𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒆𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏

February 27. 33 days left.

The landlord was waiting for him on the stairs.

Gerald Feehan. Five foot four. Bald on top in the way that suggested hair had once been there and had made a considered decision to leave. He wore the same grey cardigan every day, buttoned wrong, and he stood on the second-floor landing with his hands behind his back like a man delivering news of war to a country that didn't know it was losing.

"Fayiz," Gerald said.

"Gerald."

"I don't like doing this."

"I know."

"Two months, son. November and December. January I let slide because it was Christmas and I'm not a monster. But February's nearly done and I've got a building to run and the pipes on the second floor are doing something I'd rather they didn't and I need the..." He stopped. Looked at his shoes. Gerald's shoes were enormous for a man his size, brown brogues, polished, the kind of shoes that belonged to a taller man. "I need the money, Fayiz. I'm sorry."

Fayiz leaned against the railing. Theodore sat on the step below and looked at Gerald with the expression of a dog who had chewed this man's shoes and was prepared to do so again if circumstances required.

"I'll have it by the end of next week," Fayiz said. He didn't know if this was true. The gallery on Water Street had sold the seagull painting last month, and there was a commission for a restaurant mural that might come through, and he had savings that weren't savings so much as a jar of coins and small bills, what was left of the framing shop money he'd brought from Queens, which had been less than it should have been because New York cost what it cost and the bus to Montreal cost what it cost and St. John's was the end of the continent but it still charged rent. He'd find it. Or he wouldn't. It was thirty-three days from mattering.

"And I'll be out in April," he said.

Gerald blinked. "Out?"

"Moving out. First week of April."

Gerald's face did something complicated. The landlord mathematics: relief at the resolution, confusion at the timeline, the vague guilt of a man who suspected he was the reason.

"Now, I hope I haven't been... I mean, the place isn't perfect, I know the radiator's temperamental, and the window in the bathroom doesn't close properly, and the kitchen tap has that thing where it..." He gestured. The gesture encompassed the tap's behaviour, which was unpredictable and occasionally hostile. "I hope I haven't been a bad landlord."

Fayiz laughed. A real laugh, surprised out of him. Gerald Feehan, five foot four, wrong-buttoned cardigan, enormous shoes, standing on the landing of a building with temperamental pipes and a hostile tap, worried that a tenant's departure was a performance review.

"You've been fine, Gerald. It's not you."

"Because I can fix the tap. I've been saying I'd fix the tap..."

"It's not the tap."

"The radiator?"

"It's not the radiator, Gerald."

Gerald looked at him. At Theodore. Back at him. The look of a man who was trying to understand something that existed outside the categories of taps and radiators and rent.

"Right," Gerald said. "Well. End of next week, then. The rent."

"End of next week."

Gerald nodded. Adjusted the cardigan. Buttoned a button that was already buttoned. Went downstairs with the heavy tread of a small man in large shoes.

Fayiz stood on the landing. Thirty-three days. He'd told Gerald he'd be out in April the way you told someone you had plans for the weekend: casually, as if the plans were normal, as if the weekend was a thing you expected to arrive, as if April wasn't the month he'd agreed to stop being alive.

Theodore looked up at him from the step.

"What do you want, colonizer?" Fayiz said.

Theodore said nothing.

They went upstairs.

At the studio, he put Theodore's bowl down and filled it and stood at the window while the dog ate. The canvas on the easel was new, white, untouched. He'd bought it three weeks ago and hadn't started it. He kept starting the diner studies instead, the counter, the clock, the particular angle of the booth from his seat, and telling himself those were practice. They were not practice.

☕︎

He'd been staring at the email for a week.

Not reading it. He'd read it once, the night it arrived, standing in the kitchen with his phone in one hand and a spatula in the other because he'd been making dal and the dal had burned and the smoke alarm had gone off and Theodore had howled and in the middle of all of it, the smoke, the howling, the burned lentils, he'd read Rifa's name on a screen for the first time in two years.

He'd read it once. That was enough. The sentences had installed themselves behind his eyes the way her face had installed itself on the canvas in the studio: permanently, without permission.

Fayiz. I know you probably don't want to hear from me. I know I have no right. But I'm in Toronto and I've been in Toronto since September and I saw a painting of yours on someone's Instagram and I thought: he's still painting. He didn't stop. And I need to see you. I need to tell you things I should have said in that apartment. I made a mistake. You know I made a mistake. Please. Rifa.

Please. Rifa.

He'd told Mollie on Thursday. Watched her do the thing she always did: put the wall up, say the right words, use the work voice. Then watched her take the wall down because he'd asked her to, and what was underneath was something he thought about every night in the studio while the paint dried and Theodore slept and the green scarf hung on the hook like a question he couldn't answer.

I'm losing something I don't even have.

She'd said that. To her hands. To the table. To the space between them that was never empty.

He'd told himself he needed a week to decide. About Toronto. About Rifa. About the email that sat in his inbox like a grenade with a pulled pin. He'd given himself seven days to think clearly, to separate the old wanting from the new, to figure out whether the pull he felt toward that email was love or habit or the gravitational force of a person who had once been his entire solar system.

Seven days.

It had taken three.

By Sunday he'd known. That had been four days ago. He hadn't told her yet.

He'd been painting, the diner again, a different angle, the counter this time, Dottie's coffee pot, the crooked clock, and he'd reached for the ochre, the warm one, and his hand had known before his brain did. The diner belonged to their mornings and their mornings belonged to Thursdays and Tuesdays and he was not going to Toronto because Toronto was the past and the past was a country he'd already left once and he was not, he discovered, a man who left the same country twice.

The decision had been simple. Explaining it would not be.

• • •