Page 65 of You, Only You

"She watched from another room. Sent a message through Bates that I'd done well." I closed my eyes. "She's being professional. She's being exactly what I asked her to be. And it's..."

"Awful?"

"I was going to say instructive."

"You were going to say awful and then you edited yourself, which is your whole problem in a sentence." Her voice softened, but only a fraction. Nicole's softness always had edges. "Tell me what happened. Not the testimony. The other thing. The thing you're not saying."

So I told her. Not the sanitized version. Not the strategic summary. The hallway. The kiss. The walking away. The four days of good and calculated distance and Lindsey eating scrambled eggs from a skillet because we couldn't find clean plates. The balcony in Virginia where she'd told me to stop performing and I'd almost reached for her and then she'd reached for me instead and we'd stood in the cold holding each other and I'd thought, this is it, this is the thing I've been afraid of, and it wasn't afraid, it was something else, something with no name and too much weight.

And then the courthouse. The empty chair.

"She told you she wasn't going anywhere," Nicole said when I'd finished. "And you tested that by going exactly nowhere yourself."

"That's not..."

"Will." Just my name. The way she said it when she was about to tell me something I needed to hear and was going to hate. "She showed up. On the balcony. In the kitchen. She reached for you when you couldn't reach for yourself. And then you went to a courthouse and she wasn't sitting in the gallery and you fell apart."

"I didn't fall apart."

"You called me at midnight and said fine four times."

"That's not falling apart. That's..."

"Falling apart in your specific, tightly controlled, unwilling-to-admit-it way." A breath. "You need to show up, Will. Not in the way you know how, not the tactical version, not the I'll-be-there-for-the-testimony version. The real version. The one that scares you."

"What does that look like?"

"I don't know. You've never done it." She paused. "But I think it starts with walking into a room where she can see you. Not to protect her. Not to monitor the situation. Just to be there. Just because she's there and you want to be where she is."

The words settled into me like something heavy finding the bottom.

"That sounds terrifyingly simple," I said.

"The simple things always are." She yawned, which undercut the profundity slightly. "I have a client meeting tomorrow and my basil plant is doing something suspicious. New leaves, but they're a weird color. Margaret says I'm projecting anxiety onto the basil. I think Margaret underestimates the basil's capacity for drama."

"You're changing the subject."

"I'm giving you a minute to sit with what I said without deflecting into strategy." A beat. "Go to the courthouse tomorrow. Sit in the gallery. Let her see you. Don't plan what happens after that. Just show up."

"Nicole."

"Yeah?"

"How did you get so much smarter than me?"

"Therapy, time, and a basil plant that keeps me humble." Her voice went warm. "I love you. Go to sleep. And Will?"

"Yeah?"

"She's worth the scary part. You know that, right?"

I didn't answer. She didn't need me to.

"Goodnight," she said, and the line went quiet.

I set the phone down. The scotch was still on the counter, still untouched. I poured it down the sink and watched it spiral away.

Then I stood in the dark penthouse and did nothing. Didn't plan. Didn't strategize. Didn't run scenarios or calculate exposure or map contingencies. Just stood there with the fear, the guilt, the image of an empty chair, and the taste of a word I kept circling but couldn't land on.