It's Two A.M
1235 Words
I make a rulmade one forty fiveforty-fiverning.
I am done analyzing tonight. Whatever he meant in the car, whatever the silence after it meant, whatever the feeling I refuse to name is doing in my chest right now it can wait until morning. I am getting up, getting water, and going back to bed and that is, the complete list of things happening in the next ten minutes.
I get up.
I go to the kitchen.
He is already there.
---
Standing at the counter with a glass of water looking out at the city. Not doing anything else. Not on his phone, not reading, not performing the version of himself that exists in offices and restaurants and the back of black cars. Just standing in the dark in a t-shirt and looking at Chicago like it is something he has a long standinlong-standing with.
He hears me and turns.
Neither of us says anything immediately.
I almost went back. I get as far as deciding to go back and then I stop because retreating would tell him something about why I came out here in the first place and I am not ready to tell him anything yet.
I go to the cabinet and find a glass. I fill it at the sink. I lean against the counter on the opposite side of the kitchen and I look at the city too.
We st,and there on either side of the kitchen in the dark.
The city does its thing outside lights and distance and the occasional sound of something far below. The penthouse is quiet around it. Not uncomfortable, quiet. Not the performed quiet of two people pretending they are not aware of each other. Something that has been here long enough to settle.
He speaks first.
"You were good tonight."
"I was performing," I say.
"You were both."
I look at him. "What's the difference to you?"
He turns his glass slowly in his hand. "Performing people ask questions they already know the answer to. You actually want to know. Every question you asked tonight you were listening for the answer. Not waiting for your turn."
I think about that.
"You do the same thing," I say.
"Yes."
"Is that why you chose me?" I keep my voice even. "Because I pay attention."
He is quiet for a moment. The city moves outside and the kitchen stays still.
"Partly," he says.
---
I look at my water glass.
I have been carrying a question since Diana said her name at the dinner in Chapter 4 and I have been waiting for the right moment and I understand standing here at two in the morning that there is no right moment for this kind of question. There is only the moment you ask it or the moment you don't.
"Tell me about Sofia," I say. "Not the file version. Not what happened. Who she was. On an ordinary Tuesday."
He goes still.
Not the controlled stillness he wears like a second suit. Something different like a man deciding whether to open a door he has kept shut for two years.
The kitchen is very quiet.
Then he talks.
"She laughed too loud," he says. "For whatever room she was in. It used to embarrass people and she never noticed and wouldn't have cared if she had." A pause. "She read three books at once. Always. Every surface in the apartment had a book on it face down and I used to move them to put things down and she would lose her place and blame me and she was always right that it was my fault."
I don't say anything. I let him go.
"She never finished any of them," he says. "Not one. She said the ending was never as good as the middle so why ruin it." Something moves across his face. Brief. Real. "It used to drive me completely mad."
I say "She sounds stubborn."
"The most stubborn person I had ever met," he says. He looks at me. "Until recently."
I hold his gaze. "That is not a compliment."
"It is from me."
---
Something shifts in the kitchen.
I feel it the way you feel a room change temperature not dramatically, not all at once. Just a degree. Just enough to notice.
I look back out at the city and I ask the question that has been sitting underneath the first one.
"Do you think she knew? About Hale. Before the end."
He doesn't answer immediately. He looks at his glass.
"I think she was getting close," he says. "I think that is why it happened when it did. She had found something. She was pulling a thread and whoever was watching her understood where it was going before she did."
I think about that. A woman following a story toward a man who was her own father without knowing it. Getting close enough that he decided she had to be stopped.
"She was trying to find out the truth about a man who turned out to be her father," I say. "And she never got to know that."
"No," he says. "She didn't."
"That is the saddest thing I have heard in a long time."
He looks at me across the kitchen. "Yes," he says. "It is."
The city moves outside and we stand in the quiet of that and I think about what it means to spend two years building a case for someone who cannot know you are building it. What it costs. What it does to the person carrying it alone.
I think about what forty seven employees look like when they don't know how close they came to losing everything.
I think about a borrowed pen in a frame on an office wall.
We are not so different, Caden Cross and I. That is either the most comforting thing I have realized in nine days or the most dangerous and I cannot decide which.
---
I push off the counter.
I rinse my glass and set it on the drying rack and I say "I'm going back to bed."
"Nora."
I stop.
I turn around.
He is looking at me from across the kitchen with that expression I have been trying to read for nine days. The one that sits just behind whatever he is managing on the surface. The one I catch in the moments between his controlled versions.
"Thank you," he says. "For asking about her. Most people don't."
I look at him. The city lights come through the window behind him and the kitchen is mostly dark and he is just a man standing with a half empty water glass looking at me like I did something that cost him something to receive.
"Most people probably don't know how to," I say.
I went back to the guest room.
I lie down in the dark and I stare at the ceiling and I think about a woman who laughed too loud for rooms she was in and read three books at once and never finished any of them because the ending was never as good as the middle.
I think I would have liked her.
Then I think he just compared me to the woman he loved and called it a compliment and meant it.
I close my eyes.
I do not go back to sleep for a very long time.
- Writer
