The Knowing

The purifier in the corner cycles higher. She stopped noticing it months ago, which is its own kind of information. The light through the blinds is amber at an hour when it shouldn't be.

Nathan leans forward, elbows on knees. Jess has her arms crossed, turned slightly away on the couch. Not fully. Just enough. Eight weeks ago she identified their pattern. Pursue-withdraw. Jess reaches, Nathan retreats. The more Jess presses for a decision, the more Nathan needs time. She has a name for it and the name changes nothing.

"I'm not saying never," Nathan says. "I'm saying I don't know yet."

"You've been saying that since March," Jess says.

The silence holds. Three seconds. Then: "Nathan, can you say more about what 'not yet' means for you?"

He rubs his jaw. "It means I don't want to make a decision we can't undo because we're scared."

"And Jess, when you hear that—"

"I hear stalling." Flat. Not angry. "The offer's good until June. After that we're still here with no coverage and a house we can't sell for what we owe."

She notes it. We're still here. How here has turned heavy in Jess's mouth. Something to get out of.

Her own husband left a laptop open on the kitchen counter last week. Listings in Duluth. She hadn't said anything. He hadn't asked her to.

"I want to notice something," she says. "You moved from the offer to the house to the coverage in one sentence. There's a lot in that sequence. Can we slow it down?"

"They're the same thing," Jess says.

"They might be."

This is what she does. Slowing the cascade, separating strands, helping two people hear what they're actually asking each other. Eleven years. She can name the cycle, feel Nathan's nervous system climbing from across the room just from how his breathing has changed. Accessible, responsive, engaged. The frameworks hold. They hold for everyone in this room, in this light that shouldn't be this color.

At her own kitchen counter, none of it works.

Nathan is quiet. She watches him decide whether to say the thing. Knows what it is before he opens his mouth, because she has heard her husband not say it, has felt the shape of it in the silence between them at dinner, in the way he closes the laptop when she walks in.

"I don't want to bring a kid into—" He stops. Looks at the window. The light is wrong and they all know it and nobody says so. "I just think we should figure out where we're living first."

Jess's arms tighten. "If we wait until everything's figured out, we wait forever."

The thermostat clicks and the vent overhead pushes harder. She could intervene. Name what just happened. The pregnancy conversation and the relocation conversation have fused, and she needs them to be two things, because two things can be separated and worked.

"I hear both of you," she says. "Nathan, you need the ground to feel stable before you can make that choice. Jess, you're saying the ground isn't going to feel stable, so waiting is its own decision."

They both look at her. Their impasse, described with precision. Accurate and useless, like a diagnosis with no treatment plan.

"What would it look like," she says, "to make a decision together without needing certainty first?"

Good question. She's asked it before, other couples, other rooms. It opens something. Nathan and Jess look at each other, actually look, for the first time in twenty minutes, and she holds the space for them, the purifier humming, the amber light pressing through the blinds like weather that won't name itself.

Four-fifteen. She walks them out. Twelve minutes before her next session.

In the bathroom she washes her hands and looks at herself under the fluorescent light, which is the only honest light left in the building. There is a succulent on the windowsill that someone put there two years ago. It is alive. It does not require much.

Her phone has a text from her husband. Dinner tonight or are you late?

She types Home by 6.

Three cars in the parking lot. The building across the street has been for lease since January. She sits in her car with the engine off and the windows up and does not open the listing he sent last night. The one in Duluth. Big yard. The price that means something has gone wrong there too.

She starts the car. The air comes on by itself.