CHAPTER 77: The Kindest Goodbye
They'd come up here on a Thursday in June, before any of it had a name. She'd found a roof access door propped open with a brick and said, "Come on," like it was obvious, and they'd stood up there with wine in gas-station cups watching Pasadena do its early-summer thing below them, and at some point he'd stopped watching the city and started watching her face.
He hadn't told her that.
The roof was colder now. December, an hour before sunset, the sky doing its Los Angeles thing where the light turned dense and orange before it quit. They'd come up with coffee in proper mugs this time, which was an improvement and also a thing neither of them had commented on.
Penny had her hands wrapped around her mug. Her hands tightened around the mug.
"I've been trying to figure out how to start this," she said.
"You don't have to figure it out," he said. "However it comes out is fine."
She turned to look at him. Her face had the quality of someone who had been carrying something carefully for a long time and had finally reached the place where they could set it down.
"I love you," she said. "I want to start there. Because what I'm going to say next isn't — it doesn't undo that."
He waited.
"I can't stay," Penny said. "I mean, I could. I could turn the role down and stay, and I'd probably be okay." Her voice was even. Not performed even — genuinely, carefully steady. "But okay isn't — I'd always know there was a bigger version and I chose not to go. And I'd be good about it for a while, and then one day I'd be angry, and the anger would have somewhere to go that wasn't myself." She stopped. Looked at the mug. "And I really, really don't want to be angry at you."
"You'd be right to be," he said.
"That's the problem." She almost smiled. "You'd just sit there and be reasonable about it and I'd have no one to actually be angry at."
He looked at the city. The 210 was starting to thicken — rush hour building, the red lines of brake lights threading west. He'd driven that freeway a hundred times. It always looked better from up here than from inside it.
"I made a decision," he said. "A while ago. Privately." He turned to look at her. "You should know it had nothing to do with you asking. I decided that if you were going to go — I wasn't going to be the reason you stayed."
Her expression shifted.
"Why?" she said.
"Because the version of you that stayed would get smaller, and I like the version that doesn't."
A pause. Down on the street, a car horn. Someone's phone going off somewhere in the building below them.
"That's the thing," Penny said. Her voice had gone quieter. "You've been — you never asked me to be less, not once. Most people don't even know they're doing it. But you just." She stopped. "You made room. You always just made room."
He had nothing to say to that. He took it, the way you took something that was both true and cost you something, and he held it.
She set her mug on the ledge. He set his beside it. They stood there for a moment without speaking, and the sky kept doing its slow drain from orange to something deeper.
"I don't want to call it a failure," she said.
"It isn't one."
"We were good."
"We were." He meant it cleanly and completely. "This was one of the — this was a good one, Penny."
She made a sound that was half-exhale, half-something else. Then she turned toward him and he opened his arm and she came into the hug the way people hugged when the thing they were holding together was the grief of a thing that had already ended, and they both knew it, and neither of them was pretending otherwise.
They stood like that for a while.
He was genuinely, thoroughly sad. Knowing it was coming hadn't softened it at all — if anything the opposite; he'd had longer to understand what he was about to lose. He'd spent weeks being careful and composed and carrying the weight of the knowing, and now, up on the roof in the December cold with the city moving below them, he let the sadness exist without building a room around it.
It was real. It had been real.
That mattered.
Eventually Penny pulled back. She looked at his face. Then she said, "Your coffee's going cold," and something in her voice was both completely wrecked and trying not to be, and he said, "So is yours," and she laughed — actually laughed, a short, surprised sound that she didn't plan — and he laughed too, and for a moment both of them were standing on a December rooftop laughing over nothing and it was, against all probability, the right thing.
"Okay," she said, after. Wiping one eye with the back of her hand, not making a performance of it. "Okay."
"Okay," he agreed.
They stood there until the light had drained to the particular blue-grey that preceded dark, neither of them moving to go first.
Two mugs on the ledge, going cold.