Chapter 145: 145. When I was About To Walk With Petricia... Haruka Decides To Come As Well

Gerald didn’t answer immediately. The pause had the quality of someone who has said a true thing and is now surprised to find themselves in the truth of it.

"I don’t know," he said finally. "I just know that when I’m at the machine, I feel it..."

"That feeling... And then the machine doesn’t land, and the feeling’s gone, and I keep going because I want it back."

"And when you come home?"

"When I come home, it’s gone," he said. "And everything is exactly what it was."

Petricia was quiet.

"I’m not saying this to hurt you," Gerald said. "I know that it does."

"I know you’re not," she said.

The exhaustion in her voice was not the anger-exhaustion typical of someone in an argument, but rather the other kind, the structural kind.

"That’s the part I can’t—" She stopped.

"The part you can’t what?"

"The part I can’t keep waiting for to get easier," she said. "Gerald... I’ve been waiting five years for something between us to get easier."

"What do you mean, between us?"

"I mean us," she said. "I mean, how we are together."

"We’re fine," Gerald said, and he said it in the specific way of someone who is deploying the word "fine" as a shield rather than a description.

"No," Petricia said quietly. "We’re functional. That’s not the same thing."

The silence that followed was different from the previous ones. It carried a weight, the kind that arises when a truth has been articulated for the first time, leaving both people in the room to confront it together.

Gerald muttered something low and brief that Mike couldn’t decipher.

Petricia uttered his name, just once, in a way that conveyed more than just a name. It was as if she were saying, "I see you, and I see us, and I need you to recognize it too."

"You know what... I need some fresh air..." she said and then walked towards the door.

And then the door of the management office opened.

’Oh shit—!’

Mike stepped out of the alcove and into the hallway at the same moment, because appearing naturally in a corridor is easier when you appear to be arriving from somewhere rather than occupying a fixed position.

Petricia came out fast, not running but close to it, with the tight posture of someone who needs to be in a different room before they lose the composure they are holding with both hands. She turned toward the lobby rather than the stairs, and her eyes went to Mike, and she stopped.

For a moment they simply looked at each other. Her face displayed the expression that people often have when they are trying to hold back something that requires a larger outlet.

"Sorry," she said, which was the wrong word for the situation but also the first available one.

"Don’t be," Mike said.

"I didn’t hear you come in," she said, and she was straightening herself slightly, not performing composure but assembling it, piece by piece, in the way she always did. "I didn’t know you were here—how long have you been here?"

"I just came through the door," Mike said easily. "I heard from the stairs that you were busy."

"I waited."

She looked at him, and something in her face moved, recognizing the kindness in the version of events he had just offered her. She did not question it.

"Right," she said.

She pressed her lips together briefly. "Yes."

Behind her, Gerald appeared in the office doorway. He looked like a man who had been in a room with something difficult and had not emerged from it intact.

He looked at Mike with the expression of a man who has just done something he regrets and is now encountering someone he trusts in the immediate aftermath, which is a very specific kind of relief and a very specific kind of shame arriving simultaneously.

"Mike," Gerald said. His voice was that of someone who had used up most of what he had and was running on the remainder. "I didn’t know you were back."

"Just got in," Mike said.

Gerald looked at Petricia, then at the floor between them, and finally back at Mike; his expression revealed the specific exhaustion of a man who knows he is on the wrong side of a situation and lacks the resources to find his way to the right side.

"She needs it."

"Can you? I don’t know how—" He stopped and ran a hand over his face. "She’s not going to listen to me right now, and I don’t blame her, but... she shouldn’t be alone."

"I’ll go," Mike said. "I’ll talk to her."

Gerald looked at him for a moment with the complicated expression of a man being offered help by someone he does not deserve help from, at least not in this context, who understands this and accepts anyway.

"She trusts you," he said. "More than she trusts me right now, which she does." He stopped again. "It’s what it is."

"Gerald," Petricia said, her voice level, precise, and exhausted. "Don’t ask Mike to manage me."

"That’s not his job."

"I’m not asking him to manage you," Gerald said, with the slightly wounded quality of someone who knows the distinction matters and is not sure they can make it clearly. "I’m asking him to be there."

"Those aren’t always different," she said.

The hallway was quiet for a moment, all three of them standing in the particular configuration of a situation that did not have a clean solution.

Mike looked at Petricia.

"I was going to get some air before going upstairs," he said. "If you want the company."

It was framed as his own inclination rather than anyone’s management, and she received it that way, with a small look that acknowledged the distinction.

At that moment, the door to Unit 5 opened, and Haruka stepped out into the hallway in her yellow sweatshirt and socks, holding her travel cup from habit, looking between Mike, Petricia, and Gerald with the alert expression of someone who had heard everything through a wall and was deciding what to do about it.

"I heard," she said simply.

"Can I... no..." she looked at Petricia. "I’m coming too."

Petricia looked at Haruka, and something in her expression softened slightly, the way it does when someone you didn’t expect to show up shows up anyway. "You don’t have to."

"I know," Haruka said, and stepped into the hallway in her socks and then apparently thought better of the socks, went back in for five seconds, came back out in her sneakers, and said, "Okay, let’s go."

Gerald, standing in the office doorway, watched the three of them move toward the lobby entrance. He said nothing. Mike glanced back at him once as they went through the door, and what was in Gerald’s face was the look of a man watching something leave a room and understanding, with the particular clarity that bad evenings sometimes produce, that the leaving was partly his doing.

Mike held the door.

’What a stupid fucking husband...’