"Are you all right?"
"I'm okay."
"Are you going to be able to call me later?"
He tried to disguise it. He tried to soften it. But years of learning him, inside and out, meant that it was all transparent to her now. "I don't know," she said. "Don't, don't stay awake or anything, I just..."
Ned laughed softly. "I know you'll stay awake," she said, soft, teasing. She dropped her voice, even more softly. "I love you."
"I love you."
She stood motionless for two minutes after hanging up the phone, her shoulders set. Sam was asleep, tired from the plane ride from his parents' back to their house on the edge of the lake, drowsed with turkey and stuffing and macaroni and cheese.
Frank was unpacking his suitcase, in his shorts. His hair was tousled. He had dumped the dirty clothes out of his suitcase and into a laundry basket, and was repacking with new, fresh clothes.
Another assignment.
"I'm sick of this," she said, aloud, without even meaning to speak. Frank looked up at her and Nancy could only hold his gaze for a moment before dropping it. She put her hand on his to still it. "I'm so sick of this."
"Of what," he said.
She sat down on the bed and ran her hands through her hair, trembling all the way down to her bones. "We never finish any of our conversations."
He held a pair of tube socks, matched and rolled, in his hand. He looked down at them vaguely, dropped them into the suitcase, then shoved it to the side and sat down next to her. "We finish conversations all the time."
"No we don't," she said, quiet but insistent. "How can we finish anything when I never know if you'll be here tomorrow."
"We've been over this."
"You were never meant to be married."
The realization dawned, then. The slow look in his eyes. "Are you unhappy, Nan," he said faintly.
She started twisting her engagement and wedding rings around her finger, over and over. "I've been unhappy for three years," she said. "Since the day I figured out that this," she said, gesturing at his half-full suitcase, "this isn't a job for you, or a hobby. This is your life. This is who you are and what you do, and when you are, there's no space left for me. No time. The further away you go, the less space I have, to move, to breathe, to do anything."
"Nan," he said, and reached for her hand.
She let his hand rest on hers, passive. Not acknowledging. Not denying. "Frank," she said, and looked at him, looked straight and full into his face for the first time in the longest time. "You're not a bad person. You're so kind and so gentle and so, so good," she said, and sighed, tears rising in her eyes. "When you're here, you are a good father. You are. And you do try. And you do want to be," she said. "But I didn't ask you to be half a father, I told you I was pregnant because I thought you deserved the chance to be her full time father. But you aren't."
"What do you want me to do?"
She could see pain in his eyes. She pulled her hand out from under his and his hand slipped to her knee.
"Let me go," she told him, the first tear streaking down her cheek. "Let us go."
He started, then, as though he had been shot, the blood draining from his face. "Sam?"
Nancy ran her hand through her hair and nodded. "I need some time," she said. "I want you to say I can go to Chicago and stay with my father for a while and we can think about this."
Frank's face was hardening into a mask, but not an unkind one. "What about Christmas," he breathed. "What about, with, everyone."
She smiled, humorless, sad. "We can talk again, then," she said quietly. "In River Heights."
He looked down at his hands. At anything else. "When," he said.
"Tomorrow," Nancy said softly. "Tomorrow, I'll take her. They have a space available. In Chicago. They can, she can go there for, until..."
He reached out for her, his fingers against her upper arm, and she could feel it, the soft slow spark she had once sworn to Ned she would never act on again, but it found no answer in her. "Nancy," he said, and his voice broke.
"Frank, I'm sorry," she said. "I swear, I'm so sorry. I never meant for this to happen. And I've tried, I've tried so hard," she said, and she buried her face in her hands, gasping in sobs. "The pills helped for a while, Sam was enough for a while..."
"Pills?"
They talked. They talked for hours, and for the first time in years he was listening. He had never known about the pills in the Midol bottle. He had never known how lonely she was.
"And Callie? Was it Callie that day in the park?" Nancy finally asked, the last twinge of jealousy rising in her.
Frank bowed his head. "We talk, Nan," he said. "She-- I know she still has feelings for me, but, we have lunch, we talk, she's my friend. You know that."
"I thought it could be," she began, and looked down at her own hands, a small self-depricating smile on her face. "And that's all."
Frank nodded. "Everything happened, so suddenly," he said. "Back then, with Sam. You say we never finish any conversations but I feel like she and I have never said goodbye, either. Maybe that was wrong of me." He looked away.
She put her arms around him, then. "It's not wrong," she said gently. "Frank, I do care about you, so much, but this... this is not how it was supposed to be."
"Because I'm gone all the time."
She smiled, sadly. "We're the same," she told him. "Don't you see, if not you it would be me. But we have Sam, and as much as I care for you, this isn't ever what I wanted for her."
"I wanted to give her everything," Frank said simply. "You do know that."
Nancy nodded. "I know. That's what I wanted too."
--
To Sam, it was just another trip.
Frank gave Sam the longest hug, and so many kisses, so many promises that he would see her again soon. But they had decided, during that long sleepless night, to not make a big deal out of it. Sam traveled so much that this was just another visit to her grandfather.
"I love you, Sam," Frank told her, in the middle of the busy terminal. He was still taking his flight out, and Nancy had not wavered on her decision to leave. When he asked her, with hope still standing in his eyes, to reassure him, tell him it was all temporary, just a small break, she just gave him the same sad little smile.
She released a long breath and took off the rings, made to hand them to him, but he refused them, folding her fingers around them. "Keep them," he said. "Until I see you again."
She sighed. "Okay," she whispered, and patted him on the shoulder, her lower lip trembling. "Be safe, all right?"
He nodded. "Love you."
Sam waved as they walked out of Frank's sight.
--
"You okay?"
Nancy put her head on her father's shoulder. Sam went to bed easily enough, in her mother's old room, absolutely nothing off or wrong in her world. Carson put his arm around her shoulder and Nancy felt herself, finally, start to cry, after a day of putting up a brave face for Sam. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the rings, handed them to her father.
"Put them in a safe place," she told him through her sobs. "Until, until I can give them back to him..."
Carson hugged his daughter. "It's okay," he said. "It's going to be okay, baby."
She put her arms around him. "He still doesn't understand," she whispered. "He doesn't. In a month he's going to come here, and I just know he'll ask me if I'm ready to come back home yet, but, I can't, Dad..."
"Then you can't," he said, reassuring, rubbing his palm over her back. "Stay here as long as you need to."
He only went to bed after she assured him that she would be all right, she only needed warm milk, the quiet lull of the television set, white noise to make her sleep, to bring her oblivion. She watched infomercials without seeing them, wrapped in her bathrobe, her cheeks rubbed raw and red, salt dried hard on her skin.
Sam would be going to school in the morning. Nancy stared, uncomprehending, at the clock on the cable box. It was late, so late. She reached up and swiped at her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. Wondered if Frank was sleepless, wherever he was tonight.
Wondered.
She went into the kitchen and splashed cold water on her face until the flush was fading, the tears washed off her skin. She scrawled her cell phone number on a scrap of paper and stuck it to the refrigerator door with a magnet. She took her cell phone out onto the front porch and called a cab, after she had dressed and brushed her hair and kissed her sleeping daughter's cheek.
When Ned answered his door, Nancy was rubbing her bare left ring finger.
"Hey," she said. "Um. I've. I left him. I left my husband."
All he did was reach for her, pull her inside with him into his dark apartment, closing the door behind her. He put his arms around her and held her to him and she closed her eyes, breathed him in. The room was still, cool.
"What are you going to do," he asked.
"Stay with my dad," she told him, her face against his shoulder. "Until we figure everything out."
"Are you... are you doing okay?" he asked, hesitant.
"I'm okay," she said. Then she smiled. "I'm here. I'm okay."
They walked hand in hand to his bedroom, and it started to catch up with her, the fatigue and the exhaustion. She felt drained and heavy as she climbed in with him, into his arms.
"Ned."
His hand on her side, palm over her stomach, fingers curling under the hem of her shirt, against her skin. "When do you have to leave," he said. Then he smiled. "Do you have to leave."
"I have to take Sam to school in the morning," Nancy said, apologetically. "And I need to get home before Dad wakes up and starts wondering where I've gone."
He nuzzled against her cheek, and she reached up to trace her fingertips down the line of his jaw. "Ned, I love you."
"I love you too," he whispered. He pressed a kiss against her ear. "Promise me one day we'll stop having to say goodbye to each other."
"I promise," she whispered.
