Chapter 10: One Month Later
He asked again on a Tuesday.
Not in the office.
He waited until we were both in the elevator at the end of the day — a coincidence, or possibly not — and as the doors closed he said, quietly, "It's been a month."
I looked at the floor numbers rising.
"I know," I said.
"You don't have to answer tonight."
"Saturday," I said.
"Somewhere without cameras."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then: "I know a place."
The elevator opened.
We walked out into the lobby separately, the way we always had, and I went home and made dinner and sat at my own table in my own quiet apartment and felt, for the first time in a very long time, that the evening belonged entirely to me.
The trial came eight months later, as scheduled.
Andrew's attorney was skilled and the defense was aggressive and there were two weeks in the middle of it that were the hardest of my life — sitting in a courtroom while his lawyer suggested that Claire had a grudge, that Patricia had misremembered, that I had been emotionally unstable and romantically fixated on my employer.
Ethan sat in the gallery on the days I testified.
He didn't try to catch my eye.
He was simply there, in the same way he had always been there — steady, unhurried, taking up exactly the space he needed and no more.
The jury deliberated for three days.
Grace called on a Wednesday morning.
"Guilty," she said.
"On all counts."
I was standing in the kitchen with my coffee.
I set it down on the counter.
"All of them," I said.
"All of them.
Sentencing is in six weeks.
The DA is pushing for the maximum given the pattern and the number of victims." A pause.
"Claire is with Patricia right now.
They're together."
"Good," I said.
"That's good."
I ended the call.
The kitchen was very quiet.
Morning light came through the window over the sink, the ordinary kind, the kind that had nothing to do with anything except that it was morning and the sun had risen.
I picked up my coffee.
It was the right temperature.
I had made it for myself, at my own pace, without checking the clock.
I thought about a dressing room at 7:14 p.m.
and a man who had turned toward the door to give me privacy before he even knew why he needed to.
I thought about a scarf folded over the back of a chair.
I thought about a key card placed on a table with no expectation attached to it.
I thought about four words on a folded piece of paper: *Don't go home with him tonight.*
I thought about Saturday dinner, and the one after that, and the Tuesday morning three months ago when Ethan had arrived at the office to find a coffee already on his desk, and had looked at me across the room with something open and unhurried in his expression, and had said simply, "Good morning, Ava," and I had said good morning back, and it had felt — for the first time in as long as I could remember — like exactly what it was.
I rinsed my cup.
Put it in the rack.
Picked up my bag and my keys.
Walked out into a morning that was entirely, quietly, completely mine.
---
Some people spend years carrying a weight they were never meant to carry alone — and it takes just one person willing to stand beside them to change everything.
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