"I didn't talk to you."
"I know."
"I didn't say one word to you for six weeks. Do you know how hard that was? I talked to the pie case."
"I know." Her eyes were stinging. "They'll say you did. They'll have pictures of us in this booth on twenty different days, and they'll say we passed notes, and they'll say I told you things about the case, or you told me things about the jury, and Mrs. Lucchesi will lose her verdict, and I'll lose my license, and it won't matter that it isn't true, because it will look true."
He was quiet for a moment. Across the street the Citation sat with the sun on its windshield.
"Then we go in," Remy said, "and we tell them it isn't."
"It isn't that simple."
"It's exactly that simple. It's the simplest thing in the world. I'll put my hand on the Bible and tell them."
"And until then?" She made herself say it. "Until then, we can't. Not this. Not here. Not anywhere they can see. If they get one picture of us walking down the street together, one picture of you holding my hand, the day after the verdict, it's over for her. Do you understand? It's over."
He looked at her for a long time across the table, and she watched him understand it, all of it, the way she had watched him understand the photograph of the charred floorboard. Then he did a thing she did not expect. He smiled, a small crooked smile, rueful and tender.
"Okay," he said. "Okay, Just Mina." He picked up Moby-Dick and stood up, and stood there at the end of the booth looking down at her, exactly where he had stood on the first day. "I promise not to bother you."