, about needing. I take the sentence with me into the kitchen and I turn it over, and over, and over.
* * *
The last panel goes up on a sweltering Saturday at the end of July. When it is done, he steps back to look at the whole length, hands on his hips, and I stand beside him and let myself look at the fence instead of at him. It is straight and level and quietly beautiful, the kind of thing that was always meant to exist and has only now been allowed to.
"It's good work," I say.
"It should be. I made it."
"No false modesty at all."
"I don't have much." He glances at me. "Is that a problem?"
"It's refreshing." The word is out before I can soften it. "Most people perform modesty. You just say what's true."
"If I've done something well, I know I've done it well." A beat. "If I haven't, I say that too."
"Do you often not?"
"Sometimes I make the wrong call. The slope project." He shrugs, and the movement draws my attention to the line of his throat, damp with the afternoon heat. "The client went with the version they imagined. It'll look fine. It won't be interesting."
"Did you tell them?"
"Yes. It's their house. I gave my advice, they chose differently." His mouth tilts. "That's their right."
Their house, I think. Their choice. The words pull at something old in me, and before I can stop them, they are out in the air.
"Michael chose our house."
Noah goes very still. "This house?"
"We looked at four. I loved a different one, an old place by the river with a crooked staircase. He had reasons for this one. Good reasons."
"And you?"
"I agreed."
"Did you agree," he asks softly, "or did you defer?"
I open my mouth to say that there is no difference. Then I close it.
"What's the difference?"
"Agreeing means you were persuaded. Deferring means you stopped arguing."
The garden is quiet. Somewhere a lawnmower sputters and dies.
"I don't know," I admit.
He nods, and does not press, and does not look away. Then he gathers the last of his tools and says, in an utterly ordinary voice, that he will see me soon.
It is the ordinary voice that undoes me. I walk back to the house on trembling legs and sit on the kitchen floor with my back against the cupboards, and I laugh until I realise that I am close to tears.
* * *
In the first week of August, Michael flies to London for ten days. A client matter. He calls every evening at seven on the dot, a dutiful, affectionate sort of call, in which he tells me about his day and I tell him about mine and neither of us says anything that costs us a single thing.
I write in the mornings. I walk in the afternoons. The suburb empties out for the school holidays until the streets feel like the set of a film nobody has come to shoot.
On the fifth evening, the telephone call finished, I step into the garden barefoot with a glass of wine, because the house is too quiet and the sky is the colour of a bruised peach.
The kitchen door next door opens.
"You're still here," Noah says.
"I'm always here."
"Michael?"
"London. Ten days."
"You didn't go?"
"He's working. And I have the book." I sip the wine. "It's a very good excuse. I've been using it for years."
He lowers himself onto his bench. He is wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and I realise I have never seen him in anything that was not stained with the day. He looks cleaner, dangerous in a different way. His hair is damp from a shower. I can smell, across the new, solid fence, the faint green scent of soap.
"How is it?" he asks. "The book."
"She's at the moment before."
"Still?"
"Still."
"Elena." He leans forward, elbows on his knees. "How do you get past the moment before?"
I stare at him. "For the character?"
"If you like."
"In general?"
"In my experience," he says, "it ends when somebody says the thing they've been not saying."
"What if they don't know what the thing is?"
"They know."
"What if they've been very, very good at not knowing?"
"Then it goes on for years." His voice is low and level and impossibly gentle. "It stops being a moment. It becomes a place to live."
The woman in the book. Or the woman in the garden.
He doesn't say it. He doesn't have to. It hangs in the heavy dusk between us, with the crickets starting up and the first stars pricking through, and my heart is beating so hard that I put my glass down on the grass in case I drop it.
"I'm going to say something honest," I say.
"All right."
"I've been watching you work for three Saturdays. And sitting in your garden, telling you things I don't tell anyone. I know what this is. I'm not a child." I take a breath. "It's something I should manage."
"Should."
"Yes."
"But you're telling me anyway."
"Because you said it ends when somebody says the thing."
His eyes lock on mine. "And this is the thing?"
"Yes."
The silence stretches until I can hear the blood in my ears. Then, very slowly, Noah Garrett stands up.
"I've known since June," he says.
"Since the fence."
"Since you brought the tea." His voice roughens. "You didn't ask if I wanted any. You just came out, and you sat down, and you asked what I was thinking."
"That's such a small thing."
"It's not nothing." He crosses the lawn to the fence and rests his hands on the top rail, the long fingers curling over the wood, and I am suddenly, shamelessly, aware of how little there is between his hands and me. "This is complicated, Elena."
"You're my neighbour."
"Yes."
"I'm married."
"I know."
"To a man you've shaken hands with. Who thanked you."
"I know." His jaw tightens. "I'm not telling you what to do. I'd never do that. I'm telling you that I know how this ends."
"How?"
"Walk to the south side."
I do. I don't decide to, my feet simply carry me, along the new fence, over the cool grass, past the last of the hydrangeas to the section nearest the street. And there, set into the grey timber so neatly that I have walked past it a dozen times without seeing, is a narrow gate. A plain wooden latch, no lock, no handle, nothing decorative at all.
"I put it in when I replaced the panels," he says, from the other side. "Hinges and a latch. Just in case."
In case.
My breath leaves me in a rush.
"In case of what?" I whisper.
He doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. He simply stands there, on the other side of a plank of wood, with his hands at his sides and his heart in his eyes, and waits.
The moment before, I think. One way or another, it ends.
My hand rises. It is trembling. The latch is cool and smooth under my fingertips, and I can feel the whole summer behind me, the carefully built life, the eleven years, the polite warm weight of a hand at the small of my back.
Say the thing, whispers a voice I do not recognise, and it is mine.
I lift the latch.
* * *