She blinked. "What? " "That's how long we've been doing this. " He held her gaze. "I counted. " She stared at him. "I've been counting for a while. " He said simply. She pressed her lips together, nodded once, looked away, then back.
"Okay. " She said softly. "Okay. " They sat at the table until Nadia came home from school, and neither of them said anything more about the interview. They didn't need to. Five days later, Ethan's alarm went off at 6:15 in the morning. He lay in bed for a moment looking at the ceiling, feeling the weight of the day pressing down with a clarity that only comes when something you cannot control is finally, irreversibly here.
He heard her in the kitchen. The sound of the coffee maker. The soft, particular sound of a woman who had been awake for a while, already doing something with her hands to keep herself from thinking too hard. He got up. He walked to the kitchen doorway.
She was standing at the counter in the gray robe, his robe still hers now, and she was holding a mug with both hands and staring at nothing with the look of someone running through the same thing repeatedly, hoping it comes out different. She heard him, looked over. "The coffee's ready. " She said. "I can see that. " "I made it the way you like. " "I know you did. " She looked at him. He looked at her.
The kitchen between them was the same kitchen it had always been. Same table, same chairs, same refrigerator humming its constant low note. And it was also the kitchen where everything had cracked open on a Tuesday morning with six broken eggs and one sentence. "Are you ready? " She asked. He thought about his mother's voice.
All the way down. "Yeah. " He said. "Are you? " She looked into her mug, then back at him. "Ask me again when we're in the car. " She said. He nodded.
"Deal. " He crossed to the counter and poured his coffee, and stood next to her, not touching, not needing to, just close enough that she knew he was there. The way he'd stood outside her door that October midnight. The way he always had. She leaned very slightly toward him. He stayed.
Nadia's alarm went off down the hall. The morning started moving. The day they had spent 14 days preparing for and 26 months becoming ready for had arrived. And somewhere in a federal building across the city, a woman with a reputation for going off book was about to ask two people to prove they were real. The federal building was the kind of place designed to make people feel small.
Not intentionally, not cruelly, just efficiently. The ceilings were high, the hallways were long. Everything was beige and fluorescent and slightly too cold the way institutions always run their air conditioning like comfort is something that has to be earned. Ethan noticed all of it without meaning to. Old photographer's habit.
He couldn't walk into a space without reading it. The light, the angles, the way people held themselves inside it. And what he read in this building in the faces of the people sitting in the plastic chairs along the wall was a particular kind of waiting. Not impatient waiting. The heavier kind.