The Hidden Palace (The Golem and the Jinni, #2)

by Helene Wecker

“It was wrong of me to stay away,” he said. “But I knew that I would give in, that you would convince me. And I had to convince myself first. I had to change my own mind, or else resent you for changing it. Does that make sense?”

“But how will I know if he’s lying?” “You won’t,” Anna said, “any more than the rest of us ever do. You’ll just have to decide whether to believe him.”

Fifteen years; and yet it seemed only days ago, no time at all.

He’d given her his silences, and she’d filled them with her fears. And perhaps it was true, what he’d said on the rooftop—they simply weren’t good for each other, and never had been. But we could’ve tried harder, she thought. Both of us.

The windblown language, too, was like nothing the Golem had ever heard. The words were brief, yet they held oceans of meaning: a language with depth enough to satisfy centuries of exploration, so one might describe a rock, a sunset, a lover, all to the final detail.

Only the children mourned the loss. At night, they’d take their hoarded bits of steel and glass from their treasure-boxes, and make all sorts of wishes upon them, and try to convince themselves of a magic that they’d once believed in without question.

He nodded; he felt suddenly, unutterably sad. It’s a beautiful language. I miss it terribly. Why had he never spoken to the Golem in this way? Why had he never told her these plain and simple truths?

The important thing is that we talk to each other, she’d said. Arguments are uncomfortable, but silence is worse.

I love you. She’d never said that to him, not once. They’d traded so many words in their countless arguments that it was hard to believe one small phrase, not even a breath’s worth, might’ve changed matters. Perhaps it was the only thing that could have.

She wanted to object, to descend with him into the subway, to take him back to Brooklyn and her carriage-house—to hoard time with him against his absence, enough for a night, a week, a year.