Chapter Eight
Through the Glass, Not Past It
Senna spent the better part of Thursday telling herself she wasn't planning anything, and spent the evening proving that a lie.
The day had started ordinarily enough: a nine o'clock call with Baumgartner confirming the separation was proceeding on schedule now that Colt's signature was on file, a mid-morning session with Petra that ran clean and fast, an afternoon spent finally catching up on the backlog of administrative work she'd let slide for two weeks.
By the time Imke left at six, the studio felt, for the first time since the confession, almost like an ordinary Thursday, and Senna found herself reluctant to end it, staying behind under the thin excuse of paperwork that could easily have waited until morning.
She stayed late again, not editing this time, simply working through the actual backlog of notes she'd been putting off, and when Colt arrived at his usual hour she didn't make him wait outside the door.
She unlocked it before he'd even crossed the street, and when he stepped in, careful as always about where his boots landed, she gestured him toward the front room's small sofa, the one clients used while waiting for sessions, and went back to her desk like this was simply how Thursdays worked now.
He sat. He didn't ask questions, didn't push for more than she offered, just watched her work with the same unhurried attention she remembered from three years ago, the loading dock, the first time he'd witnessed her direct a session through glass and gone quiet with something that had looked, even then, like reverence.
"Can I ask what you're doing," he said finally, after twenty minutes of silence broken only by the click of her keyboard.
"Cleaning up a translation. The German rhythm doesn't match the English pacing in a few places, so I rewrite the line until it does.
" She didn't look up. "Most people think my job is technical.
Levels, EQ, making sure nothing clips. That's maybe thirty percent of it.
The rest is this. Making sure the words someone else wrote land the way they were supposed to land in a language that isn't the one they were born in. "
"That's not technical. That's translation of feeling."
"I've never heard anyone put it that way." She glanced up, surprised, and found him watching her with an expression she hadn't seen in weeks, something unguarded and entirely without agenda. "Most people just think I'm bossy about commas."
A small, real laugh escaped him, quiet and rusty, like a muscle that hadn't been used in a while. It startled them both.
The quiet that followed was different from the one they'd been living in for two weeks.
Senna felt it settle over the room like something almost companionable, and it frightened her more than the silence at the kitchen table ever had.
She kept working, or pretended to, aware of him in her peripheral vision the way she used to be aware of him across a crowded room in the early days, before familiarity had dulled that particular current down into something she'd stopped noticing.
It hadn't dulled. She understood that now, sitting twelve feet away from a man she'd told to get out of her life two weeks earlier, feeling the same pull she'd felt the first night he'd stood in her loading dock in the rain.
"Can I tell you something," Colt said, after a while, his voice lower, and something in his posture shifted, the careful stillness giving way to something more exposed. "About that night. Not an excuse. Just the truth, since you asked for one word and I don't think one word ever really covered it."
Senna set down her pen. "Okay."
"The Reinholt job went wrong in a way that got someone hurt.
Not me. A kid Rein had brought in six months earlier, nineteen, green, shouldn't have been anywhere near what happened.
I was the one who was supposed to have his back and I made a call that put him in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He's alive. Barely, for a few days. He's alive now.
" Colt's hands were loose on his knees, but his voice had gone flat in the particular way she now recognized as the sound of him holding something down by force.
"I didn't come home that night because I didn't know how to walk through our door with that on me and pretend it was an ordinary Tuesday.
I went to the clubhouse instead, because everyone there already knew what that world costs, and I didn't have to explain it or protect anyone from it.
Katja was there. She'd seen men come back from bad nights before.
She didn't ask me to be fine. She just didn't make me perform being fine, the way I thought I had to for you.
" He looked at his hands. "That's not a justification.
It's just what was actually happening. I drowned, and instead of driving the extra fifteen minutes home to the person who actually loved me, I reached for the nearest thing that asked nothing of me.
I've hated myself for that choice a lot longer than you've known about it. "
Senna sat with that for a long time, the studio quiet around them, turning the confession over the way she'd turn over a difficult take, listening for the seam, and finding, for once, none.
It was uglier than she'd expected and somehow more honest for it, none of the softening a lesser man might have reached for.
"You never let me see you drowning," she said finally. "Not that night. Not any night in three years. I used to think that was strength."
"I thought it was strength too. I'm starting to understand it might have just been cowardice with better posture."
She didn't say anything to that. She didn't forgive him, didn't reach for his hand across the small distance between the desk and the sofa, but she also didn't ask him to leave, and the two of them sat in a silence that had, somewhere in the last hour, stopped being adversarial and become something closer to companionship, strange and unearned and entirely unlike anything Senna had let herself feel since the confession.
She found herself, at one point, telling him about Petra's early nerves, about the specific technique she used to coach an actor out of fear and into truth, and he listened the way he always used to listen, total and unbroken, asking small, genuine questions that proved he was actually following rather than simply waiting for his turn to speak.
It was, she realized somewhere near midnight, the first real conversation they'd had in longer than she wanted to admit, longer than the six weeks since Katja, longer perhaps than the whole last year of a marriage that had quietly, without either of them noticing, stopped talking about anything that mattered.
When he finally rose to go, a little after two in the morning, she realized with a small, disorienting jolt that she'd gone the entire evening without once thinking of her mother, without once running the old, automatic math that measured every departure against a nine-year-old's oldest wound.
"Thank you," she said, at the door, "for telling me the actual thing instead of the version that would have made you look better."
"That's the only kind of telling that means anything to you. I'm trying to learn to speak your language instead of just standing outside it."
She locked the door behind him and stood in the dark front room for a while, listening to his engine start and fade down the street, and thought, with a clarity that startled her, that for the first time since Tuesday, watching him leave hadn't felt like relief.
It had felt like missing him already.
She climbed the stairs to the loft slowly, turning that feeling over the whole way up, unwilling to name it and unable, this time, to talk herself out of having it.