“This looks really good, Ruby,” I said, and I meant it. It had been a long time since someone had cooked for me.
“I hope you’re hungry?” She said it as a question, and wasn’t it? Wasn’t this a test of some sort? Whether I believed she was a killer. Whether I believed she could become one. The ultimate question: Did I trust her?
Would I move the food around, looking closely? Would I chew tentatively, wondering at each bite what she would be capable of? Would I eat it?
Of course I would. I didn’t even wait for her to take a bite first, twisting the pasta around my fork, closing my eyes as I chewed. With Ruby, I knew, you were all in or you were nothing at all. “Oh, God,” I said around the bite, “it really is good, Ruby. Like, really fucking good.”
She smiled, her entire demeanor relaxing as she speared some lettuce on her fork. “You know what I missed the most inside? Being able to break from routine. Not just the big freedom—that’s not the worst. It was the little ones. They were harder to deal with than the bigger concept, honestly.” I saw her throat move, her eyes drift somewhere over my head. “Just the idea that I could cook dinner for someone…”
It took me a second to realize what she meant by inside. That she didn’t mean within her. She meant a place. A place where she had existed for fourteen months. And this, even cooped up with me, with the neighbors watching—this was out. She could finally do anything she pleased. Whether that was staying out a night without checking in, on a whim; buying a new outfit because she could. And could I fault her for that, really? Every day, a steady notch. An accumulation of weeks that became routine. Adding up to an unforgiveable passage of time.
Time to grow a child. For a child to grow teeth, learn to speak, turn from baby to toddler. To graduate and become an adult. And for us, time to decide on something. Come to terms with the truth—let it seep into your bones, gather weight, and become part of your understanding: Ruby was guilty. A jury agreed. We were right. All changes that were impossible to undo, in reverse.
I cleared my throat. “How did the meeting with the lawyer go?”
A pause. “Good,” she said. “And you? How was the meeting?”
I froze, then reached for my glass of wine, trying not to show how she shook me. How did she know about the meeting here? Had I mentioned it? Had she seen it on the message board somehow, logging in to my computer when I wasn’t looking? Had she spoken to someone else here?
But I felt my allegiance shifting in her presence. The wine, the food, the honesty. The words at the bottom of the television screen the day of her release: presumed innocent.
“As expected,” I said. “They’re starting a neighborhood watch.”
“Is that why I just saw Javier Cora walk by?”
I hadn’t noticed. But Ruby was facing the window, and I wondered if that was on purpose. Whether she’d grown accustomed to keeping an eye on her surroundings. Whether she was watching for something now.
Her gaze trailed after something out the window; for the first time, I could see the signs of fatigue on her: the thin skin under her eyes, dulled and discolored; the slightly sunken cheeks, like she was ravenous for something to drink.
“Probably,” I said. It was dusk.
“Or maybe not,” she said with a wry grin. And for a second I thought her look was for me—that she’d caught me watching her too closely.
I didn’t respond; didn’t know whether Ruby’s throwaway lines meant anything at all or if I was reading too much into every word, every gesture.
“Well, anyway. What about you? What have you been up to?” she asked.
I thought of Mac last night, Charlotte this morning. “Hmm?”
“Fourteen months,” she said. “What did I miss?”
“Oh, nothing much.” Nothing I could tell her, the mundane things I’d taken for granted with the freedom she’d lacked. She already seemed to know about my new job somehow. But now I was really thinking about it—how maybe I, too, had been in a holding pattern for the last fourteen months. That I’d somehow understood—or believed, or feared—that someday she’d be back, and I had lost trajectory of my own life in the process. That I was only waiting for her return.
Fourteen months, and what did I have to show for it?
“I know one thing,” she said, fork resting in her hand. She stared at me, and I held my breath, and then she smiled, teeth first, before it reached her eyes. “You turned thirty, and I missed it. I hope you celebrated.”