Chapter 12
After the Truth
Nobody tells you how long a week is until you are waiting for a message.
Amara learned it in the days that followed. Sunday was the rain, and a fever she did not admit to having. She lay in Room 14 under a thin blanket, with the window shut, and watched the crack on the ceiling. Now and then she picked up her phone, and looked at the screen, and put it down. There was nothing on it. The last message in the thread was from the Friday before. Tomorrow, four o'clock. I'll bring the usual.
Monday was worse. Monday was the day she knew he had not written because he was deciding, and not because he had forgotten.
Brenda came back from Mityana that afternoon. Amara heard her on the stairs, singing softly, a church song, the dragging of a bag behind her. The door opened. Brenda stood there in her long skirt, tanned from the mission, with a plastic bag of mangoes in one hand and a cheerful, tired face.
"I'm back! They gave me mangoes. A whole sack, can you believe it, from an old woman who said God sent me..."
She stopped.
Amara was sitting on the floor with her back against the bed. She had not meant to be there. She had only meant to sit for a minute. But she had been there since morning, and the light had changed twice, and she had not moved.
"What happened?" Brenda said.
"Nothing."
"Amara."
"Sit down."
"Why?"
"Because I want to tell you something. And you'll want to be sitting."
Brenda put down the mangoes. She came across the room and sat on the end of the bed, very slowly. She was frowning, and she folded her hands in her lap, and looked, for the first time since Amara had known her, afraid.
It was a shorter version this time. She had told it once, to the one person who mattered most, and the telling had worn a path. She said it in plain sentences, one after another, without decoration. A man named Ronald. A man named Patrick. The fees, the apartment, the account. The aunt who did not exist. The others, in those few months. She did not say the last of it. Not yet. She was not sure she could say it twice in one week.
Brenda did not interrupt. She sat quite still, with her lips pressed together. Her eyes moved over Amara's face, and sometimes went to the floor, and once to the window. When Amara said the word apartment, she closed them. When Amara said the amount, she opened them wide, and her hand rose and settled on her chest.
When it was finished, Amara said, "That's all."
Nothing happened for a long time.
Outside, a vendor was calling out something about avocados. A girl ran along the corridor shouting for her slippers. In Room 14, the two of them sat in the plain green light, and the silence did not break.
"Say something," Amara whispered.
"I'm trying."
"Anything."
"I don't know what." Brenda's voice was thick. "I'm... I had thought. I had thought it was something like this. But thinking and hearing it are not the same."
"I know."
"I prayed for you." The words came out small and cracked. "Every night. I prayed that it wasn't true. I said, God, let her be at her aunt's. I said it with my eyes open, in front of the whole mission. And all the time..."
"I'm sorry."
"You lied to me."
"Yes."
"For a year." She was crying now. She did not wipe her face. The tears ran down and fell on her skirt in dark spots. "You lied to my face. I sat next to you in church. I shared my rice. I told the whole fellowship, my roommate is a hard worker, a very good girl. I said it in front of everyone."
"I know."
"And you let me."
"Yes."
"Why?" Brenda's voice rose, and cracked, and she put a fist against her mouth. "Why didn't you tell me? I was right here. I would have helped. I would have done something. I would have sold my Bible if I had to."
"You would not have sold your Bible."
"I would have tried."
"I know you would." Amara felt her own face give way. "That's why I couldn't tell you. You'd have tried. You'd have given me your forty thousand again. And I'd have taken it, and it would have changed nothing, and you'd have gone without lunch for a month. I couldn't do that to you."
"That's not your decision."
"It was the only one I had."
"That is not true." Brenda was shaking. "That is what you tell yourself. You thought I would judge you. Admit it. You thought, Brenda is a church girl, she'll preach at me."
"Yes."
"And you were right! I would have!" She was almost shouting. "I would have said all kinds of stupid things! I would have quoted Scripture! I would have cried! But I would also have been there!"
Amara had nothing to say. She sat with her hands open on her knees.
Brenda wept. For some time she simply wept, with her shoulders bent and her scarf coming loose. It was not graceful. It was loud and wet and honest, and Amara did not try to stop it.
When it eased, Brenda blew her nose on her sleeve, and sat up, and looked at the ceiling, breathing hard.
"I'm angry," she said.
"I know."
"I'm very angry."
"I know."
"But I'm not angry that you were poor." She said it slowly, as if feeling her way along a wall. "I'm not angry that you were scared. Or that you wanted things. Or even that you... did what you did. I think I can understand that, a little. I'm not a saint. I look at those girls in their dresses, too. I want to be pretty. I want a good phone. I pray about it. Often."
Amara made a small, wet sound that was almost a laugh.
"I'm angry that you lied," Brenda said. "That's all. Just that. You were alone in this for a year, and I sat next to you, and I could have been there, and you decided I couldn't. That is what I can't forgive. Not yet."
"Brenda..."
"I don't forgive you yet. I want to be honest. I might later. I will try. But not yet." She wiped her eyes. "Is that all right?"
"Yes," said Amara. "It's more than all right. It's fair."
Brenda nodded. She looked at her own hands, and then she slid off the bed and onto the floor and sat down next to Amara, shoulder against shoulder, and leaned her head back against the mattress.
"I brought mangoes," she said, after a while.
"I saw."
"They are very good ones."
"Okay."
"Do you want one?"
"I think I do."
Brenda got up, and went to the bag, and brought back two mangoes, and a knife, and they sat on the floor and ate them without a plate, with juice running down their wrists, and neither of them said anything more. It was the strangest meal Amara had ever had. It was also, in its way, a sacrament.
Peace took it differently.
Amara told her on Tuesday, in the library, in a quiet corner behind the Law shelves. She had not planned to say it at all, but Peace had looked at her over the top of a book and said, "You said you would tell me," and there was no way out.
Peace listened with her arms folded, and her face as still as a wall. When it was over, she took off her glasses and cleaned them slowly with the hem of her blouse. She did it with great care, front and back, and held them up to the light.
"I defended you," she said.
"What?"
"Last week. At the canteen. Some girls were talking. They said you'd been seen with that man, the one with the white car. They said all kinds of things." She put the glasses back on. "I told them to shut up. I said you were the most serious student in our year. I said they should be ashamed."
"Peace."
"I meant it. I believed every word."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Stop saying sorry." She said it quietly, without heat. "I don't want you to be sorry. I want to understand. Why didn't you trust me?"
"I did."
"No, you didn't. You never said. All this time. We studied together every night for two years, and you never said."
"I was ashamed."
"That's not a reason." Peace's voice trembled, very slightly. "I'm not like Brenda. I don't pray about it. I'm not going to say it's all right, or it's God's plan. I think what you did was a bad idea. I think it was dangerous. I think it was a lot of things. But I also think you are not a bad person, and I think you knew I'd say that, and you still didn't tell me."
"I thought you'd think less of me."
"I do think less of you. A bit." Peace said it so simply that Amara almost smiled. "That's the honest answer. I do. I think it's a thing I need to get over. But I can't just pretend, to make you feel better."
"No."
"I need time."
"I know."
"It's not that I want to stop being friends." She picked up her pen, and put it down. "I only need to get used to the idea that I did not know you as well as I thought. That's a hard thing to realise. I'm not good at being wrong."
"You weren't wrong. I hid it."
"Which makes me wrong." Peace gave a grim half smile. "I'm a planner. I like to know. It is difficult."
They sat in silence for a time. A trolley of books squeaked past, pushed by a librarian in a grey cardigan.
"I'll still help you with Accounting," Peace said at last. "If you want. I won't abandon you in exams. But I'll need a few weeks before I..." She waved a hand. "Before I sit at the same table again and say normal things."
"That's fair."
"Is it?"
"It's exactly what I'd do."
Peace looked at her for a long moment. Then, quite suddenly, she reached out and took Amara's hand and squeezed it, hard, once. It was gone before Amara could return it.
"You're an idiot," Peace said. "A genius, and an idiot."
She picked up her books and walked away, back straight, glasses flashing. Amara watched her go. She was crying, and she did not mind, and a first-year at the next table looked up in alarm and then, tactfully, down again.
On Wednesday, she went to see Madam Okumu.
She had never been to the Guidance and Counselling Office. She had walked past it a hundred times, a low brick building behind the Faculty of Education with a hand-painted sign and a row of potted ferns. She had always thought it was for other people. For the first years who were homesick. For the boys who failed three papers.
She went in at ten in the morning, with her hands in her pockets, and sat in a small waiting room on a plastic chair. A poster on the wall said It's OK to Ask for Help. Someone had drawn a moustache on the girl in the picture. On the table lay a stack of leaflets about exam stress.
"Amara Nakamya?"
The woman at the door was about fifty-five, small, round, with a head of short grey hair and large, calm eyes. She wore a plain blue dress and a pair of reading glasses on a chain. Her office was a tidy room with a desk, two armchairs and a shelf of battered books. She did not sit behind the desk. She took the chair opposite Amara's, with a small table between them and a box of tissues in the middle.
"Tea?" she said.
"No, thank you."
"Good. I make bad tea." She smiled. "Why have you come?"
"I don't know."
"That's a good place to begin."
Amara looked at the box of tissues. She had not planned what to say. She had thought about it on the way, and each time her mind had gone white. She had decided she would say something about stress.
"I did some things," she said. "I'm not sure how to talk about them."
"Then don't talk about them. Tell me how you feel."
"Tired."
"How long?"
"A year."
"Anything else?"
"Ashamed." The word came out like a stone. "And a bit... I don't know. Empty. Like I've spent everything I had."
Madam Okumu nodded. She did not take notes. She sat with her hands folded, listening, and her eyes stayed on Amara's face, without pushing. Time passed. Outside a bird was singing in the fern.
Slowly, with many stops, Amara told her. Not as she had told Nathan, in order, with a ledger. It came in pieces, in no particular sequence, as if the room had loosened something. A taxi, a restaurant, her mother's hands. The tomatoes. The scholarship that did not exist. Madam Okumu said little. Now and then she said, "Go on," or "And how was that?" Once she said, "That sounds very lonely."
"It was."
"Who did you tell?"
"No one. Until last week."
"And what happened?"
"I lost... I might have lost..." Amara could not finish. "Nathan. The one I love. He's thinking. My roommate's angry. My friend needs time. I've lost everything, I think."
"You've lost nothing," said Madam Okumu. "You've paid something. That's different."
"Is it?"
"A loss is when something is taken. A payment is when you give it. You told them, didn't you? Nobody found you out."
"A man told Nathan first."
"And you told him after. You did not deny it." The older woman's face did not change. "That matters, Amara. It matters a great deal. I have sat in this chair for nineteen years. Most people tell the truth when they are caught. A few tell it afterward. Very few tell it with the door wide open."
Amara did not know what to say. She looked at her hands. Then, because the door was already open, she said it.
"There was a night last year. On the roof of my hostel."
Madam Okumu did not move. Her face stayed exactly as it was, calm and attentive, but her eyes sharpened.
"Tell me."
"I'd had an abortion. Three weeks before. Nobody knew. I was..." She looked for a word, and could not find a better one. "I was finished. I went up at two in the morning. I stood at the wall." She heard her own voice go very small. "I didn't do it. I heard my mother. I came down."
"I see." The older woman's voice was low and steady. "Thank you for telling me. I know that was not easy."
"I haven't told anyone but Nathan."
"Then I'm very glad it was said in this room." She leaned forward. "I'm going to ask you a few direct questions, and I want direct answers. Do you have those thoughts now?"
"Sometimes. Not like that. Not that night. It's more like..." She searched. "Like a tired feeling. Like I would like it all to stop for a while."
"Do you have a plan? Any idea of how, or when?"
"No. No. I promise."
"Good." Madam Okumu sat back and nodded, once. "That's an honest answer, and I believe you. But I'm going to ask you for something in return. For the next few weeks I'd like to see you twice a week, not once. And I'd like you to keep this."
She took a card from her desk drawer, and wrote a number on the back in a firm round hand. It was her own, not the office's.
"If it comes back," she said, "the way it came that night, you do not sit with it alone. You call me. Day or night. Or you wake your roommate. Or you walk to the nearest person you trust, and you say, I am not safe tonight. You do not have to explain. That is all it takes, and everybody who loves you would rather be woken."
Amara took the card. It was soft at the corners, as if it had been handled many times, though she knew it had not.
"You were not weak that night," said Madam Okumu. "I want you to hear that. You were carrying more than anyone should carry alone, and the thought came to relieve you of it. It does that. It is a very bad adviser, but it is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that you were in pain, and without help." She smiled, faintly. "And you did something remarkable, you know. You listened to your mother. Most people in that place cannot hear a single voice. You heard one, and it was enough."
Amara put her hand over her mouth. For a minute she could only breathe.
"I'm going to ask you a question," said Madam Okumu. "I'd like you to answer it honestly, not the way you think you should. If a friend came to you, a girl your age, in your situation, with exactly this story. What would you say to her?"
She thought about it. It was strangely hard. She tried to picture someone else sitting in the chair. A girl with a sack of matooke, a girl in school shoes. A girl who had been so sure. The picture formed slowly, and with it a rush of tenderness so strong that it startled her.
"I'd say she was tired," she said. "I'd say it wasn't the best choice, but that she was alone, and scared, and nineteen. I'd say she was trying to save her family. And that she should be gentle with herself."
"And is that what you've been saying to yourself?"
"No."
"What have you been saying?"
"That I'm..." She stopped. She looked at the floor. "That I'm someone who can't be trusted. That I'm a person who ... who sold herself."
The words sat in the room.
"I see." Madam Okumu was silent for a moment. "May I tell you what I think?"
"Please."
"I think you made some decisions that hurt you, and others, and that some of them were wrong. I won't tell you otherwise. You would not believe me, and you'd be right." She leaned forward slightly. "But I also think you have been punishing yourself for a year, in a way that does nobody any good. The shame is not a payment. It does not erase the debt. It's only another way of hiding. If you are ashamed enough, nobody can accuse you, because you've already done it. Do you see?"
Amara stared at her.
"Both things are true," Madam Okumu said. "You did something that cost you and other people. And you are not the worst thing you have done. Those two sentences are not enemies. You have to hold them both. It's very difficult. Most of us drop one."
"How do I..."
"Slowly." The older woman smiled. "I'm not going to fix it in an hour. I'm going to ask you to come every week, if you can, for a while. We'll talk. You'll tell me things you haven't told anyone. Some of them you'll find are not as heavy as you thought. And some will be heavier. We'll carry them."
"And Nathan?"
"I can't help with Nathan." She said it without regret. "That is his. It's his to think about, and his to decide, and nothing you say today will change it. But I can help with you. And I think, in the end, that's the more important thing."
"Why?"
"Because if he forgives you tomorrow, and you have not forgiven yourself, it will not hold." She said it gently. "You'll wait for the next accusation. You'll hear it in every quiet moment. You'll hear it in his voice, even when it isn't there. A person cannot spend her whole life trying to be forgiven by other people, Amara. At some point, she has to do it herself."
Amara bent forward and put her face in her hands. She did not cry. She sat there with her palms over her eyes and breathed. It was like putting down a very heavy bag in a very quiet room, and discovering how sore her shoulders were.
"Take a tissue," said Madam Okumu. "Take two. Sit as long as you like. I don't have another appointment until eleven."
By Thursday she had sent the message.
She did it on the balcony, in the grey early light, with the green book open on her knee. She had written it three times. The first was angry. The second was pleading. The third was short.
I told Nathan everything. I told my roommate. I will tell my mother when I'm ready. You have nothing left to hold over me. Send what you like to whoever you like. I'm not afraid of you any more. Please don't contact me again.
She read it. She changed not afraid to no longer afraid, and then changed it back. Then she sent it, and blocked the number, and went inside, and drank a glass of water, and was sick in the sink.
When she came out, she sat on the floor with her back against the wall. She found she was laughing, a little, from sheer nerves, like a person who has walked off a high step in the dark and discovered the ground.
It was not true. She was still afraid. She would be afraid for a long time. But it was a true sentence in the way that a seed is a tree. And she had learned, in the last week, that you could say a true thing before it had finished being true.
He did not reply. Not that day, or that week. She never saw the white car again outside Lucky Star. She never heard what he did with the folder. Later, much later, Shanice told her that he had gone to Dubai, or Nairobi, or Kigali; the stories varied. He had a new girl. He had a new business. It seemed that without her fear, there was nothing to hold.
It was the strangest thing. She had spent so many weeks bracing for a blow, and when she finally stepped out of the way, it simply fell on the ground.
Shanice came on Thursday night, with a box of pizza and a bottle of soda and a very white face.
She sat on the edge of Amara's bed and said, "Brenda told me. I'm sorry. I know she wasn't supposed to. But she said you wouldn't mind."
"I don't mind."
"I thought you would be angry."
"Why?"
"Because it's my fault." Shanice's voice cracked, and she pressed her lips together. "If I hadn't taken you to that lunch. If I hadn't introduced you to Pato. If I hadn't..."
"Stop."
"I can't. I keep thinking about it. I tried to sleep. I couldn't. I lay in the dark and all I could see was that first day in the queue. And me, with my stupid sweets. I picked you out, Amara. I picked you because you were good, and I wanted some of it, and then I did the thing that makes it go away."
"Shanice."
"Don't look at me like I pushed you."
"I'm not."
"You are. A bit."
Amara thought about it. It was a fair thing to say. It would have been easy to lie.
"Maybe a little," she said. "Sometimes. In my head. I think it, and then I stop. Because it isn't true. You were nineteen too. You were doing what you knew."
"I knew what it would cost."
"But you didn't know what it would cost me. Nobody does. That's the thing. I'm not the same as you. I would have found my own way, in my own time, and a different set of reasons." She took a slice of pizza, though she was not hungry. "I'm not going to blame you. I'm too tired. And it wouldn't be fair."
Shanice put her face in her hands.
For a while she wept silently, rocking a little. Amara moved over and put an arm around her, and Shanice leaned against her, thin and light, a tall girl folded small.
"I've never said it," she whispered. "Out loud. To anyone. Four years, and I've never once said it. To my mother. To a priest. To anyone. You are the first person who knows."
"Then say it."
"What?"
"What you did. What you do. Say it. Just once. To me."
Shanice lifted her head. Her mascara was running, and she looked ten years younger. She drew a breath, and her mouth trembled, and she said it. Plainly, in six words, in a small shaking voice.
Amara held her until she stopped. It did not take very long. When it was over, Shanice sat back and wiped her face, and blew her nose, and looked at the pizza as though it had been a long time since she had seen one.
"I feel strange," she said.
"Good strange?"
"Light. Like I've been carrying a bucket and I've just put it down and I don't know where to put my hands."
"I know that feeling."
"Of course you do." She laughed, wetly. "You're the one who taught it to me."
They ate the pizza on the bed. It was a bad pizza, cold and greasy, and they finished it. Afterward, Shanice said, "I'm going to stop," in a very small voice, as if testing the words.
"With Ben?"
"With everything. Eventually. I don't know how. My mother's treatment. The rent." She shook her head. "I don't know. But I'd like to try. Do you think... would you help me? Not now. Later. With a plan?"
"I'm good at plans," said Amara.
"I know." Shanice smiled. "That's why I asked."
Eleven days passed.
They were the longest of her life. She went to lectures, and took notes, and handed in an assignment. She went to see Madam Okumu on Fridays, and sat in the armchair, and talked until she was hoarse. She called her mother on Sunday, and said, "I'm fine, Mama, I'm just tired," and her mother said, "Eat, my child. You sound thin." And Amara said, "I'll eat," and put the phone down and walked quickly to the toilet and was sick again.
She did not tell her mother. Not yet. She was not ready. She wrote it in the green book, under a new heading, Things I must still do, in a short list. Tell Mama. Pay back what I can. Tell Ronald.
On the eleventh day she took a taxi to Ggaba, alone, and sat on the shore.
It was not a famous place. A muddy landing with fishing boats and a row of bars made of corrugated iron. A man was selling grilled tilapia from a cart, and the smoke blew sideways in the wind. Children splashed at the edge, shrieking. A woman washed clothes in the shallows. She sat on a flat rock and looked at the water.
It was the same lake. Two months ago, in the botanical gardens, it had been blue and wide and full of promise. Today, from this side, it was brown and grey and ordinary. Waves slapped the rocks. A dead leaf spun in an eddy.
She thought about what Madam Okumu had said. You are not the worst thing you have done.
She said it aloud. Quietly, to the water. "I am not the worst thing I have done."
It sounded false. She said it again. And again, and by the seventh time it sounded a little less false, like a shoe breaking in. It did not feel true. But it felt possible. As if there was a place, somewhere up ahead, where it would be true, and she could see the road.
She took the green book out of her bag. She turned to the page where she had written What was left? All those weeks ago. The question stared up at her. Under it was Nathan's note, folded in four. THREE THINGS. YOU WERE RIGHT. I MISS THE ARGUMENTS.
She picked up her pen.
She had been asking the wrong question. She had been asking what was left of the girl who arrived with a sack of matooke, the one who had been so sure, and the answer had always been nothing. Nothing was left. That girl was gone. But that was not what the page was asking.
She wrote, underneath, in small, careful letters:
What was left is me.
It was not much. It was not a great sentence. She looked at it for a long time. A gull landed on the rock beside her, and stood on one leg, and examined her with a yellow eye. The wind pulled at the page.
What was left is me. Not the girl from the village. Not the girl in the silver dress. The one who is sitting here. The one who did all of it, and is still here.
She closed the book.
When she got home, there was a message on her phone.
It was from Nathan. It said only:
Library. Tomorrow. Four. Our socket.
She read it perhaps forty times.
He was there when she arrived. At the end of a long table by the wall, on the floor, with his back against the radiator and his legs stretched out, with a laptop closed on his knee and a duct-taped charger plugged into the socket. He looked up as she came.
He looked terrible. He had lost weight. His eyes were rimmed with red, and a faint stubble covered his jaw. He wore the same grey shirt he had worn the first night, with the sleeves pushed up, and he had a small, nervous, stubborn expression, like a boy about to say a recited speech.
She stopped a few steps away.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"You came."
"I said I would."
"You said you didn't know when."
"I know." He swallowed. "I'm sorry it took so long. I'm sorry for every day of it. I thought I needed it. I think I did. But I'm still sorry."
"It's all right."
"It isn't. But thank you." He patted the floor beside him. "Will you sit?"
She sat. Not too near. She tucked her knees up and put her bag between them. Around them the library hummed softly, the way it always did: pages turning, a cough, a distant printer.
He did not speak straight away. He held the laptop in both hands and looked at it as if it might supply the first line.
"I'll say this badly," he said. "I wrote it down. I have fourteen drafts. They were all terrible. So I'm going to just say it."
"Okay."
"I've been angry." He looked up. "More than I thought I could be. Not at you, only. At everything. At the man with the white car. At the man in glasses, whom I've never met, and have thought about every night. At myself, for being so stupid. And yes, at you. For a few days I was very angry at you. I imagined saying things. I won't tell you what. They were not nice."
"I understand."
"I walked around Wandegeya at night. Moses followed me for two streets, at a distance, like a bodyguard. I thought about the money. I thought about the apartment, and the dress, and the phone. I thought about you in all of it. And I'd get so... I would feel a thing in my chest like a fist. Not even rage. Something worse. A kind of jealousy. Of people I'd never met. Of a time I wasn't there for."
"Nathan..."
"Let me." He drew a breath. "I hate that I feel it. I know it isn't fair. You didn't know me then. You didn't owe me anything. But it's there, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't, and I told myself, whatever else, I won't lie to her."
"I don't want you to lie."
"I know. That's why I'm telling you." He rubbed his face. "And then there was something else. Under all that. It took me a week to see it. I asked myself why it hurt so much. And I realised it wasn't what you did. It was that you didn't trust me. For two years. You sat beside me every day and I thought we were close, and you were holding something so big that you could not put it down."
"I wanted to."
"I know. I do know. I'm not saying it's your fault." He shook his head. "I only mean I realised I'd have done the same thing. If I'd been you. I didn't tell anyone about my mother for a year. I didn't tell anyone I was hungry at school. I know what it is to hide a thing because it's too big to carry. And I thought, how can I be angry at you for being afraid? When I was afraid of the very same thing?"
She said nothing. She was holding her breath.
"I'm not going to say it doesn't matter," Nathan said. "I need you to hear me. I could say it. It would be easy. It would sound very good. Your past is your past, I don't care. But it would be a lie. I do care. It matters. It's part of you. It's part of how you got to be the person who said the three things and made the Prophet cry."
"He didn't cry."
"He nearly did." He smiled, faintly, and it vanished. "It matters. And I think it will keep mattering. There will be days when I think about it, and I won't like it, and I'll go quiet, and you'll have to bear with me. I might ask you things. Hard things. I might ask them at the wrong time. And you'll have to answer without flinching. And I'll have to not flinch. And we'll both be bad at it."
"I can do that."
"I'm not sure I can."
"Then say so."
"I'm saying so." He met her eyes. "I'm not perfect. I'm jealous. I overthink. I say the wrong thing and then I say the right thing too late. I'm a very difficult person. You should know that, before you decide anything."
"I know it."
"Do you?"
"I've known since the socket."
He laughed. It was a small, startled laugh, close to a sob. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye, and when he took it away, his face was wet.
"But it's not all you are," he said, quietly. "That's what I came to say. It took me eleven days, and fourteen drafts, and a lot of bad sleep. But that's the thing. What you did, it's real, and it's yours, and I'm not going to pretend it away. But it is not all of you. I've seen the rest. I saw you in the market with Mama Jalia. I saw you teach three first-years with a packet of biscuits so you could buy me a cake. I saw you stand in the rain and laugh with your whole face. That's real, too. That's more real, to me. And I don't believe the girl I know is a pretence. I think the pretence was the other one. The one in the silver dress."
"Nathan."
"I can't promise anything." He said it very gently. "I'm twenty-one. I don't know what happens. I don't know if I'll be good at this. I only know that I'd rather try than not. I'd rather be with you, and be difficult, and know the truth, than be with someone easy and not know them at all."
She was crying openly now. She did not wipe her face.
"And I want to be clear," he said. "I'm not doing it to rescue you. I don't think you need rescuing. I watched you walk into that hall and tell me the whole thing, without a wall. I don't know a single person who could have done that. I'm not saving you. I'm just... I'm choosing."
"You don't have to choose today."
"I know."
"You can take more time."
"I don't want more." He turned the laptop around, so she could see the screen. "Look."
She looked.
On the screen was a white page with a single line of text, in a plain font. Draft 15. Under it, in the box:
I have thought about it. I'm still here.
She read it. She read it again. It was the dumbest, simplest, most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
"That's the one you went with?" she said, thickly.
"It was the shortest."
"It's very good."
"I know." He smiled, tremulously. "I'm a software person. We don't have to make sense."
She laughed. She laughed and cried together, a wet, ugly, helpless laugh, and put both hands over her face, and then there was an arm around her shoulders, very careful, as if it were asking permission. She leaned into it. She felt him breathing. He smelled of soap and dust and a little of the lemon from the lake.
"I'm sorry I made you wait," he said into her hair.
"I'm sorry I made you hurt."
"Okay."
"Okay."
They sat for a long time in the hum of the library, on the floor, against the radiator, with a tangle of chargers between them and a cold plastic bag by his foot.
"I brought rolex," Nathan said eventually.
"You always bring rolex."
"This time it's hot. I bought it on the way. I walked very fast." He reached for the bag. "I thought, if she says no, I'll eat both."
"And if I say yes?"
"I'll eat one and a half."
She laughed again, and took the rolex. It was warm. It smelled of onions and egg and tomato. It was not a solution to anything. It was not the end of the story, and neither of them thought it was. But she bit into it, and chewed, and found that she was starving.
Outside, the evening came down the hill. The lamps came on along the road, one by one. And in the library, at the end of a long table, a girl and a boy shared a socket and a meal, and did not say any more, because for once there was nothing that needed to be said.