20. Equinox
Equinox
It was the twenty-first of September before any of it was over enough to stop, and by then it wasn't the equinox of that autumn, it was the next one, which tells you something about how these things actually go.
Serena Locke's preliminary hearing had ended on the Thursday.
Dana Kirsch had taken a plea in Arizona on a Tuesday in August. And on a Saturday in late September, a year and a bit after Preston Hale died on the floor of his own whitening suite, I closed my practice at four o'clock and sat down in my own courtyard and did not get up for a while.
The light does a thing here in the third week of September.
It comes in flat and gold off the water and up Anacapa Street and lands on the west wall of my building at about five-thirty, and for about twenty minutes the whole courtyard turns the color of the inside of a peach.
Marisol had gone home. Anh had gone home.
Kayla had gone to a wedding in Ojai. Tess was closing the cart with the unhurried competence of a woman who has closed a cart nine thousand times.
Nate came at five with two dogs and a bottle of wine and a bag of the churros from the parking lot behind the courthouse, which they only sell in August but which he had, it emerged, frozen in June specifically for this, because Nate Corrigan is a man who plans.
"You froze churros."
"I froze churros."
"For a year."
"For eleven months." He set the bag down. "They're not going to be good. I want to be clear that I know they're not going to be good. It was a gesture and it has aged badly, like most gestures."
Bear went straight under the iron table. Floss went straight under the iron table. They have a spot. It is the same spot it has been for two years and there is a worn place on the tile that Marisol has given up on.
We sat. Tess brought two glasses and did not stay, and on her way out she stopped at the chalkboard, and wiped it, and stood there for a second with the rag in her hand and the chalk in the other, and then put the chalk down without writing anything and left it blank, which Tess Okafor has not done in the entire history of that cart.
"She left it blank," I said.
"She left it blank," Nate agreed.
We drank the wine. The light came up the wall. Somewhere down the block someone was closing a shop and a bus went by on State, and the whole town did the thing it does at the end of a Saturday in September, which is exhale.
"I've got something to tell you," he said, "and it's not a bad one."
"Okay."
"Kessler's leaving. Promotion — she's going to Sacramento in January, which she has wanted for four years and will never admit to anybody." He turned his glass. "She's putting my name in for the resident agency. Senior resident agent. It's three people and a title and no raise to speak of."
"Nate."
"And I said yes." He said it looking at the dogs, not at me.
"I want to be clear about the order of operations, because it matters and I've thought about it.
She asked me in June. I said yes in June.
I did not say yes because of you, and I didn't say yes to be near you, and I'm not going to put that on you — I said yes because I've been in this town three years and I like the work and I like the ocean and I have, for the first time since 2022, not wanted to be somewhere else.
" He finally looked over. "You're the biggest thing in my life.
You're not the reason. I need you to have both of those. "
"Why does the distinction matter so much to you?"
"Because one day something will be hard," said Nate Corrigan, "and if I'd stayed *for* you, you'd count it as a debt. And you'd pay it off alone, at night, without telling me."
I put my glass down on the iron table.
"That's—"
"I know."
"That's the most unkind accurate thing anybody's said to me since Tess."
"Tess and I have discussed you at some length," he said. "I want you to know that too. It's been going on for about eighteen months and it's extremely disloyal and I'm not going to stop."
I laughed. And then, because the light was doing the thing, and because there was a blank chalkboard four feet away, and because it had been five weeks of silence and eleven months of coffee and two years of a dog dragging a lead down off the Mesa — I stopped laughing.
"Nate."
"Yeah."
"Come here."
He came here.
I would like to report that it was elegant.
It was not. He knocked the wine over with his elbow and the glass went off the table and did not break, because it landed on a Bernese mountain dog, who made a noise of enormous betrayal and got up, which dislodged the table, which was already unstable and always has been; and Floss, deciding that whatever this was she wanted to be part of it, shoved her entire head between us at approximately waist height, and I had one hand in a man's shirt and one hand on a dog's skull and I was laughing into his mouth.
And then it got quiet, and it stopped being funny, and Nate Corrigan put his hand along my jaw the way you'd hold something you'd been carrying carefully for a long time and had just been told you could put down, and kissed me properly in my own courtyard in the gold light with two dogs against our legs.
It took, I am told, some time.
"Finally," said Adele Whitcombe, from the arch.
I would like to say she'd just arrived. She had not just arrived.
Adele Whitcombe, eighty-four, had been sitting at the small table by the lemon tree with Pearl in her lap for the entire conversation, and she had, it turned out, arrived at four-forty, and Tess had given her a coffee and told her not to make a sound.
"Mrs. Whitcombe," said Nate.
"Agent Corrigan." She gathered Pearl and stood up with the enormous dignity of a woman who has got exactly what she came for. "I shall see myself out. Lila, your fountain still doesn't work."
She went. Somewhere out on Anacapa Street, her driver started a car.
We had the churros later, upstairs, and they were terrible, and we ate all of them.
And then, at some point in the dark, with the windows open and the mountains invisible and two dogs snoring on the floor in a single heap, lying with my head on his chest and his hand moving slowly in my hair, I said the thing I had been carrying since a courtyard in November.
"Tell me about Arturo Sela."
His hand stopped.
"I told you about Arturo Sela."
"You told me four minutes of it in front of your supervisor with a badge on your belt," I said.
"You told me the part that explains you.
You didn't tell me the part that hurts." I put my palm flat on his sternum where the bone is.
"I'm not asking to know a secret, Nate. I know the secret.
I'm asking for the rest of it, which is a different thing, and I want it because it's yours and because I'd like to carry some of it. "
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I heard the surf, which you can hear from my apartment on about nine nights a year.
"Not tonight," he said.
"Okay."
"No — Lila, listen to me, that's not the old answer.
" He shifted so he could see my face. "The old answer was *not yet* and I'd have kept saying it for another year.
This one's different. There's a woman named Elena Sela who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and I have written her eleven letters and sent none of them, and I am going to go and see her, and I would like to have done that before I tell you the whole of it.
Because right now the version I'd give you is mine, and it's about me, and she's the one who lost something.
" His voice went. "I want to tell you the true version.
And to get it I have to go and sit in a room with her and listen to how bad it actually was. "
I put my hand on his face in the dark.
"When?"
"Spring," said Nate. "I've asked for the leave. It's approved." A breath. "I'd like you to come. Not into the room — that's mine — but to be in the city, and to be at the end of the day, and to be the person I come back to at six o'clock."
And there it is. That is the whole of the second book: not an answer, a promise, and a plane ticket, and a man who had stopped saying *not yet* and started saying *soon* and given me a date.
"Yes," I said.
"Okay." He let his head go back on the pillow. "Okay."
Downstairs, in a dark courtyard, there was a blank chalkboard and a fountain that doesn't work and a worn place on the tile under an iron table where two dogs sleep.
In eleven hours Marisol would come in and print an appointment book she doesn't need.
In three days Mateo Alvarez, age eight, would arrive for a check-up and ask, as he has asked quarterly since he was six, whether Floss was currently on a case.
For the first time in a year and a half, I was going to get to say no.
It lasted until March.