The autumn is looking quiet

Danny said the autumn is looking quiet. He said it at the sink, lightly, facing away from me, while rinsing a pan. I know that delivery. That is the delivery for information he has already finished processing and has concluded I do not need to carry. It is not deceit. It is a kind of load-bearing politeness that he does instead of worrying out loud. I said okay. Then after a minute I said, how quiet, and he said we are fine, and I said that is not what I asked. He turned round then, actually turned round, and said: Nora, we are fine. And we are. I believe the sentence. The Caldwell retainer covers the mortgage on its own and he has two bids out and one of them is a near-certainty. I could reconstruct the whole picture from things he has told me over the last month. And I could not get my shoulders to come down for about an hour afterwards, and I sat on the couch doing nothing with my phone in my hand while he watched something, and he put his hand on my ankle at some point which is his version of asking. The problem is not the information. The problem is the delivery, and that I have heard that exact delivery before about something that turned out to be much bigger than the sentence suggested, and my body has filed the tone rather than the fact.

He knows which time. I am not going to write it out tonight. It was four years ago and it is dealt with and we are past it, and I am aware that I have now said "I am not going to write it out" in about four entries, which from the outside probably looks like something.