Part Eight: After
They left in stages, which was the worst way to leave something, because it meant that each small group had to walk past the people who were still there, and everyone could see how everyone else was doing, which was universally not well.
Rodrigo was the last.
He stood at the edge of the terrace for a moment, and he looked at me, and I could see him composing something — some final thing to say that would change the temperature of the moment, that would find the gap, that would produce the response that reversed the situation. He had always been good at finding those gaps. It was the quality that had made me love him, early on, before I understood that the same quality was why he could never stay in a losing position with any grace.
“I do love you,” he said. “Whatever you think.”
I looked at him.
I believed, at least partially, that he meant it. I had spent a great deal of time, in the months leading up to the divorce, trying to determine whether what Rodrigo felt for me was love or the specific attachment of a person who derived value from the feeling of being someone’s best option. I had concluded that these were not mutually exclusive, and that the answer was probably both, and that it didn’t matter as much as I had thought it did, because love without respect was not a thing I had any interest in receiving.
“I know,” I said.
He waited for more.
I didn’t offer it.
He walked down the terrace steps and across the drive to the car. I watched him go. The late afternoon light was doing what it did in Valle at this hour — going gold and sideways, catching the lake and the lavender and the edges of things in a way that made everything look briefly like a painting of itself.
The last car passed through the gate.
Ernesto closed it.
I stood on the terrace and exhaled.
