"It's difficult for you to say aloud. I know."
"You've been to the cemetery." He was sitting on the floor in front of Angus's perch, reviewing the detritus from their last case which was almost wrapped up.
She didn't look up from the lock room table where she was flipping through the mail she'd brought in when she came back to the brownstone.
"You tracked in an Elm leaf. One of the few stands left in Brooklyn is at Carver."
She set the mail down and turned toward the stairs, walking up slowly and deliberately, eyes on each step as if it took her total concentration to keep steady, as if she could barely lift each foot high enough to clear the rise. He raised his voice to keep up.
"Most of the ones planted as avenue trees died from Dutch Elm Disease, but some isolated groups survived."
Her left heel did catch on the edge at the very top, and when she caught her balance she reached down, tore it off her foot, and threw it down the hallway to hit the bathroom door which then crashed against the wall. All in all it made a satisfying sound, and she didn't need to slam the door to her room.
Two hours later she came downstairs.
"I'm serious," she said. "I don't want to talk about it. I will leave." She didn't specify what she meant.
"All right." He kept his head down, focused on the lock he was disassembling. Or reassembling. She didn't know which.
"Did you order anything?"
"I wasn't hungry. I thought I'd wait for you."
The prospect of having to make a decision made the feeling that required her to throw her shoe look around for a new target. "Please just pick something. I can't— I just can't." Her voice broke then, and he looked up quickly and then away without quite catching her eye.
"Mario's is closest and quick, if you're hungry. I'll get the usual." He pulled out his phone to call and was immediately put on hold.
She picked up his empty glass and went down to the kitchen to refill it with water and get herself a glass. She was on her way back upstairs when he called out, "Twenty minutes."
She set his glass on the table and stepped back to sit on the little couch by the stairs, behind him, pulling her feet up and the blanket at the end up over them and cradling her glass in two hands. "Would you put something on the record player?"
She didn't want to talk but didn't want to sit in silence, either. "Just something without words, anything is fine as long as there are no words." She heard herself and knew what he would be doing, parsing and deducing and theorizing her state of mind. As long as he kept it to himself, she'd be okay. And then the pizza would come and she would eat and hopefully fall asleep quickly, and then this miserable day would be over. Until next year.
He got up and went into the parlor, not the living room anymore, not even in her head, and started flipping through the box of albums. A minute later earnest but controlled piano started playing. He came back to sit at the lock table and this time did meet her eyes when she looked up. "Brahms," he said. "Opus 79. Rhapsodies in B minor and G minor. Seventeen and a half minutes, and then a concerto for the pizza."
Three weeks later, she came downstairs one morning and found him lying face down on the floor of the lock room, head resting on folded arms under the table, legs splayed out toward the study. She paused and waited.
"My turn," he said, his voice muffled by his shirt. "Two years. No talking."
"Oh — oh." She did the math, surprised. It didn't feel like she'd been here that long, but she had. Seven months, just about. She should have been prepared for this. But no, it wasn't her job anymore. She swallowed, unsure how to ask, as a friend. She hadn't navigated this territory outside of a professional context since Liam.
"I already have plans to meet Alfredo."
"Okay..." her voice trailed off, relieved but still unsure if she should offer or encourage or just stay out of it.
"I know," he said. "In case of emergency, or Alfredo unavailable, or every meeting in New York cancelled due to snowpocalypse. None of those things are going to happen today. Or anything else."
She heard an echo of his voice in her mind, saying "I could burst with pride." She'd thought he was being sarcastic at the time but knew now he'd actually meant it. As she did, now.
"Well, then I'm going to make tea and get to work on the Nagar files from the deposition. I'll be downstairs." He didn't say anything, and she went down to the kitchen, taking the thick manilla folder of legal papers with her.
Ninety minutes and five cups of tea later, she couldn't wait any longer and ventured upstairs to head to the bathroom. He wasn't on the floor any more, now sitting at his computer looking at photographs.
"You've never seen a picture of her, have you?" It wasn't really a question so she didn't answer, and she couldn't tell if it was an invitation so she didn't go closer. "I only have two, and she's in disguise in both." He let out a breath slowly. "Looking back now, I see... It was— It wasn't—" He dropped his face into his hands, without that agitated rubbing he did sometimes when he felt something he didn't want to feel.
She took a step toward him and he didn't move, so she continued slowly, ten small steps, until she stood next to him. Gently, carefully, she placed her right hand lightly on his back, between his shoulder blades. His breath caught and shuddered through the exhale but he remained still. She didn't look at the images on the screen.
He took another breath, breathing into her hand, smoothly now. Once, twice. After the third, she let her hand rise off his shirt with the inhale and turned back to head upstairs. She was halfway up when he spoke again, almost inaudible, head still in his hands.
"Thank you, Watson."
"I don't want us to take this case."
"False accusations of surgical malpractice, hospital administration conspiracies, patients dying right and left—"
"No!" She let the heavy envelope of medical records drop to the table with a slap.
"I am taking this case. If you chose not to work with me on it, so be it. We didn't discuss vacation time, but I'm sure you're entitled to a week in the country if you wish. However, eventually this pattern is going to have to stop."
"What the hell are you talking about." He just stared back at her. "I'm not going to discuss it," she said. "There are plenty of things you won't talk about—"
"Which have had no impact whatsoever on our work." She stared pointedly at him this time. "Our work," he emphasized. "Since you started your new career."
"That's splitting hairs. You have boxes and boxes of cases we could work on instead. Why do we have to work for doctors?"
"Surgeons. We have to help these surgeons because they and their patients need our help. And because you have expertise that could make a real difference. Why must you insist on squandering valuable assets? You can specialize here, do work few others can. Not even me."
She walked away from him to the back corner of the study, stepping behind the wingback chair to look out over the bedraggled garden. I should do something about that, she thought. Gardening. Get my hands dirty with actual dirt.
"After you ran into your old friend at the hospital, I was curious. And then after you met Alistair and— Well, I was angry. Vindictive. So I did research a bit, found the summary report. But as you know, M&M details are confidential, and your old hospital has excellent network security. I even sent an anonymous text commending the sysop for it."
He stopped, momentarily distracted by the thought of cyberinfrastructure and the many ways to test it. Or so she assumed. He cleared his throat. "In any case, that's as far as I went, other things came up and my desire to discover more faded. I know he was 34, quite young for bypass surgery. I assume then the possibility of other extenuating factors in the state of his health—"
"None of which played any part in what happened." She was still facing the windows but no longer looking outside.
After a long pause he spoke softly, his voice kind. "What did happen?"
She'd observed him do this in the interrogation room many times. She could feel her throat loosen, the words rising to the surface. She turned to face him, gritting her teeth. "Don't. You. Dare." He raised his hands in defense and took a step back.
"My apologies." He looked genuinely chagrined. "Old—"
"Don't you say 'Old habits' to me."
His face hardened, eyes intense, not quite a scowl. "All right, then. I'll say this: 'Physician, heal thyself.' It's time. Those sporadic 'errands' to see your therapist aren't working. And neither is denial. 'Sometimes you have to talk about things that make you feel uncomfortable,' I don't know how many times you said that to me. I hated hearing it every time. But you were right. If you don't want to hear it from me, fine. But do at least listen to yourself."
She'd never realized it before but the sheer genius of the sober companion model was that you were long gone by the time your client was strong enough to turn the tables on you.
He had followed her into the study and was now standing on the other side of the chair, blocking her way out.
"If you don't want me to lie about going to get coffee and then ditch you, get out of my way." It was the closest thing to an acknowledgment he was going to get, and she was relieved when he appeared to accept it as such, quickly turning and walking away to go downstairs. When she heard him clattering a pan on the stove she gripped the back of the chair and half-collapsed over it, head hanging down.
"No," she whispered into the upholstery that smelled faintly like him. "No, no, no, no, no."
"Watson." It was a few days after the fight about the malpractice case, which he had started working on and she had ignored.
"Hmm?" She was sitting at the kitchen table, browsing through the New York Times Sunday Magazine and didn't look up. When he didn't start off with the content of his question, it was almost always a hypothetical scenario or some kind of random observation that rarely required her full attention although it was usually interesting or bizarre enough to garner it eventually.
"Do you consider me a friend?" He spoke from the door to his room, with a pile of clothes in his arms.
She looked up at him, taken aback. He appeared serious, intent even. She noticed he wasn't wearing socks. Laundry day. "What?"
"You've told me you are my friend, and I fully concur. But would you say the same for me? Would I be accurate if I said I was a friend of yours?"
"Well, yes, of course. Yes, I do think of you as a friend. I think we're friends. I figured... I assumed that was implied when I said that."
"All right. Excellent. In that case..." And he paused and fidgeted a bit, still holding his clothes. Here it comes, she thought. "Friends may help each other, yes?"
"I'm not giving you my genetic material for some experiment. We've been over this."
"No. I'm trying— I want to help, Watson. How can I help?"
She felt the thin shiver of dread start up her esophagus and flipped the magazine closed. "What are you talking about?"
He chewed his lips, then turned around and dropped the laundry on his couch and came back to the doorway. He didn't come any closer to her than he'd been before.
"I know you don't ask for help. I know you don't like to accept it. You didn't want my help with Liam. You didn't want my help with your apartment. Granted, you were still my sober companion then, or in the latter case, acting as that although technically your contract had ended by that point. It could be considered professionally unethical to receive help from a client. No doubt there are many ways as a woman, and as a person of Chinese ancestry, that your competence has been questioned or undermined. I can only imagine personal and professional experiences that would further reinforce the importance to you of self-sufficiency. You know I also value that trait highly in myself."
"Where are you going with this?" She'd looked back down at the table when he started talking and was still staring at the surface. Looked like it might have been painted once. She traced a line of color within the grain with her fingertips, pressing harder as he spoke.
"I'm trying to provide evidence that I have some degree of comprehension and empathy, to the extent you have allowed, regarding your avoidance of help from others. And I'm trying to say, as your friend, that I have observed that this avoidance may be detrimental to your wellbeing."
"Noted," she muttered, feeling the strain in her jaw.
"I'm sorry I pushed you the other day to tell me about your patient. I won't ask you again. But I stand by my other remarks. As your friend. I am concerned." He ground his fists against his thighs and then rubbed his face. "Next I shall spout a platitude. This is what comes of a year of support group meetings."
She breathed a tiny harsh laugh and looked up at him warily over the top of her glasses. "I don't think you have to worry about that," she said.
"I worry about you, Watson," he said, and retreated back into his room.
She had decided to learn lock picking while he worked on the case she pretended he wasn't working on. He recommended a couple of websites with instructions and videos and pulled out his kit and the pail of practice locks for her to use. She had nicks on six fingers from getting used to the tools although only one had bled enough to require a bandage. It was a surprisingly meditative activity, and she was momentarily startled when he spoke.
"Irene and I never lived in the same place at the same time."
As the words sunk in she froze, not sure what was going on.
"I don't mean we didn't cohabitate. I mean we never lived in the same country."
She set the lock and pick down on the side table and turned around in the chair. She was sitting by the parlor fireplace, he was in the lock room, finishing some leftover dal in a takeout box. He continued speaking after she settled sideways in the chair, facing him.
"She was a wandering nomad... not of sobriety, to be sure, but of opportunity. She was a musician and, I suppose an entrepreneur, you might say. I was already in New York when she moved to London, just three weeks before she was killed. She didn't trust the internet and hated talking on the phone, so she wrote letters. As you know. I already had tickets to visit her in London a week later. She never wrote me from there. I didn't find my letters to her in the flat. They may have been taken. She might not have kept them; she was not a sentimental person." He looked down for a moment. "Nor am I, generally. Or I wouldn't have said so, but I did keep her letters. For a while. I don't know what that makes me." He looked over at her as if asking the question.
She shrugged a little and tilted her head in acknowledgment, but was afraid to speak.
"I'd gone to a forensics conference in Bruges; she was there for a concert; we met in a bar. Her french was terrible and the bartender had a chip on his shoulder about Americans and pretended he didn't understand her. I interceded before she got thrown out by buying the most expensive bottle of champagne they had so they'd let us stay. I was afraid she'd give me the slip if she left before we had a chance to talk. She told me later I was right about that. It might have been the only time I deduced correctly about her."
"I hadn't realized she wasn't from London," she said, surprised. He nodded.
"Her parents had been in the military and they moved every year or two when she was growing up; lived all over the world. She said she got a taste for it then, and never wanted to stop moving. I think there was something else, though. As well, I mean. She genuinely loved travel and new places, but there was fear, too. I don't know why. There wasn't time. I don't know a lot of things about her."
There was a long pause. He seemed to be done speaking, but she waited several minutes to be sure.
Eventually, she had to say it. "Why?"
He raised his eyebrows, not sure what she was asking.
"Why now?" She heard the edge in her voice, realized she sounded angry. Why would this make her angry? "Sorry, I'm just— I'm surprised. Why did you decide to talk about it?"
He stood up and stretched his arms overhead, then walked over to where she was sitting and lay down on the floor in front of the fireplace, looking up at the ceiling.
"I felt it was time. And obviously grief isn't a science, despite my efforts to believe that could be so. I don't know why now, but recently I've wanted to remember differently. To separate what it was, what we actually had together, from what happened. What happened to her there at the end and what happened here, after. And. Well. I realized it wasn't fair." He sat up, pulling his legs in to sit cross-legged in front of her chair. He glanced up at her and back down to his hands, back and forth as he spoke.
"Last week, asking you about your patient. Saying I wanted to help. If I am your friend, then I should offer, not demand. And then, I hope, when your time comes, when you are ready to talk about it, you will trust me to listen. As I trust you."
Her eyes filled with tears, and she was mortified. She would not be able to bear it if she broke down in front of him. She closed them tightly, getting under control, and put her hands up as if to rub out tiredness, not wipe her eyes dry. She suspected she didn't fool him but he remained silent, still glancing over rather than observing directly.
"I do trust you," she whispered. "It's me I don't trust. I lost it that day, and it's never come back."
"It hasn't been that long, Watson."
"I know. I know this isn't rational. You just said — it's not a science. I hate that too."
Neither spoke, and after a while he pulled his feet under him but paused before standing up, to place his hand just barely on top of hers where it rested on the chair arm. She had closed her eyes again in the silence and jerked now, startled by the touch, but didn't move away.
She had a sudden memory of the day they met, him shaking her hand in his firm grasp. She couldn't recall him touching her like this since, hand to hand for no other reason than to make contact. He remained crouched by her side another moment, then got up and went back to his desk in the study. She could still feel the cool outline of his hand on her skin.