“Read it now or later,” Mac said. “Your choice. Either way I’m not going anywhere.”
He was standing beside her on the pavement with Ruth three steps away giving them space and the folder in Cloe’s hand and the morning around them still and clear.
She looked at the folder.
She thought about opening it on the pavement outside the courthouse on the day her divorce was finalised and she thought about opening it somewhere quiet and private and she thought about the fact that she had spent nine years opening things alone at kitchen tables at midnight and she was done with that version.
“Now,” she said. “But not here.”
Mac took her hand and they walked half a block to a small stone bench set back from the pavement in front of a building that had a garden nobody used. She sat. He sat beside h
