Her voice had the quality of something final in it. A door closing on an alternative. I will shut down every camera and every source and burn every bridge that puts your daughter's life in a story. That is not a press release. That is a promise.
He breathed. Okay. He said, I'm sorry, she said, for the thing I didn't do, but that happened in my name. I know you didn't do it. I'm still sorry.
I know that, too. The silence between them was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people recalibrating in real time, finding the new position after something has moved. I'll handle the communications director, she said. You handle your side, he said.
I'll handle mine. What's your side? Making sure I'm the one who decides what my story is. He said it quietly, but without ambiguity. Nobody else gets to do that.
Not journalists, not PR departments, and not the woman. I'm He stopped. She waited. He finished the sentence. Not you either, he said.
Even you. A beat. Especially me, she said. He nodded at the phone, a gesture she couldn't see. Yeah.
Breakfast, she said. I can be there in 45 minutes. He looked at the coffee situation. He looked at his kitchen, his apartment, his life. I'll make the coffee, he said.
Please don't let me do it. Last time was a disaster. It was a developing process. The smoke alarm went off. That was She stopped.
He could hear her working to suppress a laugh. That was an outlier event. It's always an outlier until it's a pattern. She laughed. Finally, that real laugh, the one that arrived before she could curate it, and something in the morning, which had started with the cold weight of a thing, gone slightly wrong, shifted back toward the warmth of something, they were both carefully and honestly, and without quite enough words yet, building, he put the coffee on.
She was there in 40 minutes. And they sat at his kitchen table on a December morning with Amara's drawings on the fridge and the sealed bill envelope by the door and the thin winter light coming through the window. And they talked about real things in honest language. And outside the city went about its business without any knowledge of what was happening in this small apartment in this particular morning, which was exactly how Darius needed it to be. For now, the new year came in quiet.