agreement. She breathed out. The agreement felt safe. It made a space for each of them. She turned to face him—this man who understood her as no one ever had. Even she hadn’t thought of planning for love.
“It may always be just the two of us,” he said, “but it will be the two of us.”
And this was more than she could resist.
She leaned over and kissed him. He kissed the top of her head.
“We need a name,” she said.
“A name?”
“For the agreement. To make it real.”
“It’s already real,” he said.
But she knew the power of words. “We’re out here in the middle of this space that is sometimes water and sometimes sand. Is there a name for out here?”
“Tidal flats,” he said and looked at her.
“The Tidal Flats Agreement,” she said.
And he held out his little finger, which she hooked with hers. Then he pulled her to him and kissed her and asked her to spend the rest of her life with him. They helped each other stand and continued on. Up ahead she was surprised to see that the rocks veered quite dramatically to the left. When they’d started out, it had looked like a straight shot.
PART ONE
LOVE
1
To Cass, he was just Ethan, the man she’d been married to for almost three years, the man who curled into a ball as he slept and who liked to read People magazine, but to the rest of the world, he was the photojournalist behind The Afghan Woman and the famous Portraits of Afghanistan. He was the “Photographer with the Soul of a Nation.”
With no direct flight from Kabul, he came home by way of Dubai, the nonstop due in at 6:06 a.m. Add to that delays, customs, baggage claim. She didn’t just pull up to the curb; she’d made it a ritual to park and go inside, to sit in the atrium drinking coffee while she waited for his text, then to stand behind the roped-off area that assured arriving passengers of enough space to exit, her eyes locked on the airport escalator on the other side of the empty corridor watching for his curly black hair. Watching his tired eyes find hers. His ears like wings, no smile—that was Ethan. Which made her smile.
Instead of navigating around the rope, he came straight to her and dropped a bag from each hand, wrapping his arms and body around her, the rope between them nothing after sixty-three days—the longest they’d ever been apart. Only then, when she could smell the tangy shaving cream he’d used in the airplane bathroom, did she allow herself to feel every drop of missing him, that wave knocking her under at the same time that it began to recede.
Sometimes, even before their apartment door shut all the way, they began to shed their clothes, leaving a trail to the shower. Their first meal—eggs and bacon, toast with jam—eaten standing in the light-filled kitchen, each of them by that point too hungry to wait. Day two just the opposite, unfurling in slow motion. For the sake of time zones, they would plan to rise at a normal time but could never do it. When eventually they did, she would sit on the counter while he made coffee, happy he didn’t like the way she made it so she could watch him roam the kitchen where he seemed more like something exotic than something that belonged. They would stay in their pajamas, watch movies, do his laundry. Day three would take the shape of a day, but one with a deckle edge. Computers on laps opened as an afterthought, some part of him touching some part of her. But by day four, neither could resist the siren call of the real world.
On this day four, as they lay in bed, jackhammers from the construction site across the street revved up. Ethan jumped. She reached for him, but he was already standing, and her arms landed in the warm indentation where he no longer was. He picked up a pillow from the floor and threw it at her, something the first one to leave the bed often did, their way of saying they didn’t want to leave the other behind. She turned to watch him cross the room, her eyes fixing on the boomerang-shaped scar that dipped below his waist until he disappeared into the bathroom.
With one kick, she extricated her feet from the sheets and rolled out of bed to their wall of windows. Sunlight peeking from behind the buildings in downtown Atlanta. Between here and there, traffic on the connector. The green on the trees, sparse but already there, now at the beginning of March. It would only be a matter of months before everything fell into place—Ethan home for good and Cass in charge at Howell. Planning, that’s all life took. A little planning.
She could hear the shower, could feel the humidity rising. Ethan almost never shut doors. He said he didn’t want anything between them. But there were often continents between them. And that endless gray ocean.
But soon there wouldn’t be. She stretched, feeling the world expanding around her. The windows misted over. She drew a heart with her finger and felt like a teenager. They were about to enter a new phase, one where alone would finally be wiped off the map. The shower stopped, and she looked over her shoulder. When she turned back to the window, the heart was already gone.
Ethan emerged with a towel around his waist. She tapped the ottoman away and stepped backward into the easy chair, sitting with her knees to her chest. Boxers, button-down, jeans. Soon he’d head to his studio, but he’d be home later this same day—like a normal husband.
“Sorry about the timing of this Boston trip.” He glanced over while threading his belt through the loops. “I’m not ready to leave you yet.”
“Sometimes you are?”
He tilted his head in her direction as he sat on the end of the bed. Brown socks, city boots.
“Supper request?” she said.
He stood and scooped his wallet from the oblong wooden bowl on top of the dresser, then he leaned over her, his hands on the arms of the chair.
Normally, she didn’t enjoy being trapped.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he said.
“To Boston?”
“Think about it.” And he tweaked her nose as if he were about to claim he’d stolen it by showing her his thumb. “You know I don’t care about dinner.”
“Maybe I’ll just grab something from the market.”
He left the room, and she hopped up, getting to the front door in time to hold it open, in time for the kiss that only had to last eight hours.
Before he disappeared down their third-floor hallway, he turned and said, “Tidal Flats, babe.”
She smiled, eased the door closed, and leaned back against it. Sunlight poured through their French doors, filling the room. The morning in full force. After three days of Ethan, she missed the Fates.
In the bathroom, she picked up her fat-toothed comb and parted her straight, blonde hair in the middle. At the end of December, right after Ethan left, she’d had it cut shoulder-length, but now the ends fell down her back again.
She
