The Good Days

There was a stretch of nine days, between the meeting with Renata and the day the proffer was finally scheduled, that Maren would think about for years afterward as the strangest of her life, because they were, against every reasonable expectation, some of the best days she had ever lived.

Theo called on the third day. Not to talk about the case, not to ask about Adrian, but because, he said, he'd found a coffee place near his new office that made something close to the espresso they'd once had, unexpectedly, on their way out of a client dinner months ago, before any of this, before the grey room, before the eleven pages, and he thought she should know it existed.

She went. They sat outside on a cold bench with two cups going cold between them and talked about nothing, about the coffee, about a documentary he'd been half-watching, about the particular indignity of the M14 bus, and it was the first conversation they'd had in six weeks that carried no weight beneath it at all, no strategy, no secret, no clock counting down, and she found, sitting there in the November cold, that she had forgotten, somewhere in the last three years of her life, that a conversation could simply be a conversation.

"I'm not doing this because I've decided something," he said, unprompted, halfway through the second cup. "I want to be clear about that. I don't know yet what I've decided. I'm doing this because I missed talking to you and I got tired of pretending I hadn't."

"I missed it too."

"I know. That's the part that makes this whole thing impossible to sort cleanly. If I hated you completely, this would be simple. I'd never see you again and that would be that. I don't hate you completely. I hate what you did completely. I don't know yet how to hold both of those at once without it destroying me a second time, so for now I'm just going to drink bad coffee with you on a cold bench and not solve it, because I think I need practice at not solving things immediately. I've spent three years solving everything immediately. I'm tired."

They did it again two days later, and again three days after that, always somewhere neutral, always without the weight of the case between them, and Jonah, watching his sister come back to the office each time looking less like a woman condemned and more like a woman remembering, slowly, how to be one, said nothing, and let her have it.

On the seventh of the nine good days, they went to the Frick, because Theo said he'd never been and Maren said everyone should go at least once before they died, and they stood together in front of a small Vermeer for eleven full minutes without speaking, and at the end of it he said, very quietly, not looking at her, "I keep waiting to be sure. About us. About whether any of this can survive what you did. I keep thinking sureness is going to arrive and it hasn't, and I don't know anymore if that's because the answer is no, or because I've never actually had to love someone without being sure, and I don't know how to do it."

"I don't think anyone knows how to do it," Maren said. "I think that might be the whole difficulty. I think I spent my whole life believing certainty was the same thing as safety, and I built an entire career out of manufacturing it for other people because I could never manufacture it for myself. I don't have an answer for you, Theo. I just have this. Standing here. Not managing it."

He looked at the Vermeer a moment longer, the small quiet woman pouring milk into a bowl, frozen in an ordinary act four hundred years old, and he said, so softly she almost missed it, "That might be enough for today."

They walked out into the cold together, not touching, close enough that their shoulders nearly did, and Maren thought, walking down the wide stone steps with the whole uncertain shape of the next month waiting for her, that she had spent her entire life mistaking control for safety, and that this, whatever this turned out to be, this walking beside someone with no promises made, no outcome guaranteed, was the first genuinely brave thing she had ever done.