I had completed the last section the night before and spent Friday morning reading it through in full, the whole document, all forty-two pages, every finding and inference and structural map, reading it the way I read my own work when I wanted to find the things I had missed while I was inside it.
I found two places where the language could be more precise. I fixed them.
Then I sent it to Dominic with a note: Complete. Final review when you have time.
He read it the same day. I was in the kitchen when he came out of the office with his laptop, set it on the counter, and said: "This is thorough."
"It's accurate," I said.
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." He was reading a specific section, I could tell from his posture, the angle of his attention. "The fourth layer gap. You left it in."
"It's part of the structure." I looked at him. "It's documented. Tran has everything that explains it. Leaving it out of the report would have been incomplete."
He was quiet for a moment. "You know this document is going to become part of the federal record."
"I know."
"That doesn't bother you."
I considered that, genuinely considered it, the way I considered things that deserved consideration. "No," I said finally. "I came here to find information. This is information. The shape of how I found it and what I found adjacent to it doesn't change the fact that the report is accurate." I paused. "Does it bother you?"
He looked at me for a moment. "No," he said. "It would have, six months ago." He closed the laptop. "Things change."
I held that.
Things change was not a sentence Dominic Moreau delivered casually. I had learned enough of his architecture to know that the sentences he chose were chosen, always, that the economy of his language meant that what he said occupied the space of several things he didn't say. I understood this one to mean: I was one kind of person six months ago and I havebecome another kind and you are part of the reason for that and I am not sure yet what to do with that information but I am not treating it as a problem.
I understood it and did not respond to it directly, because I was also not sure yet what to do with the information and I had spent too much of the last seven weeks pretending otherwise.
"I'll bill for the final week," I said instead. Practical. The surface of things.
He looked at me, that look I had come to recognize as the one he used when I was doing something he understood and was not going to argue with. "Of course," he said.
He went back to the office.
I stood in the kitchen for a moment longer.
* * *
The week had a different quality.
I noticed it in small things: the way the mornings moved, the way the apartment held them, the way the silences between them had changed register. For seven weeks the silences had been strategic, spaces around managed information, deliberate gaps in the disclosure. Now the information was out. All of it, or nearly all of it, as much of it as could be said. And what remained in the silence was different.
I found myself staying in the living room in the evenings instead of retreating to my room. Not performing staying, actually staying, with my laptop or a book, comfortable in the shared space in the way of someone who had stopped calculating whether comfort was appropriate. He stayed too. He worked, mostly, or read. They spoke when there was something to say and didn't when there wasn't.
I had not experienced this specific domestic register with another person before.
I had experienced proximity. I had experienced the negotiated cohabitation of temporary arrangements, the practical management of shared space, the routines that developed in the absence of alternatives. I had experienced, occasionally, something that had briefly felt like intimacy before revealing itself as something less structural.
This was different and I knew it was different and I was, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, not immediately reaching for the category it fit into.
I let it be what it was.
* * *
On Saturday evening my father called.
He was three days out from Mississippi, had been driving slowly, stopping at places he had not seen in years, moving back toward New Orleans the way you moved back toward something you had been away from long enough to need to approach carefully. He sounded different on the phone than he had in the first call. Less careful. The quality of a man who had made the decision and was now simply living in the direction of it.