In Silence, I Loved Him First

Chapter Six: The Trial of Nathan Cole

It started, as these things tended to in that apartment, with a crime.

"Someone," Vera said, holding up the offending object between two fingers like a prosecutor entering evidence, "ate the last of my dumplings."

Nathan, sitting at the kitchen counter with a script open in front of him and an expression of profound, unconvincing innocence, did not look up. "Tragic."

"There were six left in the fridge last night. I labeled the container."

"Labels are more of a suggestion, legally speaking."

"I wrote Vera's — do not touch in permanent marker."

"I thought that said Vera's dark thoughts. I assumed it was a diary and left it alone out of respect."

"You ate my dumplings."

"I have no memory of this crime."

"You have sauce on your script."

There was a silence, brief and damning, while Nathan looked down at page fourteen of whatever he was supposed to be memorizing and found, indeed, a small constellation of soy sauce dotted across the dialogue.

"That could be anyone's sauce," he said, weakly.

"It's my dumpling sauce. I make it myself. It has a very specific ratio of chili oil that you would recognize anywhere if you weren't currently on trial for your life."

"Am I on trial?"

"You are being formally charged."

"Do I get a lawyer?"

"You get a warning." Vera set the empty container down on the counter with the ceremony of a judge setting down a gavel. "One warning, Mr. Cole. Touch my dumplings again and I will start labeling things with your name on them instead, in front of your fans, at your next public appearance."

"That's extortion."

"It's justice."

"I panicked, okay?" He set the script down, finally looking properly guilty, which on him mostly resembled a golden retriever who'd been caught on the couch. "I had a twelve-hour shoot day. I came home starving. There was a container of dumplings sitting right there being delicious and I made a terrible decision under duress."

"You could have ordered food."

"I could have. I chose violence instead."

"You chose my dumplings."

"In my defense, they were extremely good dumplings. If you're going to press charges, I'd like that entered into the record as a mitigating factor. The quality of the crime scene."

Vera looked at him for a long moment — the rumpled shirt, the exhausted eyes, the sheepish charm of a man who'd clearly rehearsed none of this and was making it up as he went, badly, the way he made up everything, badly, and always somehow endearingly — and felt the corner of her mouth give out entirely.

"Fine," she said. "I'll make more tomorrow. On one condition."

"Anything. Name it."

"You have to actually say please this time. In advance. Like a functioning adult."

"Vera Camille," he said, with mock solemnity, one hand over his heart, "may I please, at some point in the future, have some of your dumplings, assuming you make them, which you are under no obligation to do, and which I will not touch without express written permission."

"Better."

"Was that not enough groveling? I can add a bow."

"I'll allow you to keep some dignity. This time."

He did add a bow, later that evening, an absurd, theatrical thing performed in the middle of the kitchen with a dish towel draped over one arm like he was presenting royalty with a scroll, and Vera laughed so hard she had to set down the knife she'd been using to chop scallions before she cut herself, which only encouraged him further.

"You're ridiculous," she said, wiping her eyes.

"You married me. What does that make you?"

"Contractually obligated to tolerate you."

"That's not what the marriage certificate says. I checked. It says till death do us part, which, I'll be honest, feels like a significant overcommitment given the dumpling situation."

"We can renegotiate the terms."

"Can we? Because I have several additional demands."

"Do you," Vera said, arching an eyebrow, resuming her chopping with the deliberate calm of a woman who knew exactly what effect that eyebrow had on him by now and had decided to enjoy it shamelessly.

"I want dumplings on a recurring basis. Weekly, minimum."

"Noted."

"I want the thermostat set to a number that isn't actively hostile to human life. You keep it at sixty-eight like we're preserving a body."

"Sixty-eight is a perfectly reasonable temperature."

"It's a temperature for a morgue, Vera."

"You could wear a sweater."

"I own four sweaters and you've hidden all of them."

"I organized them. Into a box. In the closet you never open."

"That's a crime scene of your own, then. I'm filing a countersuit."

"On what grounds?"

"Emotional distress. Wrongful sweater seizure. Chronic hypothermia caused by a spouse who runs cold and refuses to acknowledge it."

Vera turned to look at him properly then, knife still in hand, something warm and unguarded slipping loose across her face before she could catch it and put it away again. "I don't run cold," she said, quieter than she meant to.

Something shifted in Nathan's expression too — the joke slowing down, softening, the two of them standing on opposite sides of the counter in a kitchen that smelled like scallions and old arguments and something neither of them had a name for yet.

"No," he said, after a moment, watching her in a way that made her deeply aware of her own pulse. "I don't think you do, actually."

The oven timer went off. It was, Vera would later privately admit, the single most inconvenient sound in the history of household appliances.

"That's the rice," she said, turning away first, grateful for the excuse, her voice steadier than her hands currently were.

"Right. The rice." Nathan cleared his throat, took a full step back like a man retreating from a ledge, and picked his script back up with the specific over-focus of someone who very badly needed something to look at that wasn't her. "I should — run my lines. Before I forget them completely."

"You've had that script for three days."

"I work well under pressure."

"You work well under sauce stains, apparently."

"There it is," he said, pointing at her with the script, something like relief in his voice at the return of familiar ground. "There's the woman who charged me with theft an hour ago. I was starting to worry you'd gone soft on me."

"I have never once gone soft on you, Mr. Cole."

"Mm. Sure. Keep telling yourself that while you make me extra dumplings."

"I'm making them for myself. You're simply in proximity."

"Generous proximity."

"The most generous proximity you'll ever get."

He grinned at that — the real one, not the practiced camera-ready version, the one that still, six weeks and a lifetime into this arrangement, did something entirely unfair to the rhythm of her heart — and went back to his script, mouthing lines under his breath at the counter. Vera plated rice she suddenly couldn't taste, both of them diligently pretending, the way two people get good at pretending, that nothing at all had almost happened in the four feet of space between them.

It had, though. Vera knew it had. She could feel it sitting in the room afterward like a held breath neither of them had exhaled yet — small, fragile, entirely unspoken, and utterly, hopelessly hers to carry alone, the way everything true about this marriage always seemed to be.

She served dinner. He complimented it, the same way he always did, meaning it more than he probably realized. And if she let her hand linger half a second too long passing him his plate, and if he noticed, and said nothing, and simply looked at her a beat too long before looking away —

well. That was between the two of them, and the empty dumpling container, and no one else at all.