She looked at the window. A plane taxied and the glass turned it into a pale smear. “Three weeks. A little more.”
Something in Derek’s chest went cold and orderly. Three weeks of her being tired. Three weeks of site visits for the museum grants, of evenings that ran long, of a Saturday she had taken Mason to a birthday party and come home with her eyes rinsed out. He had rubbed her feet on the couch because that was what he did when she looked used up by good work. He could feel the ghost of that kindness now, and it humiliated him.
“You’ve been with him for three weeks,” he said, “and you bought him a seat next to my son, and you told Mason I wasn’t coming, and you were going to let me drive away.”
“I was going to tell you when we got back.”
“When you got back. Without him. After Mason had already been in the air with a stranger you call a brother you forgot to mention for a decade.”
“He isn’t a stranger to me.”