Page 113 of The New Place

“And I want to know what you think about that,” Ned says. “Because this has a lot of layers, so it’s your decision too. Do you want her to have this now? Do you want me to give it to her, or do you want to? Or both of us? Do you want to wait until she’s older and can understand better? If she does have it now, she shouldn’t hang on to it. Chances are she’ll lose it.”

“It’s not important. Whatever you’d like. And she can do with it what she wants to.”

“Okay, but no. If you want to pretend it’s not sentimental, that’s one thing, but the cost alone⁠—”

“The value doesn’t matter.”

“To you. I don’t go around handing Peggy something that could help pay for college.”

“If that’s what you’d like to do with it, I’m sure you could sell it and⁠—”

“Abbot! Are you listening to yourself? Can we please talk about this, for real?”

“We are.”

Ned lets out a breath. “This is not talking. I want to know what you think.”

“Then just ask.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do? How can we be engaged and not able to discuss this?”

“We aren’t.”

“Talking, I know.”

“Engaged.”

“Aren’t we?” Ned asks. “We didn’t get engaged. Nobody proposed. This wasn’t the plan. But we’ve told everyone, so doesn’t that make this real?”

“You said you don’t want anything to change.”

“I don’t want to do anything to mess up our relationship. Talking about how we feel isn’t that.”

Fine, Abbot thinks. “So how do you feel?”

Ned throws his hands up. “Confused? Uncomfortable? Frustrated, for sure. There, now you go. Your turn.”

Abbot touches the soft fur of Baxter’s ear. No. He doesn’t want to. And he can’t, not like Ned just did, simply offer up a bevy of words so Ned will understand.

Although understanding isn’t the issue. Ned is understanding. That’s perhaps the root of the problem—or the root of a problem, at least. Abbot has plenty of them, too many to hold in his mind, and none he wishes to share, not in the face of Ned’s pushing and pushing.

“We have to be able to talk,” Ned says softly. “I just feel stuck with you right now.”

Stuck. Yes. Suddenly, achingly, Abbot wishes for the normal pace of their last year together, the scant time they’ve had together, the lack of momentum to their relationship. Nothing moving them forward, because they were always arrested by the workweek, the distance between them, their time a constant cycle of saying hello and goodbye.

He checks his phone, knowing it’s a prevarication. There’s surprise, then, in finding a new email. From Beverly, he sees, sent late enough in the workday that Abbot had already gone to meet his father and Liesl at their hotel.

Final steps, the subject line reads. Abbot quickly taps it. “Ned. Check your email. This came to both of us.”

Ned pulls his phone out as Abbot scans the message and then reads it again slower.

“Oh damn,” Ned says. “This is what I’m really reading, right?”

“It is.” Abbot looks over it once more to make sure. “She needs us to call her first thing in the morning, but there’s a budget for a position for you, and support from the department.”

Ned points at his phone. “So we just call her tomorrow and that’s it?”

“It seems so. She says she’s putting together the formal offer letters.”