“Because I did not want the last real thing between us to be the sidewalk,” he says.
The answer lands heavier than I expect.
Outside, a car passes with music too loud, bass dragging along the windows.
I nod once. “Okay.”
“Your turn,” he says.
I take a sip of beer. “Ask.”
“What are you afraid the story will cost you?”
That one comes too fast and too clean. Like he has been carrying it around.
I look at the laptop. The transcript. The notes. The shape of a piece that keeps getting sharper the closer I get to people I do not want to hurt.
“My clean hands,” I say.
Ryan’s gaze does not move from my face.
I hate that he understands.
“I know the work matters,” I say. “I know the difference between harm and exposure. I know the ethics. But sometimes knowing the rules does not stop it from feeling like theft.”
“It isn’t theft if it’s true.”
“That is what people say when they want truth to excuse everything.”
Ryan takes that.
Does not argue.
The doorbell saves us.
Dinner arrives in two paper bags and one plastic container already leaking sauce. We eat on the floor with the mutedgame on television and the burned pot soaking in the sink like evidence.
The noodles are better than his pasta would have been. He knows this. I know this. We agree not to say it out loud.
His phone buzzes on the counter.
He does not reach for it immediately. He looks at it from where he is sitting, and something moves through his face that I cannot name.
Not neutral. Not nothing.
He reads it and sets the phone face-down.
Whatever it is, it closes something in him.
“Everything okay?”
“Team thing.”
“Anything I should—”
“It’s handled.”
He picks up his chopsticks again. The room has moved a quarter inch in a direction I cannot name, and we both let it sit there.
