I counted because counting kept the part of my brain busy that wasn't replaying the last week on a loop I couldn't stop. Forty-three minutes of fluorescent light and the distant sound of the building's ventilation system and my own pulse, steady, controlled, because the body held the line even when the rest of it was coming apart.
I'd done this before. Waited outside rooms while clients testified, gave depositions, identified suspects. I'd sat on benches and in hallways and in government-issue chairs, waited with the patience the job required. Then I'd brought the client out, given the handshake and the nod and the speech, and driven away.
The speech went: The detail is concluded. My firm will follow up with paperwork. If you have concerns going forward, contact our office directly. Professional. Clean. Complete. I'd given it forty times. The client thanked me. I thanked them. I left. Whatever had built up over the days or weeks of proximity dissolved in the rearview mirror, and by the time I hit the highway I was already thinking about the next assignment.
Forty times. Forty clean exits.
I sat on the bench and ran the words in my head, and they were right there, every one of them, in the right order. The detail is concluded. My firm will follow up.
The door opened.
Jenna came out. She looked tired and fierce. She'd been crying and had stopped, and her lipstick was bitten half off, and her eyes found mine and the speech dissolved.
I stood. "How'd it go?"
"It went." She shouldered her bag. "I told them everything. The prosecutor said it was strong. Let's get out of here."
I walked her out. Held the door. Didn't touch her back how I wanted to. We were in public. She wasn't my client and shewasn't my girlfriend and she was something I didn't have a category for, and I couldn't put my hand on her in a courthouse lobby without knowing which one it meant.
The sunlight hit us both when we stepped outside. She squinted and I pulled my keys out as we headed for the truck.
I DIDN'T DRIVE TO THEapartment.
She didn't ask why. She watched the streets pass and said nothing when I turned onto Bourbon instead of heading home, and when I parked across from Proof, engine off, the bar's front dark at eleven in the morning, neither of us moved.
The street was trashed. Post-Mardi Gras Bourbon Street was the aftermath of a war nobody won. Beads in the gutters, crushed cups, a folding chair on its side in front of the daiquiri place two doors down. The cleanup crews hadn't reached this block yet.
Proof sat shuttered behind its windows. Closed sign. Dark wood, the Edison lights in the courtyard visible through the gap in the side fence. Her place. Her bar. The thing she'd built with her own money and her own hands and her own stubbornness. It had nothing to do with me, and would go on having nothing to do with me the minute I gave the speech and pulled away from this curb.
I opened my mouth. The words were ready.
"The detail is—"
"Don't."
Her voice was calm. Her hands were still in her lap.
"Don't you dare," she said. "I can hear it coming. The speech. The professional wrap-up. Thank you for your cooperation, we'll send an invoice, here's a number to call if you feel unsafe." She turned in her seat and looked at me full-on, and the composure was gone and what was underneath it was fury and fear in equalmeasure and neither one was flinching. "I've watched you build that wall back up since Monday. Monday morning you kissed me in the kitchen and by Monday night you were sleeping on your side of the bed with a foot of space between us and I could feel you rehearsing your exit in the dark."
I didn't deny it. She'd have known.
"You've spent so long being the man who leaves that you don't know how to be anything else. Clean exit. Packed bag. New city, new job, new woman who doesn't matter enough to keep. And I almost let you do it." Her voice dropped, and the drop was the Jenna warning I'd learned to recognize, the quiet before the thing she actually meant. "I almost kept my mouth shut and watched you drive away because that's what I do. I don't ask people to stay. I've never asked anyone to stay in my life because asking means it matters and if it matters and they leave anyway then I was the fool who asked."
She held my eyes. Steady. Unwavering. The same woman who'd looked at me in her doorway the first night and called my grin a rehearsal.
"But I'm not doing that. Not with you. So you need to decide right now whether this was the job or whether it was real. Because I already know my answer, and I'm not sitting in this truck while you give me the goddamn exit speech."
The truck was still. Bourbon Street was silent. The engine ticked as it cooled.
I looked at her. Red lipstick half-gone, dark eyes, the fine tremble in her jaw that she was holding still through sheer force. The woman who'd poured me coffee every morning and changed her closing routine to watch me recalculate and slept with her fingers curled around my wrist.
Forty clean exits. Forty packed bags. Forty rearview mirrors and highways and the relief of not having to feel anything that stayed.
"It was real," I said. "All of it. From the first night."
Her breath caught. One sharp inhale. Her jaw unlocked, her eyes went bright, and I watched the anger and the fear and the defiance rearrange into an expression I'd never seen on her face before. She'd never let me.
I cleared my throat. "I don't know how to do this. I've never stayed. I don't have a protocol for staying."
