He didn’t look away. “You told Graves the same thing.”
“I did.”
“And did he listen?”
“Eventually.”
The corner of Rhain’s mouth turned slightly down. “Then I’ll try to arrive there faster.”
“Ambitious.”
“Necessary,” he said.
For a moment, neither of us moved. Then he gave me the smallest nod. We started walking again.
“My boyfriend’s name is Nate,” I said. “He’s wonderful. He’s a software developer in Washington. He makes very good coffee and very bad decisions about wool sweaters. We have been together for four years, which feels like a lifetime, and he has never once asked the questions about my work that make me lie unnecessarily. We’re a good match.”
Rhain said nothing.
Smart man.
I continued. “My mother, who thinks I’m a State Department translator, has been waiting for me to get engaged to Nate for three years and has started making passive-aggressive Catholic comments about fertility windows.”
“She sounds formidable,” Rhain said.
“She is.”
He walked a few steps in silence, as if deciding whether the next question had earned the right to be asked.
“Do you love him?”
“Nate?”
“Yes.”
I looked ahead. The corridor stretched long and empty in front ofus.
“Yes,” I said.
I didn’t feel the need to expand. Whether what I had with Nate was enough wasn’t a question I was ready to answer with dragons watching me.
Rhain accepted the answer without pressing. We walked several more steps in silence, and I thought, briefly, that he might leave it there.
He didn’t.
“My mother’s name was Margot,” he said.
I stopped walking.
This time, he didn’t. He continued two paces, then paused beside a window and looked out at the courtyard, as if the sentence had required movement to survive being spoken.
He hadn’t dropped the information. He had placed it on the floor between us and stepped past it.
“Margot,” I said.
“Yes.”
The name sat between us for a breath before the rest of the file opened in my head.
