Chapter 5 #2
And I listened. I have spent my entire career listening to people's worst moments — clients in interview rooms confessing the things they did to survive, the corners they cut, the people they failed, the shame they carry — and the one skill I have that I'm actually proud of is that I can listen to the worst of a person and still find the human underneath it, because if you can't do that you can't do my job, because everyone I've ever fought for has a worst moment and they're still worth fighting for.
I listened to Dominic the way I listened to them.
Not excusing it. Not minimizing it. Just hearing it, all of it, and looking for the man under it, and finding him, because he was right there, he'd been right there the whole time, in the plates and the coffee and the anonymous money orders to throwaway kids.
When he finished, we'd stopped walking. We were under a streetlight at the corner of Birch and Hollis, the cone of yellow light around us and the dark and the honeysuckle everywhere, and he was looking at me finally, braced, the way he'd been braced the first night across the dark street, waiting for the verdict, because of course he was waiting for the verdict, he'd just handed me every weapon I'd ever need to confirm everything I'd walked into this believing.
"You're not that man anymore," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. "Some days," he said, and his voice wasn't even, not quite, for the first time all night. "Some days I'm not sure."
"I am."
It came out before I could weigh it, two flat words, the surest thing I'd said in weeks, and they landed on him like something physical.
I watched it happen. I watched the thing he'd told me about — the guard, the held-back part, the reservation that lived in his face the way it lived in mine — I watched it just go, for one second, dissolve out of his eyes entirely, and what was underneath wasn't dangerous and wasn't guarded and wasn't a Reaper or a defector or a problem I'd married.
It was a man, looking at me, with nothing in front of him, the most undefended thing I have ever seen, more naked than skin, a man who'd been bracing for a blow his whole life letting himself, for one second under a streetlight, not.
And the honeysuckle was thick enough to drown in, and the light was gold and close, and he was looking at me like that, like I was the verdict and the verdict was mercy, and I understood with total clarity that if I held his eyes for one more second I was going to kiss him.
I was going to close the foot of warm spring air between us and put my mouth on his and stop pretending, and the second I did that there'd be no more paperwork, no more terms taped inside my desk, no more locked drawer, no more eleven weeks and an exit built in.
The second I kissed him this stopped being fake, and once it wasn't fake I'd have something I could lose, and I had spent twenty-three years making sure I never again had something I could lose, because the last time I had something I could lose it was my whole family and then it was Theo and the world simply took them, the world takes everything if you're foolish enough to hold it where it can reach.
So I looked away first.
I made myself look at the dark street, the porch lights, anything that wasn't his undefended face, and I felt the moment break and fall away, felt him feel it break, and we stood there a second longer in the wreckage of the thing that almost happened, and then I said, in a voice I worked very hard to keep level, "We should get home.
I've got Pruitt prep in the morning." And he said, "Yeah," low, and we walked the last two blocks in a silence so full it was its own kind of conversation, and I got us home with my dry-land lie in tatters around my ankles, standing chest-deep in a boat full of water, telling myself I'd looked away in time.
I hadn't looked away in time. That's the thing about the moment you don't kiss someone.
It tells you more than the kiss would have.
The kiss would have been an answer. The not-kissing was the whole question, asked out loud, hanging in the air of a too-small apartment for both of us to lie awake under.
He went to his room. I went to mine. The honeysuckle poured in through both our open windows, the same warm air touching both of us through a paper wall, and I lay in the dark with my heart still going and I thought about a man who'd told me the worst of himself and asked for nothing, and a man who sent money to foster kids in secret, and a man whose face had come undone under a streetlight when I said three words I meant, and I understood that I had married a stranger to win a case and that somewhere in the last few weeks, between the coffee and the bookshelf and the receipts and the hand at the small of my back, I had stopped being able to remember why I'd ever thought I could keep my heart in a drawer when a man like that was sleeping ten feet away making me arroz con pollo and asking nothing in return.
I didn't sleep. I lay in the warm dark and I let myself, for the first time, just once, in the privacy of my own bed where no one could see and no eight-year-old could object — I let myself want him.
It was the most dangerous thing I'd done in twenty-three years. It felt like stepping off a ledge in the dark and finding, instead of the fall I'd braced my whole life for, that there was something there to hold me.
I should have known. The last time I let myself hold something, the world took it. There was no reason to think this time would be different.
But God, the honeysuckle. And the way his face came undone. And some days I'm not sure, and I am, and the boat full to the gunwales, and me, standing in it, finally, finally letting it sink.