Page 111 of Knocked Up

"It isn't," I said, "because I'm not on my own. That's the actual answer. It's taken me nine months to be able to say it in a sentence."

And then I told him about the clinic. I had not said it out loud to anybody, not to Sofia or Violet or myself in any way that had words in it.

"The ground is ours," I said. "That's the thing that changed and I don't think either of us has sat with it. For twenty-four years that building has been run by somebody who was going to lose it. My mother ran it that way and I ran it that way. It's why she poured forty feet of covered concrete in 1998 so she'd never have to walk home. It's why I've never taken a Sunday.

"It isn't that any more. It cannot be taken off me. And I keep waiting for somebody to come and correct the mistake. Nobody's coming. So now I have to run it like a woman who's going to have it for thirty years. That's a completely different job and I've never done it."

"And it doesn't need me the way it needed me," I said. "That's the part that hurt. Because if it doesn't need me at four in the morning, then I have to find out what I am when nothing's on fire."

Beckett did not say anything.

"Ask Sofia," I said.

"Ask her what?"

"To stay. Properly. Not a locum, not by the day. Partner. Her name next to mine on the sign under my mother's."

"Is that what you want?"

"Yes. And I've wanted it since February. I haven't asked her, because asking somebody for something is…"

"Yeah," he said. "I know."

I asked her at half past five that afternoon in the corridor, badly, with a chart in my hand. If I had planned it I would not have done it.

She said, "Yes. Obviously. I will need my own key to the drug cabinet and I'm going to reorganize your imaging room, it is a disgrace." Then she cried for about four seconds and denied it while it was happening.

We signed at eight o'clock that night.

I read all thirty-one pages and made three notes in the margin, one of them substantive. Fran got the relocation clause struck on the Monday. I initialed every page the way I have initialed everything in this house since December, in my own hand, on the right.

Then I put the pen down in front of him and he signed it. He did it the way he does the runs and the four o'clock bottles, with no ceremony at all.

Except that when he got to the end he sat there with his hand still on the page.

"Page twenty-two," he said.

"I read page twenty-two."

"Read it again."

It is four lines of extremely boring language about the assignment of playing rights. The words no-move appear in it twice.

"It means nobody can send me anywhere," Beckett said. "Four years, in writing, filed with a league office in New York. Not the coach. Not Delisle. Nobody."

"I know what it means."

"Tessa."

"I know what it means," I said, and my voice did something, and I put my hand flat on the table.

Because I have known that man since I was twenty-one and every single thing about him has been provisional. He has been moved four times. He has spent eleven years in a job where a phone call at one o'clock on a Tuesday can put a man in another time zone by Thursday. I have spent nine months in a house listening for exactly that. In February I stood in a gravel lot in the cold with no coat on pretending to look at a gate.

And a man who could be taken away at any moment went into an office and made himself impossible to take away. He did it on paper, in a filing cabinet in New York.

"That's not a contract," I said.

"It's definitely a contract, it's thirty-one pages."