Page 61 of Pretend You Love Me

Page forty-seven. La luce filtrava attraverso le persiane. The light filtered through the blinds.

It is a beautiful sentence. I’ve had it for four visits and done absolutely nothing with it.

The morning moves on. The door keeps chiming. Maisie finishes her blueberries and starts a new project involving a wooden ring. Milo forgives the board book and begins a diplomatic reconciliation. Luca says something witty and devastating to a man who asks whether the cortado is “worth it,” and the man buys two.

I stay at the window seat until noon, at which point I have translated three lines and drunk two coffees and sat in the hissing, warm, slightly chaotic company of a place I have absolutely no professional reason to be in four days a week, and I pack up my things with the unhurried pace of someone who is in no hurry at all, and nod goodbye at the counter.

It is not a place I work from anymore. I think I’ve known that for a while. I just hadn’t said it even to myself until just now, and somehow that makes the walk to the door feel entirely different.

***

The weeks that follow don’t broadcast themselves. That’s the thing nobody tells you about actually letting someone in, it doesn’t happen in a single decisive moment with dramatic weather and appropriate music. It happens in weekday takeaways and broken baby gates and films you don’t finish, and by the time you notice, you’re already somewhere you can’t describe as setting the groundwork.

We eat on Elsie’s living room floor the first Tuesday after the café closes late, takeaway containers spread across the coffee table, the twins down for the night, the quiet that follows two successfully sleeping infants carrying its own type of relief. She steals my spring rolls without asking and doesn’t apologise. Not even a glance in my direction, just her hand across the table, already dipping into my container with the calm confidence of someone who has decided this is simply how things work now. I look at the space where my spring rolls were and then at Elsie, who is watching something on her laptop with total focus, spring roll already in her mouth.

“Those were mine,” I say.

“They were on the table,” she says, without looking up.

I don’t press the point. I just eat the dumplings.

The baby gate is two weeks later. It’s a supposedly thirty-minute assembly job that takes me closer to forty-five because the instructions appear to have been translated from something by someone who only partially understood the destination language, and because Milo sits eighteen inches from my left knee for the entire duration and considers the instruction manual a light snack. I fish the corner of a diagram of a hinge mechanism out of his mouth three separate times. He retrieves it twice. By the end, we have reached an understanding.

“You’re doing great,” Elsie says from the doorway, mug in hand, ankles crossed, looking nothing like someone who intends to help.

“The instructions say this takes two people.”

“It says can take two people. Very different.” She tilts her head at the gate, which is almost upright. “You’ve nearly got it. The left bracket is slightly off.”

“I can see the left bracket.”

“You’re handling it really well,” she says, the tone of someone narrating a wildlife documentary about moderate competence.

I tighten the left bracket. The gate holds. Milo immediately tests its structural integrity with both palms and seems satisfied. I sit back on my heels with the particular exhaustion of someone who has just been personally defeated by flatpack hardware and still counts it as a win.

“Thank you,” I tell Elsie. “Your support was invaluable.”

“You’re welcome,” she says warmly, and takes another sip of her tea.

The film happens on a Wednesday, something she’d been meaning to watch for months, and she’s asleep by the forty-minute mark, the collapse of someone whose body has finally made a unilateral decision. Her head finds my shoulder in stages, the first drift, the correction, the second drift that she doesn’t correct, and I stop paying attention to the screen entirely. I sit very still for another hour and a half because the alternative is waking her, and I am not going to do that. I watch the credits roll on a film I couldn’t describe even slightly if asked. Something happened. There was weather. I think someone cried at an airport.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is the weight of her head on my shoulder, and the way her breathing slows into something completely unguarded, and the fact that I have apparently become someone who sits through unknown films in companionable silence and considers this one of the better evenings in recent memory.

Maisie starts reaching for me sometime in November. Not just accepting me when I’m close, reaching. Arms up, the full infant summons, the one that means you, now, immediately, I have decided. The first time it happens I’m crossing the living room on my way to the kitchen, and she’s in the bouncer, and she just raises both arms at me with the solemn expectation of someone who has already made up their mind. I pick her up before I’ve consciously decided to. Hold her against my shoulder while she cranes her neck to examine something on the ceiling. Spend a full minute there before it registers that there was no pause between the reaching and the picking up. No hesitation at all.

I stood in Elsie’s living room with Maisie weighing about as much as a bag of flour against my shoulder and think, when did this stop being something I had to actively think about.

By December I know the café alarm code. I know the floorboard outside the nursery that creaks if you step left of centre, and I always step right, automatically, without deciding to. I know that when Elsie goes quiet she isn’t disengaging, she’s processing, and the thing you don’t do is push her for the first ten minutes, and the thing you do is make sure there’s something warm nearby when she surfaces. I know she’ll read the last chapter of a book first if she’s anxious about it. I know she makes a sound like a sharp inhale when something is genuinely funny before the actual laugh arrives.

Harper starts texting me about books in November, direct, brief messages that treat the exchange as already established, as if we sorted this out at a meeting I can’t remember attending. Did you read the Carver? What did you think of the ending? I always respond. It becomes a thing.

Liv insults my tea in December, a withering critique of the brand I brought to a Sunday dinner, delivered with the precision of someone who has thought about this. “That’s not tea,” she says. “That’s a concept of tea. It’s what tea looks like in a film where no one did research.” She then drinks two cups of it. I count. I don’t say anything.

Luca pulls me aside one evening in January, after the twins are down and Elsie is in the kitchen doing something with the blender. He stands very still for a moment, which is unusual enough on its own to make me pay attention. Then he says, with the quality of someone who has put the theatrics away deliberately: “I will end you if you hurt her. I want that on record.”

“It’s on the record,” I tell him.