“The tickets. We eat the fees. I’m not putting him on a plane tomorrow to restore your father’s idea of the week. If Jonah wants to go back to Wilmington in a few days, we can talk about that like people. If you go with him, Mason goes only if Mason says he wants to, and I am at the airport when you come back. Not a maybe. A time. If you don’t come back, you will say that before you leave, to my face, and we will build a plan for our son that does not involve him finding out from a seat map.”
“I’m coming back,” she said.
“You said you didn’t know if you meant to stay.”
“I don’t know if we can. I’m coming back to the house. I’m coming back to him. I’m not disappearing into my mother’s life because it’s the place where I already know how to fail. I bought the return ticket because some part of me still wanted this kitchen. I also looked at one-way fares the night after Jonah called. Three of them. I didn’t buy them. Mason saw the screen. That’s the piece he carried onto the curb. He thought the paper in his backpack was the other paper, the one I didn’t purchase. He was trying to stop a leaving that I had already talked myself out of and hadn’t had the decency to unsay in front of him.”
Derek sat down. The chair complained. “Say that again.”
“He saw my laptop. I thought he was in the bath. He wasn’t. The screen had three one-way fares. I closed it. Later he heard me on the phone with Claire. I said if I told you first I didn’t know whether I was coming back. I meant coming back to the marriage, not to the city. He is eight. He heard the words that were actually in the air. I corrected him with a lie because the truth was an hour long and the flight was a day away and I am, as a habit, a person who picks the short sentence.”