On New Year's Eve, Elena almost called him at midnight and did not. She stood at Jamila's apartment window with a glass of champagne and watched the riverfront fireworks bloom and fade. At 12:07 she texted Denise: Still here. Denise texted back: Still proud. At 12:22 Marcus texted: If you're awake, I'm wishing you a year that asks less of your courage and more of your joy. If you're asleep, ignore me. Elena typed three replies and deleted them. She settled on: Awake. Received. Then she put the phone face down and let Jamila pull her into a ridiculous dance to a song from their twenties, and for seven minutes the platform was only a place on a map and not a room she lived inside.
Winter deepened. Chicago did what Chicago does in January: it made every outdoor errand a negotiation with wind. Elena began seeing Dr. Ruiz on Thursdays at four, a woman in her fifties with a calm office and a plant that seemed to thrive on secrets. Dr. Ruiz did not tell Elena what to do about Marcus. She asked, instead, what Elena was protecting when she delayed the decision, and what she was punishing, and whether those two projects could live in the same chest without crowding out breath.
"I keep waiting to feel sure," Elena said in the third session. "Sure that I should leave. Sure that I should stay. Sure seems like the minimum requirement for a life decision this size."
"Sure is a luxury grief rarely affords on a schedule," Dr. Ruiz said. "What if the work is not certainty but tolerance for imperfect knowing while you watch his behavior over time — and your own?"
Elena hated how useful that was.
She also began, carefully, to live a life that was not organized around the question. She took a weekend trip to Detroit with Jamila to see a new exhibition and did not tell Marcus until she was home. She joined a Thursday evening running group along the lake that mocked her into better cardiovascular health and offered the companionship of strangers who only knew her as Elena-who-shows-up. She cooked more. She called her grandmother on the South Side and sat in the kitchen that had taught her how love could smell like onions and patience, and when her grandmother asked about the wedding, Elena said, "There may not be one," and her grandmother nodded and said, "Then we will still eat," which was the most theological sentence Elena heard all winter.