Chapter Twelve
Inside the Booth
Senna woke the next morning still faintly disbelieving what she'd done, replaying the image of Colt standing inside the booth's glass walls, quiet and careful, like a man aware he'd been given something he hadn't earned yet and wasn't going to take for granted.
"He might come by in the evenings now," she told Imke, over coffee, with a deliberate casualness that fooled neither of them. "Colt. I wanted you to hear it from me instead of just seeing him here."
Imke looked up from the schedule, something careful in her expression. "Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"You've been letting him in for weeks, Senna. I just didn't think it was my place to comment on how far." Imke's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "I'm glad you told me instead of me finding out by walking in on something."
Senna felt her face heat, more from the implication than embarrassment. "It's not that. Not yet."
"Not yet," Imke repeated, with the particular gentleness of someone who'd clearly clocked exactly how much weight those two words were carrying lately.
She went back to the schedule, then added, almost as an afterthought, "For what it's worth, you've seemed more like yourself the last week than you have since before all this started.
I don't know what that means. I just noticed it. "
Senna didn't answer, but she carried the observation with her through the morning's sessions, turning it over the way she turned over everything, unable to decide whether Imke's noticing was a comfort or one more piece of evidence in a case she wasn't ready to close.
The morning brought its own small proof of how much had shifted: Petra, arriving for a session, mentioned in passing that she'd seen a man's motorcycle parked outside for a while the previous evening and asked, carefully, whether everything was all right.
Senna found herself explaining, briefly and without the old defensiveness, that it was her husband, that they were working through some things, and was startled by how easily the words came, how little they cost her compared to a month earlier when she would have deflected the question entirely.
? ? ?
That evening, when Colt arrived, Senna didn't hesitate the way she had the previous night.
She unlocked the booth and gestured him in before he'd even finished crossing the front room, and this time, instead of simply letting him sit in her presence, she pulled a second chair up beside the director's seat and showed him, properly, what she actually did.
"This is the take from this afternoon," she said, cueing up the file. "Watch her face when I play it back. You can hear the exact moment she stops performing and starts believing the line."
He listened, watched, asked genuine questions, the same total, unbroken attention she remembered from three years ago. When the recording finished, he sat back, something thoughtful in his expression.
"You've spent your whole career listening for the second something becomes real instead of performed," he said.
"I think that's why you never caught me.
I was performing being fine so completely, so consistently, that there wasn't a seam.
Not because I was a good liar. Because I'd actually convinced myself the performance was real too. "
"That's a frightening thing to be good at."
"Yeah." He was quiet a moment, turning something over. "You ever wonder if that's why we found each other in the first place? Two people who'd both gotten dangerously good at convincing everyone, including ourselves, that we were fine when we weren't."
Senna considered that, surprised by the accuracy of it. "I used to think I fell for your stillness because it felt safe. I think I actually fell for it because it matched something in me. I just didn't recognize the shape of it yet."
"I've started going to a meeting. Wednesday nights.
Guys trying to get out of this life, or already out, talking about how you rebuild something honest after building your whole identity on not needing anyone to see you struggle.
Ledger doesn't know yet. Rein definitely doesn't know. I haven't told anyone but you."
Senna sat with that, surprised by the admission, by the quiet, deliberate risk of it. "Why tell me first."
"Because you're the only person whose opinion of whether I'm actually changing matters enough to risk being wrong about." He looked at her directly. "I don't need you to forgive me for going. I just didn't want to keep one more thing from you, even something good."
They talked for a long while after that, not about the affair, not about the club, but about smaller things: her father's endless relocations, the way she'd learned German dialects by ear before she could properly read them; his own childhood, a father who measured love in scars and never once said the word out loud, a mother who'd left before Colt was old enough to remember her clearly, an absence he'd never fully examined because examining it felt, he admitted, like admitting it had cost him something.
"We're both fluent in the same language," Senna said eventually. "Just different dialects of the same thing. People who leave without explaining it, and people who learned early not to ask why."
"Maybe that's why the silence never bothered either of us until it did."
She thought about that for a while, watching the studio's dim light catch the edge of his jaw, the small scar near his temple she'd never once asked about in three years of marriage.
"Tell me something else," she said. "Something small.
Not about the club, not about the wound.
Just something ordinary I don't know yet. "
He considered it, a faint smile tugging at his mouth. "I can't swim. Grew up two streets from the Main and never once learned properly. Sabine used to tease me about it every summer."
"Three years married and I never knew that."
"There wasn't much occasion to bring it up. We were never exactly a lake house kind of marriage." The smile widened slightly, real this time, and she found herself laughing despite everything, a small, surprised sound that seemed to startle them both. "Your turn. Something ordinary."
"I hum when I'm editing and don't realize I'm doing it until Imke tells me to stop. Always the same three notes. I have no idea where they're from."
"I've heard you do it. I always thought it was on purpose."
"No. Entirely involuntary." She shook her head, still smiling. "See, this is what we never did enough of. The small things."
He reached over then, and she let him, his fingers finding hers on the console between them, nothing more than that, a simple point of contact she didn't pull away from.
She didn't have an answer for that, but she didn't need one.
They sat together in the booth a while longer, the studio dark and quiet around them, the city outside carrying on its ordinary November business, trams and rain and the distant hum of the Main, none of it reaching the small glassed-in world they'd built for themselves for an hour.
At one point he reached over, slow enough that she could have stopped him, and laced his fingers loosely through hers where her hand rested on the console, nothing more than that, a simple point of contact she let stand without comment, feeling the warmth of it travel up her arm and settle somewhere she'd kept carefully guarded for three weeks.
When he finally rose to leave at his usual hour, she found herself, for the first time in weeks, disappointed that the evening had to end at all.
She locked the booth behind him and stood there a long moment, smiling faintly before she caught herself doing it, and made herself stop before the feeling could grow into something she wasn't ready to name out loud.