There are two suitcases in my hallway that don't belong to me, and one of them still has the airline tag from a honeymoon I attended as best man. I am Leon, thirty-four, and an hour ago my brother's wife rang my bell with her coat buttoned wrong and asked if the offer I'd made at Christmas, drunk and half-joking, still stood.
It did. It does. I am trying very hard not to think about why.
Nadja sits at my kitchen table with both hands around a glass of water she hasn't drunk, and she looks smaller than I have ever seen her. Eight years I have known her. Eight years of family dinners where I sat across from her and talked to my brother and learned exactly how long you can look at someone without it being noticed.
“I left,” she says, to the glass. “I'm not going back this time.”
“You don't have to explain.”
“I know. That's why I came here.” She looks up. Her eyes are dry, which is worse. “Two weeks, Leon. Until I find something. Then I'm gone and you never have to hear about it.”
My flat has one bedroom and a sofa that is too short for me. I tell her she takes the bed. She argues, briefly, without conviction, and gives in, and when she stands to carry her cases through she stops in the doorway of the room I sleep in and looks at it, at my books, my unmade bed, the photograph on the shelf from a summer before she met him, in which she is laughing at something I said.
She picks it up. She turns and looks at me with the photograph in her hand, and I see her understand something, or begin to. “You kept this,” she says. Two weeks. One door between us. And the thing I have never said out loud is standing in my bedroom, holding the evidence.
