Vesna was not simply some casual friend.
She is the woman whose name appears on his phone at around midnight.
The woman who puts a hand on his shoulder slightly too often at company dinners — and not possessively, which is what I assumed for about a year.
Comfortably. Which is worse, and which I did not have the vocabulary for until about the April.
You put a hand on somebody’s shoulder like that when you are in something with them.
The same woman who once looked straight at me, across a table, in the February, and said: he tells me everything.
Not flirtatiously. Not as a dig.
She said it the way you say a thing to somebody you have assumed is already in the arrangement — pleasantly, over a dessert, with four other people at the table who heard it and thought nothing of it.
That is the single most important four seconds in this entire account and I did not understand it for three weeks.
For months he had dismissed every concern of mine as jealousy.
He used that word eleven times between the January and the June.
I counted. Not at the time.
Afterwards, going back through eleven months of messages on a Tuesday evening in the March with a glass of wine and a notebook — which is a thing nobody should ever do and which I did for about four hours.
Eleven uses of jealous about a woman who had not once raised her voice about any of it.
Now he expected her to move into my house. For six months. With a newborn. In the room with the lock on the inside.
I said, calmly: six months?
Yes.
And where will she sleep?
The guest suite.
Not the guest room. The suite.
Which has its own bathroom, its own entrance off the side of the house, and a door that locks from the inside.
He said it without hesitating. No I suppose and no we could put her in. He had already walked through that room, mentally, with somebody, and allocated it.
At that moment I knew exactly what I was going to do.
And I had known for about four months. Everything had been drafted since the April.
All that had been missing was a date, and he had just handed me one across a kitchen island while scrolling through his phone.
He mistook my silence for submission. He smiled.
He said: see? I knew you’d be reasonable.
PART 3
