August 22, Saturday
WARREN'S FACE filled the screen against the backdrop of our old bedroom—my old bedroom, technically, though the distinction had stopped mattering months ago—and I registered, with a small unwelcome jolt, that he'd moved the dresser.
The one that used to sit under the window now stood against the wrong wall entirely, as if the room itself had been rearranged to make room for a life I wasn't part of anymore.
"You ready to come home yet?" he asked, without preamble, tugging at his tie.
"You know I can't do that, Warren."
"Just checking." He said it the way you'd check the weather, mild and disinterested, already moving on. "It's ridiculous, is what it is."
"Are you keeping up with the kids' schoolwork? Making sure homework's getting done?"
He gave a short laugh, more breath than sound. "They're sixteen and fourteen, Isabel. I'm not going to stand over them nagging about long division. They know what they need to do."
"Josh is in eighth grade. It's not long division anymore."
"You know what I mean." He pulled the tie free and tossed it toward what I assumed was a chair, then reached for the buttons of his shirt.
"Warren. Can you not do that? While we're talking?"
"I've got somewhere to be. Need to shower.
" He kept unbuttoning, unbothered, working down toward the last few with the easy confidence of a man who'd genuinely never once considered that his ex-wife, on a monitored federal call, might not care to watch.
"Relax, Isabel. It's not like this is new information for you. "
I felt my face go hot and shot the briefest possible glance toward Deputy Wells, stationed at his usual post by the door, and found him staring with sudden, fixed interest at a point somewhere on the ceiling tiles, jaw set in the particular stillness of a man exercising considerable professional restraint.
"Warren, I need you to put a shirt back on."
"It's my bedroom." He shrugged the shirt the rest of the way off and draped it over his arm with a small flourish, as if he were modeling it rather than removing it, and I had approximately one full second to register, with the traitorous clarity of a woman who'd once shared a bed with this man for seventeen years, that whatever he was doing at that new gym near the dealership was, objectively, working.
The man had definition he hadn't possessed in his thirties.
It was infuriating, honestly, in the specific way that only a genuinely undeserved improvement can be.
Dammit.
"I have to be somewhere by seven," he continued, oblivious or indifferent to the temperature of the room he'd just created. "So unless there's something urgent—"
"There isn't. Just go take your shower."
"You're the one who called."
"You called me, Warren."
He paused, seemed to actually consider this, then waved it away as immaterial. "Whatever. I'll tell the kids you said hi."
The screen went dark before I could correct him—I hadn't said hi, I hadn't gotten to say much of anything at all—and I sat there for a moment in the wake of it, cheeks still warm, deeply unwilling to examine too closely which particular emotion was responsible for the warmth.
Deputy Wells lowered his gaze from the ceiling as I stood, his expression arranged into careful neutrality, though something at the corner of his mouth suggested the neutrality was costing him effort.
"Don't," I said, before he could offer anything at all.
"Wasn't going to say a word," he said, and held the door for me, and mercifully, admirably, didn't.