Tiffany and Sean are getting ready for bed later that night. Sean looks distracted.
"Long day, honey," she said. "I hope you're not taking on more than you can handle."
He brushes it off. "It's nothing. A little PI office. Certainly done that before. And with Ellie and Stanton and even Scott Baldwin's help, it's coming together pretty easily."
"Then what's wrong? Still worried about Maren?"
"I'll always worry about our daughter, but I think she's fine," he said as he pulled off his slippers and moved under the covers.
He takes his wife in his arms like he always had done and kisses her on the temple. Tiffany looks into his eyes. They seemed haunted and devoid of the spark she was so used to seeing in them and she got a little frightened by that, although she knew better to push him on it if he wasn't ready to talk about it.
"I love you, you know," she settled for.
"I know. I love you too," he said, flipping off the light with his free hand. She reaches across his chest so she could hold it in her own after he settles into the bed. She kisses it lightly on the knuckles.
Tiffany's eyes flutter shut, but she still can't shake the feeling that something's wrong with him. But Sean's pretty much out like a light.
A few hours later, though, Sean looks wide awake as a light drizzle taps on the windows of their bedroom. He moves out of his wife's embrace slowly without waking her up, puts on his slippers and leaves the room. He walks down the stairs of the penthouse and out the front door.
The next morning he's back in bed with his wife, spooning against her as the light comes through the bedroom window. The weather's cleared up so fast that no one who didn't see it would even realize it had rained the previous night. The phone rings, Sean stirs and reaches backward to pick it up.
"Yeah?" he said into the receiver. "Oh hi, Ellie. ... I'm fine, how are you? ... The meeting this morning with the real estate agent? Forgot all about it. Thank goodness I have you to keep me on the straight and narrow. I can be there in half an hour. Bye."
Tiffany stirs and he stretches to put it back on the hook. "Wasn't this supposed to be retirement?," she quipped.
"I know, baby. But I'm the money man, so I guess I need to be in on all this. I'm sure once this office is all set up they won't need me to serve as much more than the figurehead," he said as he got out of bed.
"Yeah right," she said knowingly.
Sean goes into his closet to pull a suit out. "You go ahead and go back to sleep. I'll give you a proper wakeup call when I get back."
"Sounds nice."
"It will be," he said, purposefully lowering his voice before heading to the bathroom.
An hour later, Tiffany is fitfully lying in bed waiting for Sean to return and wake her up properly. She drums her fingers impatiently on her pillow and finally just decides to get up. She pulls a lacy robe on over her nightgown and heads for the bedroom door, but trips over one of Sean's slippers.
"Should have stayed in bed," she muttered. "Why are these wet?" She picked up a slipper and turned it over, noting that there's mud caked on the bottom. Her brow furrows.
Ninety minutes later, Tiffany's dressed and still mulling over the slippers in the living room when Sean's key turns in the front door.
"I thought you were going to wait for me upstairs," he said disarmingly.
"Yeah, I couldn't get back to sleep," a distracted Tiff said.
"Maybe I should just tire you out so that you CAN get back to sleep," he retorted. She doesn't say anything. "That line is supposed to have a 90 percent success rate, you know."
"Did you go out last night after we went to bed?" she asked.
"What?"
"Did you get up and go out last night?"
"No. Why do you ask?"
"Just trying to figure out why your slippers were wet."
"Maybe I kept them on when I was in the shower, Lord knows I wasn't conscious when Ellie called this morning."
"...And they were also caked in mud."
Sean's flip attitude fades with her last statement.
"How can that be?" he asked.
"I don't know, if you went out onto the balcony or something, they might be wet, but they wouldn't be dirty."
"I didn't go out on the balcony. I didn't go anywhere."
"You had some wine last night, maybe you just forgot?" she said, just grasping for some kind of answer.
"I can certainly hold one glass of wine without memory loss, honey," he said, irritated not by her but by what she's told him. He gets up and climbs the stairs to check out the tell-tale slippers for himself.
Across town in the new PI office, Ellie's in her element as she sets up shop with Royce. A delivery man is rolling in a ton of office equipment as she gets off the phone with another bureaucratic agency.
"No sooner do we sign the lease then we've got all kinds of stuff rolling in here," Royce said. "We'll look like we've been in business a year by the end of the day."
"I've known him for 10 years, he's always been that way," Ellie replied.
"When that man makes up his mind, he makes up his mind," Royce said to her, showing the man with the cart to another room.
"That's certainly true," she said to herself. She leans over to a bouquet of flowers on a desk otherwise devoid of personal objects and reads the card "Thanks for last night." She smiles and tucks the card into her suit pocket. She rubs her lip thoughtfully as she thinks back to the previous evening.
