He's quiet for a beat. "...Atlas."
"I know how that sounds. I'm telling you anyway, because I'd rather you know I planned to be a coward than discover later I tried to hide it."
"You were going to wine me, dine me, take me to a hotel, and then tell me you were leaving? Definitely feels like you were hiding it. At the very least trying to butter me up for bad news."
"I was going to tell you tonight. Somewhere that wasn't our parent's house. I'd been sorting out the words in my head for a week and they were all bad." A pause. "The hotel was a separate plan. A selfish one. I wanted you in a bed I'd picked, with my hands on you, before I told you I was going to be on a plane and gone for a while." I look at him. "You caught me, sweetheart."
He's silent.
I sit in the silence and let myself feel what's in the bond.
He's not angry.
He's, possibly, amused. He's also hurt. A small dark thread of it under the rest, and I can feel him deciding whether to pull on it. The Max from before would have pulled on it. The Max from a month ago would have swallowed it and lied about not having felt it.
This Max picks up his wine glass. "Tell me about the trip."
I tell him.
I tell himmostof it.
What I don't:
The names. The cities. The dates. Santos in DC, who took my call two months ago and didn't hang up. The Chicago prosecutor whose son died from a Kline drug, who has been waiting longer than I have for somebody to bring him a case. The binder I'm compiling–financial records, transcript copies, the names of three Kline executives who walked away from the company eighteen months ago and have been looking over their shoulders ever since. None of it goes in Max's head. I can’t afford to have Max know more than he should. It would incriminate him, put him in danger all over again.
I won’t do that.
What I do tell him:
That what we're building is a case. The kind that ends with people in handcuffs, not the kind that ends with a settlement. That Kline has spent twenty years buying enough of the legal apparatus that should be policing them that the only path left has been finding the investigators who haven't been touched, and building it with them slowly, face to face. That the trip is three cities because we've reached the point where the case has to widen—other jurisdictions, more witnesses, evidence partitioned so no single agency can be paid off to make it all disappear.
That if it holds, what happens next is arrests.
I tell him I didn't bring it up sooner because every time I sat down to do it I watched him laugh at something Bane said and decided I'd do it tomorrow.
He listens. His eyes don't leave my face.
When I finish, he turns his glass on the tablecloth.
"So it’s business but now the Graves’ business. And you didn't tell me," he says, "because you didn't want to remind me of the cell."
"Yes."
He goes still.
"I've been, since the morning I drove you out of that facility, very deliberate about what I bring through the door of the house you live in. Some of that is operational. Most of it isn't. Most of it is me trying not to put the words Kline and facility in the same room with you any more than they already are. I was—am—wrong to keep the trip from you. I see that. I knew when I made the choice that I was making it more for me than for you."
The silence holds.
He takes a breath.
"Let me come."
"Sweetheart."
"On the trip. Or part of it. You said three cities. Pick the safest. I'll come."
"No."
