She nodded. “Ask first.”
“Yes.”
Daniel came in from the kitchen. We moved to other things. She left at three, having said she didn’t want to impose on the afternoon, and I thought: that sentence is new. Not natural yet, but there.
She rang the bell when she left, too. She said she would call before the next visit.
I stood at the window and watched her car back out of the driveway and turn down the street.
The house was quiet. My house. Ours.
I went back to the kitchen and told Daniel she’d said she would call next time. He said that was good. I said it was.
We finished cleaning up together, him washing, me drying.
The cumin was where I keep it, with the savory spices. I had moved it back the day after Patricia left, and I had not had to mention it to anyone, and it had been there since.
I found it the first time I looked.
A Note on What Changed and What Didn’t
The house is the same house. The specific things about it that I had listed as problems in the fall are mostly resolved: Patricia is in her apartment, my office door is understood to mean something when it’s closed, the kitchen is organized according to the logic I developed over five years. These are the visible changes and they are real.
What is different in a less visible way is Daniel and me.
The sessions with Martin, which we have continued as a monthly maintenance now rather than a crisis response, have made us better at a specific skill: the skill of saying a thing before it becomes the thing we’re avoiding. Daniel has said “I’ll handle it” twice in the months since November and both times has caught himself and said: “Actually, let me check with Maya before I commit to that.” I have said “okay” when I didn’t mean okay three or four times and caught it twice. Progress is partial.