I try to steer. "This isn't about you," I say. "It's about protecting the company."
Even as I say it I can hear exactly how it sounds: correct, precise, and completely hollow.
Tessa doesn't argue. She simply folds her hands in her lap and resumes looking out the window, and somehow that is the most effective counterargument she could have made.
I drive two more blocks in silence and find myself cataloguing, involuntarily, the moments before the reporter appeared. Tessa had tilted her head when she laughed, the way the candlelight had caught the edge of her earring, the half-second when her knee had been warm against mine under the table and neither of us had moved away.
I stop cataloguing.
The streets narrow as we approach her building and I slow down in a way that is not entirely explained by the change in speed limit. I pull up to the curb and keep my hands on the wheel, and the engine idles, and Tessa is still looking out the window, and the silence between us now is not like the silence at the beginning of the drive.
That silence had been a gap. This one is a question.
For the first time since the reporter appeared outside the restaurant, I understand that the problem is no longer theoretical.
It is sitting beside me in the passenger seat, in a dress the color of dark water, waiting for one of us to say the wrong thing next.
