I Can Now Breathe

I Can Now Breathe
And I thought about Selina's back to the wall in the kitchen rather than facing the window, and I pulled the trigger. The enclosed stretch of road was very loud and then very quiet.

Marco was beside me...

The rest of it was logistics, which Marco handled with the efficiency of twelve years, and I stood in the cold for a moment longer than I needed to and looked at what was in front of me and thought about Elsa one more time.

The way I thought about her now, not with the consuming grief of the years when I didn't understand what had happened to her, but with the specific quality of someone being remembered correctly.

Her story had its ending...

This was it...

I turned and got back in the car. I showered before I came home. This was practical and also something else, the specific preparation of a man who is returning to a space that contains something he values and does not want to carry the night's work into.

I came home at two in the morning and the house was quiet and I stood in the front hallway for a moment and let the quiet settle around me.

The kitchen light was on...

I went to the kitchen...

Selina was at the table with her sketchbook, not drawing, the book was open but her pencil was on the table beside it, which meant she had been waiting rather than working.

She looked up when I came in and read my face with the speed she always read my face, the rapid assessment that landed somewhere and then moved on. She said nothing for a moment. Then,

"You were with Marco."

"Yes," I said.

"Martin," she said. Not a question, a landing. I looked at her.

"I know he escaped," she said.

"I've known for three weeks." She held my gaze steadily.

"Amaya has contacts at the Institute who still know people. I heard about the escape attempt through a third channel before you would have had the chance to tell me." A pause.

"I've been waiting to see when you would tell me yourself." I sat down at the table.

The sketchbook between us. The kitchen lamp making its circle. Three weeks of her knowing and not saying, of me not saying, of both of us carrying the same information in the same house and orbiting around it with the particular care of people protecting each other from the same thing.

"I was going to tell you," I said.

"I know," she said.

"When it was resolved." She looked at me.

"Is it resolved?"

"Yes," I said. She held my gaze for a long moment.

"The vehicle," she said.

"Eleven days ago."

"Yes."

"That was him."

"Yes." She looked at the sketchbook.

"I thought so." She was quiet for a moment.

"I didn't say anything because you would have told me eventually and I didn't want to have the conversation before it was over." She looked up.

"I didn't want to be frightened about it for longer than necessary." I looked at her.

"Are you angry?" I said.

"That I didn't tell you." She considered it honestly, which was the only way she considered anything.

"A little," she said.

"I understand why you didn't. I would have made the same decision in your position." She paused.

"That doesn't mean it doesn't bother me that you made it."

"It won't happen again," I said.

"No," she said.

"It won't." She held my gaze with the firmness that wasn't hardness, that was simply the specific quality of Selina being clear about something that mattered.

"Whatever comes next, Felix. We tell each other."

"Yes," I said.

"Even if it's frightening. Even if you think you're protecting me by managing it alone." She paused.

"Especially then."

"Yes," I said again. Meaning it completely. She looked at me for a moment longer.

Then she closed the sketchbook and stood up and came around the table and did the thing she had started doing in the recent weeks that I had not yet fully calibrated to.

She simply stood beside me and put her hand on my shoulder and stayed there, the weight of her hand on my shoulder in the two o'clock kitchen with the lamp making its circle. I put my hand over hers. We stayed like that for a while.

"Elsa," she said softly.

"Yes," I said.

"It's done," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"It's done."

She moved then, and I stood, and she looked at me in the kitchen light with the expression that wasn't the guarded careful watchfulness of the beginning or the performing or the managed distance but simply herself, entirely present, choosing to be here.

"Come to bed," she said. I looked at her.

"It's two in the morning," she said.

"And you need to sleep and so do I and the kitchen has been very useful but it doesn't need to hold everything forever."

Something in my chest moved in the way it moved when she was precisely herself, which was most of the time now and which I had not stopped finding remarkable.

"Yes," I said.

She took my hand and we left the kitchen and the lamp and the circle of light and the table that had held the beginning of everything

We went upstairs together through the quiet house, and outside the October city continued its ordinary business, indifferent and sustaining and entirely uninterested in the two people moving through the dark toward whatever came next.

It was enough. It was, finally and completely, enough.

POV: Selina

The next morning, he walked down the stairs looking better than he had looked for weeks.

Then I said, "The coffee will be ready in ten minutes if you want some."

Something shifted in his expression. Warmer. "Yes," he said. "I'd like that."

He came into the kitchen and sat at the table, and Amaya gave me a look over his head that contained an entire commentary she was too disciplined to deliver aloud, and I returned a look that told her to save it, and we finished making the coffee, and we sat at the table together, the three of us, and it was ordinary in the way that felt, after everything, like the most extraordinary thing available.

Felix was relaxed.

I noticed it because it was rare, the genuine version, not the performed composure he maintained in professional contexts but the actual relaxation of a man who has briefly set down the weight of something and is sitting in the absence of it. He was talking to Amaya, actually talking, listening to her describe her grandmother's kitchen in a country she had grown up in with the real attention of someone who was curious rather than strategic, and Amaya was responding to that attention the way people respond to genuine interest when they are not expecting it.

The coffee was extraordinary. I told Amaya this.

She accepted the compliment with the regal modesty she brought to things she was actually proud of.

Felix looked at his cup and then at me and said, "This is the best coffee I've had in years," and he said it with such simple honesty that I laughed, actually laughed, the spontaneous kind that doesn't ask permission, and he
looked at the laugh with an expression that I was not going to examine too closely right now but was also not going to pretend I hadn't seen.