He stood, picked up his jacket, walked to the door, then he stopped. He turned back. Officer Webb, he said. She looked up. She's the best person I know, he said.
Whatever you decide, I need you to know that. Not for the file, just as a fact. Webb held his gaze for a moment. Then she said quietly, I know. He walked out.
Isabelle was on her feet before he cleared the doorway. She looked at his face the way she always did, reading him fast efficient, the way she'd learned to in 26 months of living in proximity to a man who kept things close. How did it go? She said. He stopped in front of her.
I told her everything, he said. Her eyes widened. Everything? Everything. She stared at him.
Ethan? I told her the arrangement, the rules, the yellow legal pad, the way it changed, the birthday cake. He held her gaze. I told her the truth, all of it. From the beginning.
She pressed one hand over her mouth. And then she asked me to tell her about the birthday cake, he said. Because you'd already told her about the birthday cake. She made a sound, short and helpless and real. We told her the same story, he said.
From different angles. Like you said real couples do. She stared at him for a long moment. Her eyes were bright. Her jaw was working.
She was doing the thing she did when she was trying very hard not to cry in a place where crying felt like losing something. You told a federal officer that our marriage started as a legal arrangement, she said. I did. That could I know. Ethan, that could.
Isabel. He said her name quietly, firmly. The way he said it when he needed her to hear him past the fear. We told the truth. Whatever happens next, we did that.
Nobody can take that from us. Whatever they decide, it's the decision they make about our truth, not a performance, not a story we built, the real thing. She looked at him. He looked at her. The waiting room around them was full of strangers carrying their own folders and their own fears, and none of them were watching.