"Do you?" She leaned forward. The diner's light made everything look slightly fried, including honesty. "Because the version of you that kept Claire in a side pocket of your life for three months is also the version that proposed to me. I need to know which architecture is load-bearing."
He looked down at his hands. "I want to be the man who proposed."
"Wanting is the easiest verb you have ever conjugated," Elena said. "Show me over time. Or don't. But do not show me speeches."
She returned to Chicago on a daytime train that offered none of the night's choreography. The city received her with its usual indifference, which she found, for once, comforting. Her apartment in Hyde Park — small, full of books, a fern that had survived her Midland trips through the kindness of a neighbor — smelled like dust and the candle she had forgotten to blow out before leaving. She watered the fern. She unpacked. She set the engagement ring in a small ceramic dish on her dresser and covered it with a scarf so she would not have to see it every time she reached for lotion.
Work helped and did not help. The museum's autumn calendar was crowded with school tours and a new exhibit on Great Migration photography that Elena had helped shape. She walked children past images of families boarding trains with everything they owned and felt the metaphor press against her ribs like a hand. She smiled for donors. She corrected wall text. She went home and sat on her couch with takeout and the particular loneliness of a person whose future had been a shared document now stuck in track-changes with no accept button.
Friends arrived in careful shifts. Her closest, Jamila, brought Thai food and rage in equal measure and offered to drive to Midland and key Marcus's car, an offer Elena declined while loving her for it. Her colleague Tom, who had been through a divorce, said only, "The timeline is yours. Anyone who hurries you is auditioning for the role of the next person you leave." Denise called every evening for two weeks and then every other evening, calibrating her vigilance to Elena's tone.