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She starts laughing. Quietly at first, then harder, her face buried against my chest.

When she goes quiet, I watch her from the corner of my eye as she smooths down her dress and stares out through the windshield.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

It’s never nothing.

I wait. Eventually she sighs. “We can’t keep pretending this isn’t complicated.”

There it is.

I lean back in the seat. “No.”

She folds her arms. The gesture is defensive enough that I immediately dislike where this conversation is heading.

“We need to be careful,” I say.

Her head turns. “Careful.”

“Yes.”

A small smile appears. Not a happy one.

“That’s funny.”

I know that tone. “Maggie.”

“No, seriously. That’s funny.” She looks out the window again. “Now we’re being careful.”

I rub a hand over my face. “We should have been careful from the beginning.”

“You’re a little late with that advice.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Then, “What exactly does careful mean?”

I know what she’s asking. The problem is that I don’t have an answer I can give her. The trouble is that she’s waiting for an answer I don’t know how to give her without opening a door I have kept closed for years.

Maggie is not asking for the whole history. I know that. She’s not asking for Alester’s childhood, or his father, or the years I spent being trusted by one Chandler and tolerated by the other. She’s asking for something much simpler, and somehow much harder: she wants to know why every time I tell her to be careful, it sounds like I have already decided where the danger is and forgotten to tell her.

“I mean it,” she says, quieter now. “What does careful actually mean?”

I look out through the windshield, past the faint reflection of her face in the glass, to the street outside her building. The city looks ordinary from here. A cab turning at the corner. A man walking his dog under the yellow spill of a streetlight. Someone laughing too loudly before a door shuts behind them. It should make this feel smaller.

“Nothing you have to worry about,” I finally settle on.

She laughs once, but there’s no real humor in it. “That is such a doctor answer.”

“It is not.”

“It absolutely is. It sounds calm and responsible and gives me nothing.”

I turn back to her then, and for a moment I forget the argument because she looks exhausted. Not fragile. I know better than to make that mistake with her. Just worn down in a way she has been trying to hide all evening, through dinner, through the doctors, through every polite smile she gave men who spoke around her as if her body were a room they had booked.

“I’m not trying to keep you out,” I say.

Her eyes meet mine. “Then what are you doing?”