What You Don't Say

There was a language between them that had no words.

Lena had not wanted this. After her husband's death she had learned to say things directly. With Daniel it was different -- not because he was not direct, but because there were things that stood between them without needing to be said.

He brought her coffee sometimes. Without announcement. He set it on her papers with a brief nod: there is coffee, because you forget to drink it when you are marking.

That was true. How he knew, she had never asked.

In March he stopped beside her in the rain. She sat next to him while Vienna passed in the dark. Neither said anything significant. At the end he said "See you Monday" instead of "Goodbye."

Not see you Monday. But: I thought about you all day.

Or perhaps it was simply see you Monday. That was the problem with languages without words: they could be misunderstood.

There were evenings when she came home and thought: I want to tell him what happened today. She had had this with her husband. The first thing she had missed after his death -- not the extraordinary things, but: having someone to tell what happened in the supermarket on a Tuesday.

She had thought she didn't want this anymore. Which was perhaps not the same thing.

On a Friday evening in April they sat in his kitchen. The lamp on the windowsill. He had eventually brought it home.

"I'm afraid," Lena said.

He stopped eating. "Of what?"

"Of getting used to it. To you being here. And then --" She stopped.

He was quiet in the way that thinks.

"I'm afraid too," he said.

"Of what?"

"That it won't be enough. What I can give you."

Lena looked at him -- this man ten years younger who did not feel younger, who carried his grandmother's lamp into every office and knew when she forgot her coffee.

"That is the most wrong thing you have ever said," she said.

He looked up.

"It is enough," she said. "More than enough."

Outside it was April and Vienna and the lamp's light fell crooked and warm on the table between them.

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