The same three weeks he’d spent coming home, eating dinner with me, asking about my day, going to bed beside me.
Not once had he mentioned that he was considering a future on the other side of the country.
“What were you planning to do?” I asked.
“If they offered it, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why ask for six months?”
He didn’t answer.
I stepped closer.
“Why, Nathan?”
Finally, he said, “I wanted to see what it was like there.”
I stared at him.
“What does that even mean?”
“Living there. Working there. Whether I liked it.”
The sentence landed harder than anything Mr. Bennett had said.
“You weren’t testing a job,” I said. “You were testing a life.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Without telling your wife that the test was happening.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“When? After you’d decided you wanted it?”
Nathan’s expression hardened.
“I wanted to know how I felt before this became a huge conversation.”
I almost laughed again, but there was nothing funny left.
“It was already a huge conversation.”
He started saying my name.
I walked away.
I barely slept that night.
At first, my thoughts kept circling back to Susan.
Her apartment.
Her knowing Nathan forgot to eat.
Her knowing about the extension.
But by morning, another memory had begun pushing through all of that.
Two years earlier, after my father died, my mother had been alone.
She wasn’t helpless, but she’d struggled.
The house felt too big.
Every small repair reminded her Dad was gone. I hated being several states away while she tried to rebuild her life.
I’d asked Nathan if we could consider moving closer.
