Chapter 2 — One Last Chance

Audrey watched the appointment disappear into my calendar.

“You’re making a decision before we’ve even talked.”

“We talked last night.”

“You told me what you’d decided.”

“I told you what I was considering. You told me I’d misunderstood.”

She pulled the chair away from my desk and sat.

I could smell the coffee she had spilled. A dark patch marked the cuff of her blouse.

“Tell me what you want me to do.”

The question should have been easy.

Instead, I looked at her hands.

Fourteen years earlier, those hands had been shaking so badly that a police officer had taken her phone from her to read my message himself.

I remembered that part from what she told me afterward.

The parts I had seen were harder to remember in order.

A door opening. A flashlight. My own shoes on a concrete floor.

Audrey waiting outside the building, her hair escaping a ponytail, crying when she saw me.

For years, when fear caught me somewhere ordinary—a stalled elevator, a locked service corridor—I could think of her face and find my way back.

Now she sat three feet away, asking what it would take to keep me from leaving.

“I need some time,” I said.

“How much?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to tell your lawyer I’m having an affair?”

“I’m going to tell her what happened.”

“I’m not.”

“Then you shouldn’t need me to edit the story.”

She flinched.

At the front door, her phone began vibrating inside her bag.

She looked toward it.

Neither of us moved.

It stopped.

A moment later, it started again.

Audrey closed her eyes.

“I have to get to court.”

“I know.”

She left the coffee on my desk.

That afternoon, Evelyn Whitmore arrived with a casserole dish and no attempt to pretend she was dropping by casually.

“My daughter called me,” she said.

“I guessed.”

“May I come in?”

I stepped aside.

Evelyn had known me since I was eighteen. After my parents died, she had made room for me at holidays without making a ceremony of it. She remembered the anniversary of their deaths. She kept the brand of tea my mother had liked, though nobody else in her house drank it.

She placed the casserole in the refrigerator.

Then she sat on the couch.

“I’m not here to tell you it’s nothing.”

I remained standing.

“She lied to you,” Evelyn continued. “And that young man behaved disgracefully.”

“Audrey let him.”

“Yes.”

That answer made it possible for me to sit down.

Evelyn clasped her hands.

“She says she didn’t understand how far it had gone.”

“She understood enough to hide it.”

“I know.”

Outside, a delivery truck backed into the alley. Its warning beep sounded three times.

I counted them before I realized I was doing it.

Evelyn noticed.

“You haven’t been sleeping?”

“Not much.”

She lowered her voice.

“I remember when she used to stay on the phone with you until morning.”

“I remember too.”

At eighteen, I had been held for thirty-one hours by two men who believed my father had left money behind.

There had been no money.

My father had been a lawyer with an old car, a mortgage, and the habit of taking cases from people who couldn’t pay.

The men took my phone to demand a transfer from an account I couldn’t access. Before one of them grabbed it, I managed to send Audrey four words.

“The porch light’s out.”

It was a sentence from a film we had watched together, a frightened boy’s warning disguised as a complaint about his house.

She knew I didn’t have a porch.

She called me. When a stranger answered and said I was busy, she called the police.

She gave them everything she knew: where I had been going, who had approached me about my father, the vehicle I had mentioned seeing twice that week.

She didn’t rescue me alone.

But she was the reason someone started looking in the right place.

Afterward, she never called my fear weakness.

That had mattered more than I knew how to say.

Evelyn wiped at one eye.

“I think she’s forgotten that keeping someone safe is something you keep doing.”

I looked down at my hands.

“Please don’t ask me to owe her for the rest of my life.”

“I wouldn’t.”

But she hesitated.

Then she said, “Would you consider giving her one chance to make this right?”

That evening, Audrey came home early.

Evelyn stayed, though I told her she didn’t have to.

“No,” Audrey said. “I’d like her here.”

She set her phone on the table.

“I spoke to Graham. Tyler will work under another partner from Monday.”

“Does Tyler know?”

“Yes.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That our relationship had become too informal. That it stops.”

She unlocked her phone and turned it toward me.

There was a message to Tyler, sent that afternoon.

It told him to direct work questions to his new supervisor and not to contact her privately.

His reply was short.

“Understood. Sorry if I caused trouble.”

Audrey watched me read it.

“I’ve removed him from my personal accounts too.”

I pushed the phone back.

“I’m not going to check that every day.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“I won’t live as your monitor.”

“You won’t have to.”

Evelyn said nothing.

I took a sheet of paper from beside my laptop. I had written three things on it.

“No private contact,” I said. “Actual time together that doesn’t disappear whenever someone at work wants you. And counseling.”

Audrey glanced at the page.

“Okay.”

“I’m keeping the appointment with Rachel.”

Her face tightened.

“We can still try without pretending I haven’t considered leaving.”

She breathed out slowly.

“All right.”

It was the first conversation in two days that felt like a conversation.

We found a counselor. Audrey booked the first session herself.

For three weeks, she came home when she said she would. She left her phone in her bag during dinner. At counseling, she admitted that being needed by someone young and impressed with her had made her feel less exhausted.

I didn’t forgive her in a single moment.

I noticed things.

She asked about my work and stayed to hear the answer.

She remembered a difficult delivery date.

Once, when a call came through while we were watching a movie, she let it go and didn’t tell me afterward what a sacrifice that had been.

Meanwhile, I met Vivian Cole at a coffee shop near Northlight Films.

She arrived carrying a hard drive and wearing the same irritated expression she had worn at sixteen when I made her wait outside a record store.

“You’ve become impossible to hire,” she said.

“I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what? Every producer I know says you keep turning down longer projects.”

I looked at the drive.

“What have you got?”

“Six months of footage. A director who thinks every interview is indispensable. A broadcaster who disagrees.”

“Sounds delightful.”

“It pays.”

“That helps.”

She slid the drive across the table.

Then her expression changed.

“You okay?”

“Audrey and I are having a rough patch.”

Vivian waited.

I had known her too long to mistake her silence for indifference.

“We’re working on it,” I said.

“Then I hope it works.”

There was no smugness in her voice. No invitation hidden underneath.

She opened her laptop and showed me the schedule.

For the first time in months, I looked at a project and wanted it before I calculated how inconvenient it might be for Audrey.

I signed the contract that Friday.

By the fourth week, the apartment felt easier to live in.

On Sunday night, Audrey sat beside me at the kitchen counter while I worked through a sequence of interviews.

Her phone was charging in the bedroom.

Her laptop remained open near the fruit bowl.

A work notification appeared.

I wasn’t reading it. I was looking for the mouse I had left beside her computer.

Then I saw Tyler’s name.

“Sorry to use this address. I know what you said. There’s something in the filing I can’t fix, and you’re the only person I trust.”

Audrey reached for the laptop.

“I’ll tell him to ask Graham.”

She took it into the bedroom.

A few minutes later, I went to get my headphones.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, typing.

When she saw me, she closed the screen.

“Handled,” she said.

I wanted to believe her.

I went back to my work.