We sit across from each other in the dark living room. His face is open in a way it only gets when he's too tired to be anything other than himself.
"Come to bed," he says finally.
We both stand. He crosses to where I am and puts both hands on my face and looks at me for a moment—just that, just looking. Then he presses his forehead to mine and we stand there without moving.
I take his hand and we go upstairs.
We liein the dark bedroom and neither of us talks about it anymore. He pulls me against his side and I put my head on his chest and listen to his heart, slower now than it was before and more familiar. I know the specific rhythm of it.
"The Torres thing," I say into the dark.
"Yeah."
“I wasn't just saying that."
His arm tightens around me. "I know."
"But the next time there's something sealed in a stack I'm reading?—"
"I'll tell you it's there," he says. "And what it is. Even if I can't tell you what's in it."
"That's all I need."
He presses his lips to the top of my head. I feel him exhale.
We don't resolve everything. The fight established a line rather than erasing one, and that line will probably need to be redrawn in different ways. We’ll have this fight again, I’m sure.
But tonight we're in the same bed with his arm around me and his heart under my cheek and that’s okay with me.
31
PHOENIX
Aweek after the three in the morning fight, I come home feeling differently.
It’s not particularly dramatic though. I’m still in my jacket, still with files under my arm, still the person who has come through this door every night for the last eight months. But I've been sitting on something since the parking garage outside the Wilshire Division station. It’s something I didn't tell her when I drove home that day and I can’t keep it to myself much longer.
She's at the kitchen table when I come in. Laptop open, manuscript on the screen, the half-empty glass of water she refills throughout the day. She looks up when she hears me and reads my face.
"My father said something on the phone," I say. "The day I took the Tennessee documents to the police. I've been sitting on it and I shouldn't have."
She closes the laptop.
"I called Dad from the parking garage after I left the police station," I say. "I told him what you found. What you did with it." I look at my hands on the table. "There was this silence after. Long enough that I checked the screen to see if the call had dropped."
She waits. I hold my breath and then let it out.
"He said he was proud of me. Both of us. What we built together, what you did finding Ashley." I look up at her. "He's never said it like that. Not once. About both of us, about what you did. It just came out plain, no buildup, and then he hung up and I sat in that parking garage for fourteen minutes because I didn't trust myself to drive."
She stares for a bit before getting up and putting her arms around me. We stay like that for a while, her arms around my neck and my face against her hair. The kitchen quiet around us. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. She just holds on and so do I, and after a minute or two that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach goes away.
“Thank you for telling me," she says finally.
"Should have told you sooner."
"Yes," she says. "But you told me now."
She pulls back. Her hands are still on my shoulders. Her face in the kitchen light is steady and warm and she's looking at me with the expression she gets when she's decided something.
