Page 36 of His Wall

She was looking at the river. The morning wind was coming off the water, lifting a dark strand of her hair across her cheek and she did not push it back. The line of her jaw was set. Her gray eyes were on the chop.

I did not push.

We walked.

"Why do you draw buildings?"

I stopped.

She kept walking for two steps, then she stopped too. She turned back to me.

"What?"

"You draw buildings. In your desk drawer. I've seen the edges of the sketches. You close the drawer when I come in, but not always fast enough."

I rubbed the back of my neck.

"You notice things you shouldn't, Claire."

"So do you."

We looked at each other.

A bird went by overhead. The lab and its owner came back the other direction, panting now, the dog's tongue long. Claire's hair lifted and fell against her neck.

I started walking again. She fell in beside me.

"I used to want to be an architect."

She glanced at me. She did not say anything.

"Before the Vanguard. Before finance. I wanted to draw things. Houses, schools, towers… I had three drawers of sketches in my dorm room in college."

"Why didn't you?"

"Life got in the way."

"That's a nonanswer."

"It is."

I stopped walking again. She stopped with me.

"My mother got sick. I needed money, not dreams."

It came out before I could put a grin on it.

I had not said my mother out loud to a woman I was attracted to in three years. I had not said I needed money in a sentence with anything other than a punchline at the end of it. Those two things sat in the air between us with no joke in front of them, and I felt the morning shift a quarter-inch on its axis.

Claire looked at me.

She did not say I'm sorry. She did not put her hand on my arm. She did not do any of the things the women I had told this to in the past had done. She looked at me with her gray eyes and her chin a quarter-inch up, and she let the sentence be what it was.

Recognition. That was the closest I could put a word to it.

She was looking at me like she knew the shape of the sentence from the inside.

We started walking again. The path curved up to the railing that ran along the high bend of the river. She stopped at the railing, put both hands on the top rail, and looked out over the water. I stopped beside her. Her hip was a foot from my hip. The wind was off the river, and the loose strand of her hair was across her cheek again.