I scoff. “Sounds like a real asshole.”
“He can be. But he’s a great cook, so…”
“You win some, you lose some?”
She holds up the half-empty bowl. “Exactly.”
I glance back at the television. He’s saying all the right things. I’ve heard versions of this speech before. Different setting. Different stakes. Same damage control.
“Must be strange,” I murmur, “watching your handiwork play out in real-time.”
“It’s stranger when you know what didn’t make it into the press release,” she replies. “I don’t start fires. I step in when they’re already burning. I just hate when I’m forced to work with liars.”
“That’s not far from what I do.”
She glances over, her brow furrowing. “You save people.”
“So do you. You just do it differently.”
She considers it, her eyes narrowing as if she’s turning it over from multiple angles.
“I don’t always like the people I treat,” I continue. “But liking them isn’t in the job description. Judging them isn’t either. You stabilize first. You stop the bleeding. Everything else—the morality, the ‘why’—that comes later.”
Her gaze softens, the usual steel in her eyes replaced by something quieter. “That’s surprisingly reassuring.”
I finish the last few bites at the counter while she’s still eating on the couch. I rinse my plate, wash hers when she’s done, and dry both without thinking about how easily the earlier awkwardness fell away.
When I’m finished, I move back to the couch and hand her the pills. She takes them without a single protest, curling her legs under her as she sinks into the corner of the sofa. It’s a terrible position for her lumbar spine, but she looks comfortable, so I keep my medical opinions to myself.
The news cycle has looped back to the senator.
“I don’t know how she does it,” Madison says suddenly.
“Who?”
She nods toward the screen. “His wife.”
“She doesn’t have to.”
“No, but she will. She’ll go home tonight, and she’ll be angry. But then the ‘what ifs’ start. She’ll replay every conversation, every argument, every moment she was too tired or too busy or too trusting.”
My jaw tightens.
“But later,” she goes on, her voice barely a whisper, “when the house is silent and no one is watching the performance, she’ll stand in front of the mirror and wonder what wasn’t good enough. She’ll wonder what she missed. What she did wrong. How she could have beenmore. Prettier. Kinder. Less demanding.” She swallows hard. “Even when she knows, logically, that he’s the one who broke it.”
There it is. The raw, jagged edge of experience.
Something hot and protective settles in my chest. It’s an anger I didn’t have when I walked in here. “That doesn’t sound fair.”
She shrugs. “Since when has fair been the metric?”
I shift closer without thinking. I can feel the warmth of her body, the lingering tension in her shoulders.
“You know why she’s standing there?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“She’s terrified of being the woman people whisper about,” she says. “The one who couldn’t hold it together. The one who gets blamed for a grown man’s choices.”
