Page 179 of Only the Hunter

It’s a good look.

It has always been a good look.

“Guilty,” I announce, because it’s still the only word that matters.

“I heard.” He was monitoring. He always monitors when I’m in a courthouse. “All counts?”

“All counts.” The conspiracy count could have gone either way—it’s a fantastic result.

He exhales once, and I watch him absorb it the way he absorbs most things—fully, without performance, letting it settle before reacting. Then he looks at me with the specific quality of attention I spent a lot of time telling myself I was imagining. “You okay?”

“Yes.” And I mean it the way I’ve learned to mean it, not as deflection, but as an actual answer. “I’m good.”

He steps forward and his hand finds my stomach before he’s even fully closed the distance, palm flat and warm against the curve of it, the way he always does. Six months. The baby has strong feelings about space and makes them known at irregular intervals, particularly during depositions, which I’ve decided to interpret as professional solidarity. Gabe’s hand settles and stills and I feel him breathe.

“She awake?” he asks.

“She’s been quiet since this morning. Saving it for tonight.”

“She’s got your timing,” he says, and I hear the smile in it without having to look.

We’ve been arguing about names for three months. We’ve agreed on nothing except that we’re both far more particular about this than we expected to be, and that this is Gabe’s fault because he’s the one who said we should decide together when I would have been perfectly content to present him with a shortlist. He keeps suggesting names from Greek mythology. I keep vetoing them. We’ll figure it out.

Down the sidewalk, the lawyer is wrapping up. The cameras will follow the convicted man to his vehicle, and then they’ll follow the story to wherever it goes next, and the machinery of consequence will grind forward without me.

I watch it for a moment longer.

Then I turn away.

“Where are you parked?”

“Around the block.” He keeps his hand where it is as we move down the steps together.

“Your mother called. She wants to know if we’re coming for Thanksgiving.”

“I told her last week after we discussed it.”

“Then why did she call me?”

“She wanted to hear it from you.” He says it without apology, which is correct, because it is not an apology-worthy situation. His mother has had thoughts about me since approximately two days after we moved in together and she realized the arrangement was permanent, and those opinions have been, without exception, favorable, which I find both touching and slightly overwhelming. “She’s making the sweet potato thing.”

“Tell her I said thank you.”

“Tell her yourself. She’ll like that better.”

The 4Runner is where he said it would be, because Gabe always parks where he says he will, which remains one of the most quietly reassuring things about him. It’s mud-splattered across the bumper—there was a weekend in the Shenandoah two weeks ago, a trail I’d wanted to take one way and he’d insisted on taking another, and we were both right in different ways—and the roof racks are loaded with gear he hasn’t unloaded yet, and it looks exactly like what it is: a vehicle belonging to a man who goes places and comes back.

He always comes back.

He opens the passenger door and I climb in, which requires slightly more negotiation with geometry than it did six months ago, and he closes it without comment and comes around to the driver’s side and gets in and starts the engine and pulls into traffic with the same unhurried vigilance he brings to everything.

We drive for a while without talking. This is one of the things I didn’t expect—how comfortable the silence became. For most of my adult life, silence meant an empty hour I hadn’t yet filled with work—another file, another draft, another problem to solve so I wouldn’t have to sit inside my own head. Then I moved in with a man who treats silence the way he treats everything else: deliberately, without waste. Something to be inside of, not something to escape.

I watch the city move past the window.

Twelve convictions. Four more pending. Twenty-two women in the preliminary case file, some of whom testified, some of whom took settlements, some of whom disappeared back into lives that will carry the damage in ways no prosecution can address. A dead witness whose name is in a federal record, permanent and official, because the people who tried to erase her failed.

This is not a clean ending.