Chapter 4
Rose opened her eyes.
She did the thing she always did when she woke from sleeping against me: blinked twice, slowly, then turned her head toward the nearest face with the calm curiosity of someone for whom the world was still entirely new and not yet frightening. She turned toward Ethan. She looked at him. The vertical line appeared briefly between her brows, the one that was his, the one I had spent seven months watching appear on a face that was becoming more its own person every week.
"Her name is Rose," I said.
The woman in the emerald dress made a sound that she covered quickly with her hand. One of the lawyers pushed back slightly from the table, creating a few inches of space between himself and whatever was about to happen, the instinct of someone who has learned to recognize the moment a room becomes something other than a business meeting.
Ethan stood up from his chair. He did it the way people stand when their body is moving before they have decided to move, slowly, as if the air had thickened around him. He came around the corner of the table and stopped four feet from me, which was the closest he had been to me in seven months, since the last time we had occupied the same space and he had looked at me with the detached and slightly impatient expression of a man who has already made a decision and is waiting for the paperwork to confirm it.
He did not look at me that way now.
He looked at Rose.
"I didn't know," he said. The words came out carefully, the way words come out when a person is not sure if they are an explanation or an apology and cannot yet determine which one the moment requires.
I held his gaze. Not with anger, because the anger had burned itself out somewhere around month four, in a hospital waiting room at two in the morning, and what had replaced it was something colder and clearer and more durable. Not with cruelty either, because I had not come here for cruelty. I had come here for truth, which is a different thing entirely, and considerably harder to argue with.
"You never asked," I said.
The room held that sentence for a long moment.
May you like
Ethan looked at Rose again, at her fist curled now against the carrier, at the specific way she had turned her head back toward me after examining him, the trusting automatic movement of a child who has already established the geography of her world and knows exactly where the center of it is.
His jaw tightened once, not with anger, with something that looked, from where I was standing, like a man accounting for the specific cost of a decision he could not unmake.
