That night, after everyone slept, Simone found Aaron on the back porch again with a blanket around his shoulders.
"I keep waiting for you to ask me to leave," she said.
"I keep waiting to want that cleanly," Aaron said. "It hasn't arrived clean."
"What has arrived."
He stared at the dark yard. "Rage. Grief. The stupid hope that the person who did this is still the person who held my head when my father died. Confusion about whether hope is loyalty or humiliation."
Simone sat on the top step without touching him. "If you need me to go — a month, three months, permanently — I will go. I will not take Lily from you. We will figure out custody like adults who failed at something else. I am not asking you to decide tonight. I am telling you I will not trap you with the house and the child and the performance of normal."
Aaron was quiet a long time. "Stay through the new year. Stay in the guest-room arrangement. Keep going to Okonkwo. Do not contact him. If I find out you have, even once, the decision makes itself."
"I haven't. I won't."