We sit for a while longer before she asks the question I’ve been bracing for since she got off the plane.
“Do you love him?” she asks. “Not because of the contract or because he pays the bills or because it’s easier than fighting it anymore. Him. The actual man.”
I look at my tea, gone cold in my hands.
“Yes,” I say, and the word comes out before I’ve fully decided to say it, simpler and more honest than anything I’ve managed to tell myself in the privacy of my own head over the last five days. “I do. I didn’t want to. I fought it for longer than I probably needed to. But yes.”
“Then why do you look like you’re carrying something heavy every time his name comes up?”
“Because loving him doesn’t erase what I learned about how this started,” I say. “I found out he had me investigated for months before I ever applied for the job. Vetted, profiled, chosen, the way you choose an asset rather than the way you choose a person. I can love him and still be furious about that. Both things are true. I don’t think they cancel each other out.”
Lena considers this with the seriousness she brings to things that actually matter to her. “That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.”
“You should tell him that. Not me. Him.”
I look at her. “I already have.”
“Then tell him again,” she says, “until it actually lands somewhere.”
I find him in his office an hour later, the door open, a folder of operational reports spread across his desk, the aftermath of last night still visible in the faint shadows under his eyes.
He looks up when I come in.
“Lena’s resting,” I say.
“Good.”
I close the door behind me, not to lock anyone out, just to give us the privacy this conversation needs.
“I need to say something to you,” I say, “and I need you to actually hear it instead of trying to fix it while I’m still talking.”
He sets down the report he’s holding. “I’m listening.”
“Last night, when you walked through that door with her, when I saw her safe, something in me broke open. I have never needed you the way I needed you in that moment, never felt that kind of relief in my entire life. And some part of me wanted that feeling to be enough. Wanted it to wash out everything else, the file, the lock, the months you spent deciding who I was before I ever got the chance to decide it myself.”
“Celine.”
“Let me finish.” My voice doesn’t rise, but it doesn’t waver either. “It isn’t enough. I love you. I’m not going to keep pretending I don’t, not to you and not to myself. But loving you doesn’t erase what’s still sitting between us. I can be desperate for you to hold me and still need you to understand that what you did before any of this started was wrong. I can need both of those things to be true at the same time, even if it doesn’t make sense to you.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, and I watch him do something I have rarely seen him do: sit with discomfort instead of immediately moving to resolve it.
“It makes sense to me,” he finally says. “More than you probably expect it to.”
“Then say something. Don’t just agree with me to make this easier.”
“I’m not agreeing with you to make it easier. I built a structure to control every variable in my life before I knew what it cost to control the people inside it too.” He holds my gaze, steady, no defense in it this time. “I’m not going to tell you the file doesn’t matter, or that loving you retroactively justifies how it started. It doesn’t. I understand that the two things exist separately foryou, the way you just described, and I’m not going to ask you to collapse them into something simpler just because it would be easier for me.”
“That’s not an apology.”
“No,” he says. “It’s not. I don’t think an apology is what you actually need from me right now. I think you need to know that I’m not going to pretend this is resolved just because last night happened. I’m not going to use Lena’s safety, or what’s between us in this room right now, as a way to avoid the rest of it.”
I look at him for a long moment, the office quiet around us, the city doing whatever it does outside the window, indifferent as it always is to whatever is happening above it.
“I don’t know how we fix the rest of it,” I say.
“Neither do I.”
