Chapter 24
David
The bar occupies the back half of the building, separated from the wreck rooms by a thick wall and an impressive amount of soundproofing.
It’s dim, brick-walled, all Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood, with a chalkboard menu featuring drinks named things like RAGE QUIT and SHATTERPROOF.
A group of twenty-somethings in boiler suits are laughing too loudly at the far end, flushed with destruction and cheap whiskey.
Nora strips off the gloves and drops them into a bin by the door, then unzips her coveralls to the waist and ties the sleeves around her hips.
Underneath, she’s wearing a deep green blouse that has gone damp at the collar and between her breasts, and I have to look away before my brain abandons civilization altogether.
“Sit,” she says.
I blink. “Are you ordering for me now too?”
“Yes.” She tilts her head. “Do you want to object?”
“No,” I say, which is becoming a concerning pattern.
The corner of her mouth lifts. She goes to the bar.
I sit in a booth near the back, because if I stay standing, I may do something adolescent and spectacularly ill-advised, like haul her into the nearest storage closet and finish what we started between the broken printers.
My body is still keyed too tight from the kiss.
My mouth tastes like her. My hands remember the line of her waist through canvas, cotton, and heat.
Jesus.
Nora returns a minute later with two low glasses the color of amber varnish and slides into the booth opposite me.
“What is it?”
“Bourbon,” she says.
I take the glass. The first swallow burns all the way down, clean and medicinal in the way only bourbon can be.
Across from me, Nora lifts hers and drinks too, her throat working once, twice.
We sit with it for a minute, the noise of the bar a low blur around us, the aftermath of smashed things still humming under my skin.
Then, because the room we just walked out of has stripped me down to blunt-force honesty, I hear myself ask, “When were you married?”
Her fingers tighten slightly around the glass.
“A long time ago,” she says first, buying herself a second. Then she tips her head, eyes on the bourbon instead of me. “I was twenty-six when we got married. Divorced by thirty-four.”
Twenty-six. Eight years. I do the math automatically, then hate myself for doing it like a deposition timeline.
“Was he an asshole?”
Her mouth lifts. “That depends on how technical you want to get.”
“I’m a lawyer. Technical is my love language.”
That gets a real smile out of her, brief and tired. She takes another sip. “The short version is that I couldn’t have children and he found someone who could.”
For a second all I can do is look at her.
Nora doesn’t look up. She rotates the glass once between her palms like she’s aligning herself with some private axis, then lets out a small breath through her nose.
“He was very gracious about it at first,” she says, voice even. “There were appointments, specialists, and terminology I didn’t know I’d one day be able to recite from memory. There was a lot of hopeful waiting. A lot of very expensive disappointment.”
My grip tightens around the bourbon glass.
“And then?” I ask.
“And then it became clear that the problem wasn’t going to solve itself through positive thinking and ovulation apps.” She gives a short, dry laugh with no amusement in it. “I was still grieving, and he was already shopping for alternate futures.”
Something hard and ugly moves through my chest.
“What a bastard.”
Her eyes lift to mine then, and there’s a flicker of surprise there. Maybe because I say it so flatly. Maybe because I don’t soften it into something polite.
“He wasn’t cruel about it,” she says.
“That doesn’t make him less of one.”
The corner of her mouth twitches, but her gaze goes distant again.
“No. I suppose not.” She takes another sip.
“He started staying later at work. Then there were ‘friendships’ that were probably more than friendships before I was willing to admit it. Then there was one specific friendship. A woman at his office—Claire.”
I listen without interrupting.
“He told me at our kitchen table. Very calmly. Very reasonably. He said Claire was ‘able to give him what he needed.’ Like I’d failed my duties and was therefore being made redundant.
” She takes another sip. “They have a son now. Oliver. Greg’s mother tells me all about him each year inside her Christmas card.
I’ve never known if she does that to be kind or cruel. ”
“It can be both.”
“It is both.” She looks at me. “That’s the worst part. Nothing about the end of my marriage was simple enough to hate cleanly. He wasn’t a monster. He was just a man who wanted something I couldn’t provide, and I made it very easy for him to leave.”
That phrase. That exact phrase.
Made it easy.
The same thing she did to me. In her kitchen, on the counter, five weeks ago.
I was still inside the aftermath of the most reckless, desperate, extraordinary thing I’d done in years, and she reassembled her composure like a woman putting on a coat and said we had a night, people have nights.
She held the door open with such grace that walking through it felt like the only reasonable option.
She made it easy.
Jesus.
“Was it?” I ask, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears. “Easy?”
“It was the safe thing.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Grace is what you call it when you’re too afraid to make someone feel guilty for leaving.”
I set my glass down with more care than it deserves.
“Grace,” I repeat, because the word offends me on principle. “That’s a very elegant name for self-erasure.”
Nora’s eyes flick up to mine. There’s no defensiveness in them. Just recognition.
“I’m not saying it was healthy,” she says.
“No. You’re saying it was survivable.”
The bar noise keeps moving around us—ice in shakers, a laugh from the boiler-suit group, a bartender calling out an order—but our booth feels sealed off from it.
Like the whole building has narrowed to Nora’s face and the small shift in her mouth when she realizes I’ve understood something she wasn’t trying to make obvious.
“That’s usually the bar, isn’t it?” she says quietly. “Not healthy. Just survivable.”
I think about my marriage. About Kelsie leaving in increments and then all at once. About the years after, when survival became the only metric that mattered. Keep Michaela fed. Keep Michaela safe. Keep the lights on. Keep moving. Don’t ask whether any of it is a life.
Then I think about Nora in her kitchen, trying to hand me an exit with both hands because wanting something had become too dangerous to do without apology.
I lean forward, forearms on the table. “You did it with me.”
Her breath catches. Barely. But I hear it.
“David—”
“In your kitchen.” I keep my voice low. Not sharp. Just exact. “Afterward, you made it easy. You gave me the script. We’re adults. It happened. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” My jaw tightens. “That wasn’t grace.”
She goes still.
For a second I think she’s going to deny it, or soften it, or do what she always does when she’s hurt: turn herself into something smaller and easier to carry.
Instead she looks at me with a kind of exhausted honesty that feels more intimate than the wreck room kiss.
“No,” she says. “It wasn’t.”
The answer lands in my chest and stays there.
“Why?” I ask.
She laughs once under her breath, not because anything is funny. “Because you looked at me like you regretted it while you were still inside me.”
The words hit so hard I feel them in my teeth.
For one suspended second, everything in me blanks. The bar. The glass in my hand. The low music and the laughter from the other end of the room. All of it drops away under the force of that single sentence.
I see it then with nauseating clarity—not my memory of that night, but hers. What she must have felt when I pulled back. The way I’d stared at her like a man trying to survive a detonation. The way I’d gone from kissing her like I was starving to acting like I’d set fire to my own life.
Not regret for her.
Terror of myself. But what she got was regret. Of course she did.
“Nora,” I say, and my voice is wrecked.
She lifts one shoulder, a tiny motion that tries for indifference and lands nowhere near it. “You don’t have to explain.”
“I absolutely do.”
She looks down at her glass again. “David—”
“No.” I lean in farther before I can stop myself. “No, because if you’ve been carrying that around for weeks, I’m not letting it sit there one second longer.”
Her fingers still on the bourbon. The booth light catches the gold in her hair, the tiredness around her eyes, the careful set of her mouth. She looks braced. Like she expects impact and intends to absorb it neatly.
I hate that. I hate that she expects neatness from pain.
“I didn’t regret you,” I say.
Her lashes flicker, but she doesn’t look up.
“I regretted losing control,” I say more quietly.
“I regretted the timing. The risk. The case. I regretted that the first time I touched you the way I’d been wanting to touch you for months, it happened in the middle of a custody disaster, with your job, my daughter, and a thousand ways to make a mess of both our lives. ”
Now she looks at me.
Her eyes are glass-bright, steady, searching my face like she’s trying to determine whether I’m telling the truth or just performing a cleaner version of it.
“I regretted the context,” I say. “I regretted that I couldn’t give in to it without immediately having to calculate the blast radius. But I did not regret you. Not for one second.”
The bar noise keeps happening around us, but it feels far away now, filtered through something thick and private.
“I thought—” She stops. Swallows. Starts again. “You said it couldn’t happen again.”
“Yes.”
“That sounded a lot like regret.”
“It was meant as panic.” I exhale hard through my nose. “And cowardice, probably.”
Her mouth twitches at that, but only faintly.
I keep going because if I stop now, I’ll lose the nerve to say any of this with the honesty it deserves.
“I have spent most of my adult life confusing restraint with virtue,” I say.
“If I want something enough, my instinct is to lock it in a box and call that maturity. With you, that’s what I did.
I wanted you, so I told myself no. Then I kissed you anyway.
Then I tried to apologize for kissing you and we ended up sleeping together. So I—”
“Put me in a box?”
“Something like that.” I drag a hand over my mouth. “Which, for the record, was a poorly constructed box made of tissue paper and chewing gum.”
A breath escapes her. Not quite a laugh, but closer than we’ve been in the last minute.
“I was trying to do the right thing,” I say. “And I was doing it badly. Those aren’t the same thing as regretting you.”
Nora’s gaze drops to my mouth for one treacherous second, then lifts again. “You were very convincing.”
“I know.” Shame moves through me, hot and exact. “I’m sorry.”
She studies me in that unnervingly direct way of hers, like she’s looking for the cleanest line through a tangled thing. “You really didn’t regret it.”
“No.”
She chews the inside of her lip. “And what about now? I can’t have children. I’ll never have children. And even if I could, I’m probably too old anyway.”
“No.” The word comes out immediate. Absolute.
“I have regretted a great many things in my life. Marrying Kelsie. Letting my father choose too much for me for too long. Not asking for help when the nanny had to leave because I convinced myself I could manage the schedule alone.” I lean back just enough to look at her properly.
“I haven’t regretted sleeping with you. I’ve regretted that it scared me.
I’ve regretted the way I handled it. I’ve regretted every day since that I couldn’t seem to stop wanting to do it again. ”
Nora goes still in a way that tells me I’ve finally said the thing as plainly as it needed saying.
“David.”
I don’t know what’s left to lose in this conversation, so I keep going.
“You asked me, in your kitchen, what about you.” My throat tightens around the memory.
Her hand in mine. Michaela’s footsteps in the hall.
“I didn’t answer because if I had answered honestly, I would have said too much.
I would have said that you mattered already.
That you mattered in ways I didn’t know how to safely contain. ”
Nora’s lips part, but no sound comes out.
So I say the thing I should’ve said weeks ago.
“I’m in love with you.”
There it is. No legal framing. No caution tape. No footnotes, no qualifiers, no strategically delayed admissions. Just the truth, sitting between two bourbon glasses in a bar attached to a room where we just beat the hell out of a television.
For a second she simply looks at me.
Then she laughs once.
Not because it’s funny. Because sometimes a feeling is too big and the body reaches for the wrong door on the way out. Her hand flies to her mouth, eyes suddenly wet, and my whole body tenses because I can’t tell whether I’ve given her something or detonated it.
“Nora.”
“You absolute idiot,” she whispers through what might be the beginning of tears or the beginning of a smile. “You impossible, emotionally constipated man.”
Some air returns to my lungs. “That’s fair.”
“No, it isn’t.” She lowers her hand, and I see now that she’s crying.
Not neatly. Not gracefully. Her mascara isn’t running, but the tears are there, clinging bright to her lashes and making her eyes greener somehow.
“Do you have any idea what that does to a woman’s blood pressure?
To hear that after weeks of thinking I hallucinated the entire emotional connection we had. ”
“I’m getting that now,” I say.
“You think?” She gives a watery, disbelieving laugh and swipes at one cheek with the heel of her hand.
“David, I’ve spent the last month trying very hard to be a sane person.
A professional person. A woman with boundaries, self-respect, and at least one functioning coping mechanism.
And meanwhile you’ve been looking at me like I’m both a fire and a fire code violation. ”
“That feels accurate.”
“It is not comforting.”
“I’m not trying to be comforting right now.” I pause. “I’m trying to be honest.”
Nora stares at me for a long second, bourbon forgotten in her hand, eyes bright. Then she lets out a slow breath. “Say it again.”
“I’m in love with you.”
Her eyes close.
When she opens them again, the softness in her face is so unguarded it hits me low and hard.
“I’m in love with you, too.”