She leans in and kisses me on the forehead as she sits, and Iknow.
“We need to talk,” she quietly says.
“About what?”
Again, I can pretend with the best of them.
“Part of the reason I didn’t go to Florida is I wanted to see what I’d find here.”
“Huh?”
She sadly smiles. “I’ve had a private investigator following you for three weeks, and he says you’re exactly whereyou’ve been telling me you’d be, and you’re alone when you should be.”
“I don’t understand.”
She takes my hands in hers. “I’ve been dropping hints for a while that I need…morefrom you. I get it, we’re both busy and driven, so I’ve held off pushing this issue. I’m lonely, Kev. I love you, but it feels like I’m married to my brother now. I might as well be because we never have sex anymore.”
I know I can’t argue that point, because she’s not wrong.
Still, I have a part to play. “It hasn’t been that long.”
Her sad sigh rips at me. “Thirteen months, Kev.”
Ouch.
I knew it’d been over six months, but time really got away from me. “I’m sorry, honey. I love you.” And that’s not a lie—but there are many kinds of love.
She tips her head onto my shoulder. “I love you, too, but I don’twant to reach a point where I hate you. The fact that we can exist like this without fighting means maybe we need to go our separate ways.”
“You really thought I was cheating on you?” I hate that I put her through that mental anguish, more guilt to add to the tally.
“Honestly? No. I wanted to cover my bases, though. I didn’t want to admit that maybe I’m equally to blame here. I get into workmode and ignore you, and you’ve been so good about it.”
Like me, she’s socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
Also like me, she’s tied up with a network contract that means she has to lean a little harder to the right than she does in real life, but it’s what pays her salary, and she’s damn good at what she does. We’re both living our dream jobs, sort of, even if we have to make sacrifices.
“I don’t know what the right thing is to do here,” I admit. “Do you want to try counseling?”
She chuckles. “Do you? Will it help? Especially when we can’t guarantee we’ll be able to make appointments if breaking news happens.” She reaches down, frowning, and snags a document from the coffee table. It’s a print-out of evidence referenced in the DOJ’s filing. “Hey, this is talking about CornithAdams.”
“Yeah?”
She looks at me. “He was at a small meeting hosted by the Saudi crown prince at a private estate in Wales, about seven months ago.”
Now she has my interest. “What kind of meeting?”
She digs her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans and scrolls through her work e-mail. “It popped up on our radar because one of my producers is working on a story about illegal technology salesto the Kharmaria regime, in violation of the economic sanctions against them, Iran, North Korea, and Syria.”
That leads us down a rabbit hole as she sifts through my papers, and I scroll through her e-mail, to see if there are other trails to follow. That’s when I remember seeing another set of filings that originated out of SDNY, so I hop online to PACER and download PDFs of all the motionsin that case that aren’t under seal.
Holy shit.
By midnight, we’ve rolled our production staffs out of bed to jointly work on this story from both angles, accidentally tripping over a tangled web of a larger ongoing DOJ investigation that hadn’t so much as blipped Fox News’ radar. Which is really saying something because our current president is a liberal who is a frequent and favorite targetof both Fox and FNB.
We’ve got amassivescoop.
By the time we both collapse the next night, sleeping together in bed for the first time in a long time, I’ve made peace with this. She helps me shop for another townhouse nearby, even as we start appearing more often on each other’s shows for a variety of subjects. Our staffs become almost interchangeable because they’re working on joint stories.
When we quietly file for divorce, it never blips the public’s radar until after the final order is signed. People approach us, thinking it’s a mistake or a hoax, because they see us together all the time and have never seen either of us act like we’re not getting along with each other.
There is no story because there’s no venom to give that snake’s fangs a dangerous bite.
I still consider Laurenmy friend. Mybestfriend.
But a friend who knows nothing more about Christopher than the little I’ve just told her, and who never will.
Because I doubt I’ll ever see Christopher again, and, somehow, I need to figure out how to move on.
It’s over twenty years past time I do so.
