We Talked

We Talked
POV: Selina

When he finished he was quiet, and I was quiet, and the kitchen held the particular silence of a room where something important has just been said and both people in it are giving the importance its due rather than rushing past it.

"The compound," I said finally. "The new one. The one he commissioned recently." I looked at Felix directly. "It was for me."

"Yes."

"He was going to..."

"Yes."

I sat with that for a moment. Not with fear, fear was for uncertainty, and this was not uncertain, this was simply a fact that required space to become real. Martin had sat across from me at dinner and poured wine and asked about my day and commissioned the means of my death eight weeks before that dinner.

"He needed me to hate you," I said slowly.

Felix looked at me. Waiting.

"If I hated you enough I would never go back," I said. "I would stay away from you voluntarily. Which meant he could take his time." I thought about it. "As long as I was with him by choice, I wasn't a problem that required an immediate solution. I was useful. I was the thing keeping you reactive and compromised." I looked at Felix. "The moment I stopped being useful, the moment I went back to you, or stopped hating you, or became something he couldn't control..."

"You became a liability," Felix said quietly. "With specific knowledge of his operation."

"And the compound had already been prepared."

"Yes."

I looked at my coffee cup.

In the weeks underground I had sat across from Martin at that dinner table and I had performed relaxation while he performed warmth, and somewhere in the layers of that performance I had begun to actually relax, to let the performance become something softer, to wonder whether the certainty I had started with had been right. I had wondered whether Felix was the danger and Martin was the rescue, and the wondering had felt like honest doubt rather than the product of six weeks of careful, patient construction.

Martin was very good at his work.

"I need to ask you something," I said.

"Yes."

"The controlling," I said. "Before. The way things were at the beginning, in the first house, before I ran." I held his gaze. "That was real. The surveillance and the restrictions and using Amaya and David." I paused. "None of what Martin did excuses that. I need you to know I understand the difference."

He held my gaze without flinching. "I know the difference too," he said. "I am not asking you to discount any of it because of Martin."

"I'm not discounting it."

"I know."

A pause.

"I was building a cage," he said. "I called it protection and I built a cage. I know that now with more clarity than I had then." He paused. "Then, I told myself the line between the two was thinner than it looked. It wasn't."

I looked at him. At the specific quality of what he was doing, which was not the performed contrition of a man who has learned what words produce the desired response, but the discomfort of someone saying something true that doesn't resolve into anything, not forgiveness, not restoration, just the truth sitting on the table between two people who both have to look at it.

"No," I said. "It wasn't."

He nodded.

We sat in the silence of that for a moment.

"Martin is still out there," I said.

"Yes."

"And you're going after him."

"Yes."

"When?"

He looked at me. "Soon. Dante has a location. We're building the approach." A pause. "A few days at most."

I looked at the morning light in the kitchen window, at the garden beyond it, at the world outside the house that contained somewhere within it a man who had poured my wine and commissioned my death with the same calm hands. I thought about what Felix had built and what Martin had destroyed and what I had survived and what Amaya had survived and what Elsa had not survived, and I thought about the piece of paper folded in Felix's breast pocket that I had written on an airstrip believing I was making a declaration and had instead been making a mistake.

I will not end like your exes.

I had written that thinking Felix was the danger.

"The families," I said. "The women Martin took. Their families still don't know."

"The process is running," Felix said. "It will take time to do it correctly but it is running."

I nodded.

Then I said the thing I had been deciding about since I woke up this morning, the thing I had tested from different angles and found held when I put weight on it. "I'm not ready to go back to what it was," I said. "I want to be clear about that. Whatever this is going forward, it is not a return to what it was."

"I know," Felix said. "I'm not asking for that."

"But I'm also..." I stopped. Found the words. "I am not as certain as I was about what I'm not ready for." I looked at him directly, because I was not going to say this while looking at something else. "That's as much as I have right now. I'm not certain what it means or where it goes. But I'm not where I was a week ago either."

Felix looked at me for a long moment.

"That's enough," he said. Very quietly.

"It might not be," I said. "For a long time it might have to be enough."

"I know." He held my gaze. "It's still enough."

I looked at him across the kitchen table in the morning light and thought about the particular difficulty of two people trying to be honest with each other when honesty had not been the primary feature of what was between them, and how the difficulty didn't make the attempting wrong, just harder than the things that were easier.

"Don't get killed going after Martin," I said.

Something shifted in his expression. A warmth, controlled, brief, but real. "That's the plan," he said.

"Felix." I said his name and he focused on me. "I mean it. He's more dangerous than you're giving him credit for and you know it." I paused. "Take it seriously."

"I take him very seriously," he said.

"Good." I picked up my coffee. "Take Marco. And Dante. Don't go in with fewer people than you think you need."

He looked at me with the expression I had finally named, that I had been carrying the name of since the basement under the old building, the hope that was quieter than the operational kind, the kind that didn't announce itself.

"I'll take everyone I need," he said.

I nodded and drank my coffee and looked out the kitchen window at the morning, which was continuing with its usual indifference, birds and light and the wet garden from last night's rain, the world doing its ordinary work around the edges of things that were anything but ordinary.

Amaya appeared in the kitchen doorway in her robe, assessed the room in one rapid sweep, clocked the two coffee cups and the quality of the silence, and walked directly to the coffee machine without saying a single word.

She poured her coffee and sat at the table and looked at us both.

"Good," she said simply.

She didn't specify what was good.

She didn't need to.