And one week ago it would have provoked such a simple answer. But now, she was not so sure. She bent her head and looked at her hands clasped in her lap. A week ago, instantly, unreflectingly, she would have said no; she would have said, Go ahead, move out, leave me alone. Tonight she sat listening to the deep nocturnal silence of the house and knew she was poised on the brink of perhaps the most momentous decision of her life. This was the man. There was something in him that reached out to her, that called to something deep in her own nature. She was suddenly quite sure that if she said no to Leo now, she would spend the rest of her life haunted by an irredeemable sense of failure and loss. Even now as she sat silently contemplating her own tensely clasped hands, she had a sense of something beginning to slip irrevocably away. She ran her tongue across dry lips. “I’m afraid,” she whispered. “I know you are.” Her head bent farther forward. She had guarded herself for so long the thought of throwing away all those years of safety terrified her.
