"I stopped leaving the room," I said.
"Yes."
I took one more step forward and closed the last of the distance, and this time it was not the garden, it was not charged with the uncertainty of something that hadn't happened yet and it was not the building, which had been about something larger than the two of them. It was just this hallway and these two people and the city outside and everything that had been true for weeks without being named.
I kissed him.
He kissed my back with the same careful attention he gave to everything that mattered.
When I stepped back, the apartment felt different, or the same, I thought, but fully itself. The way a room felt when you finally moved in rather than simply staying.
"The arrangement is over," I said.
"Yes."
"I'm still here."
"I know." His voice was quiet. "I was hoping you would be."
I nodded.
I went to the kitchen to figure out dinner, and he followed, and outside the window New Orleans went on doing what it had always done, old and golden and entirely indifferent to the small private things that happened inside it, the things that didn't make history but made something else, something smaller and more durable.
Something that held. For the first time, I didn't question whether it would.
* * *
Chapter 30: Thirty Days Later
The news broke on a Thursday morning.
Not the full case, that was still moving through the federal machinery, building the kind of structure that didn't collapse on appeal, the kind that Tran had said would take the time it needed to take. But a piece of it: a brief item in the Times-Picayune about federal investigators executing a search warrant on a property associated with a prominent New Orleans family, sources declining to comment, no charges filed yet, matter ongoing. Six sentences. Buried below the fold.
I read it at the kitchen table with my coffee.
Thirty days ago I had been sitting at this same table with a flash drive in the middle of it. The table looked the same. The coffee was the same. I was, in some ways that mattered and some ways that didn't, entirely different.
I sent the article to my father. He called three minutes later.
"Have you heard from Tran?" he said.
"Not yet this morning."
"I'll reach out to my contact." A pause. "How are you?"
"Good," I said. And meant it, which was still occasionally surprising to me, not the feeling itself but the simplicity of it, the fact that good could be the accurate word without requiring qualification.
"Dominic?"
"Also good."
A pause with a quality I recognized as my father choosing not to say something he had decided not to say, a discipline he had, I now knew, in common with the man I was living with.
"Good," my father said finally.
I almost smiled. "You can just say it."
"I'm not saying anything."