"I thought one of two things. Either we'd discover that what was between us was real and we'd both know it clearly enough to move forward. Or we'd discover that it was 9 years of familiarity amplified by one accidental moment and we'd be able to go back to what we were with the question answered and put to bed. "And which thing happened?" She looked at him directly.
"You already know which thing happened." He did. He had known for two weeks, maybe longer. "The hearing first," he said, not because he didn't know the answer, but because Ava was his first responsibility, and she had always been his first responsibility, and that was not something 6 weeks or a kiss or a cracked wall had changed. "I know," Clare said.
I've never asked you to put anything before Ava. I'm not starting now. I know you haven't. She stood up and picked up her mug to bring it to the sink. He stood up too and they were close for a moment in the kitchen.
Not touching but the particular kind of clothes where two people are aware of each other completely. Malcolm, she said. Yeah. "After the hearing, however it goes, I need you to tell me where we are. Honestly, not managed, not calibrated, not the version you think I need to hear, where we actually are.
"I will," he said. She looked at him for one more beat. Then she picked up her jacket and her bag from the counter. Good night, she said. Good night, Clare.
She left. He stood in the kitchen and listened to her footsteps going down the stairs outside and he thought about what she had said. Tell me where we actually are. Not the version calibrated for someone else's comfort. The actual thing.
He had spent six years managing the actual thing out of visibility. He had become very good at it. It had cost him something. That expertise had cost him a certain access to his own interior life that most people took for granted. He had paid the cost willingly because the alternative, which was being open to pain, seemed worse.
He was beginning to recalculate that math. The preliminary hearing was on a Thursday morning in a courtroom that smelled like industrial cleaner and old paper. Renee sat beside him in a gray suit that projected the specific authority of someone who had been in this room many times and was not intimidated by it. Malcolm wore the navy blazer his mother had bought him. Not the terrible one from 2019, but a better one.
Well-fitted, the kind that actually looked professional, and he sat straight, and he answered the judge's questions directly, and he did not perform anything. He simply told the truth, which was the truest version of who he was. The judge was a woman in her mid-50s named Judge Patricia Callaway. And she had the unhurried certainty of someone who had seen several hundred versions of this particular human story and had developed over time the ability to see through to the actual thing very quickly. She reviewed the documentation.