Elise considered. "Then don't look for a door. Look for the part of you that stayed when staying was boring. If that part is gone, I need to know before I invest another year."
"It's not gone," Nathan said. "It's underfed."
"Then feed it without another woman's kitchen," Elise said. "That's the whole assignment."
He nodded. The book light made a small moon on the page. Elise went back to the guest room before the conversation could turn into a reconciliation she wasn't offering.
***
Elise used a late night after June left to finally read the entire text thread in one sitting, wine neglected, jaw tight. She annotated nothing. She did not forward it to June. She did not print it. She let the words enter and take up space.
What surprised her most was not the affection. It was the mundanity. Affairs, she had imagined in the abstract, would sound like fever. This sounded like a second marriage built of scheduling and small jokes and the relief of being adored without history. Claire had written about a difficult meeting. Nathan had written back: You're better at this than they deserve. Elise recognized the sentence. He had said versions of it to her, years ago, when Halberd was chewing her up. He had stopped saying it when both of them started assuming competence instead of witnessing it.
"We starved the witnessing," Elise said aloud to the empty guest room. "Then he found a restaurant."
The metaphor was imperfect. She kept it anyway.
She wrote in a notebook she had bought that afternoon—cheap, spiral, unromantic: Things I will not do. She listed: I will not interrogate every late night for the rest of my life. I will not make Claire the only villain. I will not stay only because divorce is paperwork. I will not leave only because staying requires work. I will decide on evidence and feeling, not on pride alone.
Under Things I might do she wrote: Stay. Leave. Separate for a season. Take the Milwaukee trip I canceled and think there. Ask him to move out for thirty days instead of guest-rooming. Forgive in pieces, never as a ceremony.
She closed the notebook. The list did not solve anything. It made the unsolved visible, which was, for now, the point.
On Monday Nathan asked Reid Langford for a post-close rotation off Meridian. Reid frowned in the way partners frowned when personal life inconvenienced leverage.
"Family matter," Nathan said. "I'm not elaborating."
Reid, who had survived two divorces and a heart scare, studied him for a long second. "After close. Not before. And don't make me explain staffing gymnastics to the client."
"Understood."
In the corridor afterward, Hannah fell into step beside him with a notepad. "Do you want me to screen Meridian calls more aggressively?"
Nathan glanced at her. "Yes. Professional only. If Claire Mendoza asks for me directly, route to the team distribution."