* * *
I was still at the window when Dominic appeared in the doorway.
He looked at me. "Tran?"
"The case is progressing." I turned. "The fourth witness's deposition corroborates everything. I said we have enough."
He absorbed that. Something shifted in his face, not relief, because he hadn't been uncertain about the outcome, but something more like the expression of a person watching a long-overdue thing arrive. "Good."
I nodded.
I looked at him across the room, this man who had made my coffee for seven weeks and had said I don't regret it in a garden and had stood behind my in a dark building while I read my mother's name in a dead man's handwriting and had said alright twice when it meant something more than agreement.
"My father wants us for dinner tonight," I said.
Dominic's expression shifted, the slight adjustment that was his version of a person who was not going to reveal that they were pleased but were pleased. "What time?"
"Seven."
"I'll be ready."
I nodded.
I turned back to the window.
"He's going to ask you about your long-term intentions," I said. "He's been circling it for three weeks."
A beat.
"What are yours?" Dominic said.
I kept looking at the river. The question was fair, I had asked it of myself, in the quiet of the last thirty days, in the spaces that the room had made available. What I wanted. Not what the situation required, not what the arrangement had been, not what the seven weeks of accumulated circumstance had made practical. What I actually wanted, arrived at by the same honest methodology I had applied to everything else.
"I want to stay," I said. "Not because it makes sense. Not because there's no better option. Because it's what I want."
I turned around.
He was looking at me with the expression I had come to understand as the one he used when something was true and he was not going to embellish it.
"Then stay," he said.
I almost said that's it? and didn't, because I knew him well enough now to know that the simplicity was the point. That the people who qualified and conditioned and surrounded the thing with structures were the people who were afraid of it. That saying then stay and nothing else was, from him, the equivalent of everything.
"I'm going to need office space," I said. "I have a new engagement and the dining room table is becoming inadequate."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "I have an office."
"You have your office."
"There's a room next to it."
I looked at him. "It's full of filing boxes."
"We can move the filing boxes."
I considered this. "I'm not sharing a printer."
"I'll get you a printer."