The Almost-Goodbye
ほとんどの別れ
The taxi rank was empty, and so they were granted a few more minutes neither had asked for.
They stood facing each other in the cold, at the exact distance that two careful people keep.
"Well," he said again, and the word had become the small coin they kept spending on this goodbye.
She stepped forward to embrace him, the ordinary embrace that old friends are permitted in the street.
But the embrace, once begun, did not end when an ordinary embrace would have ended.
His hand rested on her back, and neither of them moved to be the first to make it merely friendly.
She turned her face slightly, and for one second his mouth was almost against her hair.
He nearly said her name, the way he had nearly said it on the stairs twenty storm-lit years before.
He was on the point of speaking the sentence that would have made everything after impossible to undo.
She felt the words gathering in him and pressed her hand, once, against his coat, meaning: don't.
The pressure of her hand was a whole paragraph, and it asked him kindly to leave the page unwritten.
So he did not say it, and the not-saying was the most thing he had done in years.
They stayed like that a moment longer than friends, and a moment shorter than the truth would have liked.
Then, by some unspoken agreement, they both loosened their arms at precisely the same careful instant.
"Right," she said, stepping back, and the word closed a door so quietly that it made almost no sound.
Her eyes were bright, and she blinked, and chose to blame the cold, and he let her have the excuse.
"It was—" he began, and then let the sentence , because no adjective could survive being spoken.
"It was," she agreed, completing the incomplete, and the shared said more than grammar allows.
A taxi turned into the rank at last, its light a small yellow arriving to end their .
"That's me," she said, though the taxi belonged to no one until she claimed it as her way home.
He opened the door for her, an old , and she paused with one hand on the cold metal frame.
For a heartbeat she looked as though she might, after all, say the thing they had both refused all evening.
Then she smiled instead, the smile people use to put a lid gently over something still faintly glowing.
"Take care of yourself, Daniel," she said, and his name in her mouth was almost too much to bear.
"You too, Nora," he answered, and folded the whole unsaid letter into the ordinary, survivable words.
She got in, the door closed, and the glass rose between them like the ending of a chapter mid-sentence.
Through the window she lifted her hand, not quite a wave, more like a hand resting against the .
Then the taxi pulled away, and the space where she had stood held the shape of everything not chosen.