Chapter 173: 173. Meeting With His Wife, And Tonight... I Need More Than Pleasure From Her

She stepped back, and he came in and sat in the chair across from the small table where she had been reading, a book face-down with the spine bent slightly in a way that said she had not been reading it very attentively. She sat opposite him and folded her hands in her lap and waited.

"How long have you been up?" he said.

"Since Gerald came in," she said. "He went to the back room..."

"He didn’t say anything, and I already know that’s its own kind of information."

"He’s not hurt," Mike said.

"I could see that," she said. "That’s not what I was waiting for."

He told her what she needed to know. He did not provide all the information, as some details were not necessary for her, and it was important for Gerald to be the one to share the remaining information.

He told her about The Phoenix, about the general structure of what had been happening, and about the fact that Gerald’s casino visits had not been simply gambling but had been bound up in an arrangement that had accumulated a weight Gerald had been managing alone.

She listened with the complete attention she brought to things that mattered. She did not interrupt.

The only movement she made was once, near the middle of the meeting, when she reached up, took the reading glasses off the top of her head, set them on the table in front of her, and then folded her hands again. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

When he was done, she was quiet for a long moment.

"He has been paying them," she said.

"Yes."

"From our accounts."

"Yep."

She put one hand flat on the table and looked at it. "For how long?"

"He can tell you better than I can."

She pressed her lips together. When she looked up, her expression had transformed, indicating that she had processed her feelings and reached a state where her anger was more controlled.

"The account I found," she said. "The one from last night..."

"That wasn’t just the casino."

"No."

"He was making a payment on their behalf."

"Yes."

She was quiet again. Her hand was still flat on the table, and she was looking at it the way people look at something when they are not looking at it but need somewhere to rest their eyes.

"I’ve been angry at him about the gambling for five years," she said. "The right amount of anger, I thought."

"It’s not too much and not too little. The amount that says, "I know this is happening, and I haven’t accepted it, but I’ve decided to stay anyway." She paused. "It turns out that the issue I was angry about was just a visible manifestation of a completely different problem."

"Yes," Mike said.

"That’s a strange feeling," she said. "Feeling angry about the correct issue for incorrect reasons is confusing."

"It’s not wrong that you were angry," Mike said. "The gambling was real... The problem was real... You just didn’t have the full picture."

She looked at him. "You’re being generous."

"I’m being accurate," he said.

She sat with that for a moment. Outside the window, the street was quiet, the lamp at the end of Harwick Lane doing its usual work on the pavement.

"Are we in immediate danger?" she said. "Is the building, particularly the tenants living in it, in immediate danger?"

"Well, not right now," Mike said. "They have other considerations tonight."

"What kind of considerations?"

"The kind that came up suddenly," Mike said. "Don’t worry about it for now... It’s handled."

She looked at him with the focused attention she reserved for deciding whether to press further, and she concluded that she did not want a specific answer.

"Okay," she said. And then: "The cut on your cheek... that’s from tonight?"

"Nah, that one’s from Thursday," Mike said. "Tonight was something else."

"Something else," she repeated. "What else was that...?"

"Nothing that requires a conversation right now," he said.

She looked at him for a moment longer, making the same calculation she had made a second ago, arriving at the same conclusion.

"Alright," she said.

"Gerald needs to tell you the rest of it," Mike said. "When he’s ready... It’s his to tell."

She nodded once. "I know."

She turned her glasses over in her hands, not putting them on, just handling them. "He came in tonight and didn’t say anything and went to the back room."

"And I sat here and I thought, whatever is on the other side of this silence is something I’ve been about to find out for a long time."

"Five years is a long time to be about to find something out."

"Yes," she said. "It is."

She set the glasses down.

"Mike," she said.

"Yes."

"Is he safe? Right now, especially tonight?"

"He is," Mike said. "Like I said... it’s handled for a few days."

She exhaled, one slow breath out, and something in her shoulders settled slightly, not all the way, but enough to be visible.

"Thank you," she said.

She said it the way she said it when she meant it, which was simply and completely, without framing or qualification.

She stood up from the table, and he stood up with her; the room was small enough that they were close together, and she looked at him with a complex expression that conveyed her gratitude, exhaustion, and the presence of other thoughts, all while reflecting her specific calculation about what the evening meant.

"You keep putting yourself in the middle of things that aren’t your problem," she said.

"This building is my address," he said. "Everything here is adjacent to my problem."

"That’s a very contained way to explain what you did tonight," she said.

"It’s the accurate way."

She looked at him. "What’s the inaccurate way then...?"

"That I saw something going wrong and it bothered me," he said. "But that’s harder to quantify."

She was quiet for a moment. The room was quiet.

Somewhere in the building above them a pipe made its sound, the two-in-the-morning sound, and then stopped.

"I’ve been running this building for eleven years," she said. "I know every sound it makes..."

"I know which tenants leave their lights on and which ones lock their doors twice." She looked at the wall. "I know everything about this place, and apparently I knew nothing about what was happening directly underneath it."

"You knew something was wrong," Mike said. "You said so yourself."

"Knowing something is wrong and knowing what it is are different things."

"Yes," he said. "But you didn’t stop."

"You kept the building going, kept the accounts, kept everything running."

"You built something real while the thing underneath it was falling apart."

She turned to look at him. "Is that supposed to make me feel better...?"

"No," Mike said. "It’s supposed to be true."

She held his look for a long moment. Then something shifted in her expression, not softening exactly, but the particular shift of someone who has been very tightly held together all evening and has run out of reasons to stay that way.

"You are a very strange man, Mike Hawk," she said, quietly.

"So I’ve been told," he said. "Twice today."

She almost laughed. It wasn’t quite a laugh, but it was the thing that lives adjacent to one, and it broke the last of the controlled stillness she had been maintaining since he walked in.

She reached up, slowly, and put both arms around his neck, and it was not sudden. Not the way someone moves when they are not thinking about what they are doing.

The way someone moves when they have thought about it and decided.

"You’ve earned considerably more than rent reduction," she said.

"That’s not what I was after," Mike said.

"I know," she said. "That’s the point."

She was close enough that he could see the tiredness in her eyes and the thing underneath the tiredness, which was something that had been looking for somewhere to land for a long time and had made a decision about where that was.

"You came in here at midnight," she said. "You told me things that were hard to hear in the way that made them bearable."

"You didn’t make it smaller than it is, and you didn’t make it larger..."

"You just told me what was true and let me sit with it." Her hands were at the back of his neck, easy, not gripping. "Most people don’t know how to do that."

"Most people want to fix the feeling," Mike said. "That’s different from being in it."

"Is that what you were doing?" she said. "Being in it...?"

"Yes," he said.

She looked at him for a moment. Whatever she found in his face when she looked at it, she had decided something about it.

"Gerald is in the back room," she said.

"I know," Mike said.

"And I’m very tired," she said. "And I’ve had an extremely unpleasant evening."

"Yeah, it must be hard on you," he said.

"And you’re still here," she said.

"I’m still here," he said.

She leaned in and kissed him slowly, in the way she always did when she had made up her mind about someone; her hands tightened slightly at the back of his neck, the room was quiet, and she had decided what the rest of the evening would be like, a decision that was entirely hers.

When she pulled back, just slightly, her forehead rested against his and she exhaled once.

"Stay," she said.

Not a question.

Mike said nothing, which was its own answer, and she knew it.