Page 88 of Knocked Up

"Because a gift can be refused," she said, "and a system can't."

She put her face in her hands a second. When she took them away she was not crying. She was doing the other thing she does, which is looking straight at a problem.

"All right," she said. "Then I have to put mine down, and I've been sitting here ten minutes trying to get out of it."

"You don't have to."

"I do, because you just did." She pulled the cardigan across herself. "I have made needing anybody into a crime, Beckett. Not a weakness. A crime. I could not take a decaf off you in December without making a face about it. In October I would not let you carry a bag of food eleven feet.

"And I've called it strength, and I want to say something about my mother and I'm not going to be fair to her.

"She built the house onto the clinic," Tessa said. "Everybody says that like it's romantic. She poured forty feet of covered concrete between a surgical suite and a kitchen door in 1998 so she would never have to go home. She was never once not at work. And she was the best person I ever met. She died at fifty-four owing money on ground she'd rented for twenty-four years. I have arranged my entire adult life to be exactly like hers and called it loyalty."

"Tessa."

"And this is the thing I actually came out to say and then didn't say for an hour." She looked at me. "It was never about being kept. It's in the clause. I wrote it in red at that table, I will not be kept. I meant it when I wrote it and it isn't true.

"I was never afraid of somebody paying for something. Since I was twenty-two I have been afraid of needing somebody out loud. I have been afraid of being the one left standing there holding the need. That's all it is. It isn't complicated and it isn't strength. I have organized a hundred and six animals and a brother and a business around it."

I did not say anything, because there was nothing to say to it that would not have been smaller than it.

"You stayed," she said. "I opened the door at three in the morning and told you to go. I know how to do that, I'm extremely good at it. And you sat down on my couch."

"Yeah."

"Nobody has ever done that," Tessa said. Her voice went, once, and she put her hand up. "Don't. Don't come over here, I'll lose it."

I stayed where I was, which was the hardest thing I did all week.

We did it at the board, because that is where the law is in that house.

She got the marker off the top of the refrigerator, which she can reach if she wants to, which I had suspected since January.

"Draft it," she said.

"You're the one who wrote the charter."

"You're the one who does capitals."

So I drafted it, and she stood at my shoulder and made me change one word.

Amendment two. Full disclosure, both directions, effective immediately. No party shall decide a material thing alone. This includes money. This includes the other party's own good.

"That last sentence is aimed at me," she said.

"It's aimed at both of us."

"It's aimed at me specifically. Leave it in."

Then I said the thing I had been holding since about five in the morning. I said it before she initialed, on purpose. I did not want it sitting under a signature she had already given.

"I want to ask you something out loud," I said. "In advance. Before I do any part of it."

"All right."

"Walt's house has been sitting empty since December. It's paid off, he owned it outright. It's mine. I've had a number on it since January because a man came and gave me one." I put the cap on the marker. "It's four hundred and sixty. Your formula price is four ten."

She did not say anything at all.