GODSFALL

The First Confrontation

She found him at the Harborview Café on the south side of the financial district. She had not found him technically; she had been directed by Priya, who herself had been directed by Zeph, which meant she had been granted permission to find him, which was another thing, but she did not know that yet.

He was seated at a table in the rear. He had changed since last night, of course, and it was the first real sign that the past twelve hours were not a dream or hallucination of her own making, brought on by stress and lack of sleep. He was in a dark jacket she had never seen wear before, and he was sitting in the stillness of a man in mediation.

He was not alone. There was a woman at the adjacent table who was reading something on a tablet, and who was so completely uninvested in the surrounding environment that Lena recognized her at once as someone whose job was to be invested in the surrounding environment and who was doing it unconcern.

Lena sat down across from Ethan.

He looked at her. His face was the face she had been married to less than twenty-four hours, the face she knew like a book she has read for three years, the face she thought she knew, and later found out, she knew not, the closed middle distance, the eyes that processed and filed everything and returned very little.

“You let me find you," she said.

"You found me."

"Ethan."

A pause. A very small one. "Yes."

She placed her hands flat on the table, a gesture she had picked up in board meetings and salary negotiations and once, memorably, in a conversation with a supplier who had attempted to overcharge her by forty percent, only to be very surprised at how that turned out.

"I owe you an explanation," she said.

"You don't owe me anything." His voice was even. It was a tone she knew, the professional register, the one with no personal weather in it. She had heard it in phone calls she wasn't supposed to be listening to, calls he took late at night when he thought she was asleep. "Marcus Vane was someone you trusted. He exploited that trust. That's not a debt you carry."

"That's not what I want to apologizing for."

He waited.

"I'm apologizing for three years Ethan," she said. “For all the times you needed something and I was looking elsewhere. For the times I could tell that you were waiting for me to see something and I didn't because I didn't know how to start a conversation with you about that.” She stopped. Started again. "For the way I let Marcus take up space he shouldn't have had, not because I felt anything romantic for him but because he was easy to understand and you were difficult and I chose easy more often than I should have."

There was something that had passed across his face. She couldn't identify it.

"You didn't know who I was," he said.

"I knew who you were in all the ways that mattered."

"The ways that mattered to you."

This landed. She sat with it. "Yes," she said. "The ways that mattered to me. Which is another way of saying I chose what to know and didn't ask about the rest." She looked at him. "That's what I'm apologizing for."

He said nothing. He studied her just as he had studied her before when she was telling him something he was considering taking. It was always comforting and somewhat frightening to be read so carefully by someone who wasn't sharing what they read.

"Priya told me some of it," she said. "About who you are.”

"Priya," he repeated, in the tone of a man filing information.

"She's very good," Lena said.

"I know." A brief, unguarded thing crossed his face. "Zeph is furious with himself about it, which is how I know she's exceptional."

They sat for a moment in the strange quiet of the café, two people in the middle of a conversation that was both the first honest one they had ever had and the conversation that had been necessary for three years, arriving now in the worst possible context.

She impulsively stretched out her hand across the table. His wrist. Her hand.

He did not pull away. She felt his pulse and warmth under her fingers, steady and measured, and for a moment she pressed a little harder than she had to, because she had to confirm the fact of him, and he let her.

"You don't know who I am," he said quietly. "You never did."

This was the sincerest thing he had ever said to her. She understood it as both a correction and a door.

"No," she said. "But I want to."

His pulse did not change. She didn't expect it to. But he did not remove her hand.