Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She doesn’t smoke anymore. The air that fills her lungs is stale and heavy, damp off the river. It seems to sink inside her, denser than it should be, and she folds her arms over her chest. Her fingers curl, empty, around nothing.

When she exhales, the river air doesn’t leave her. There’s no pale smoke in the evening light. No sign of her breath at all. Just a faded figure leaning against the trunk of her car—but she doesn’t imagine herself from the outside anymore. She imagines herself down with the air in her lungs, heavier than she should be.

On the edge of the parking lot, the grass shoulder descends to where small waves graze the riverbank. The water is pale and stagnant, and in the distance the faint shapes of the Kennedy Space Center rise from the horizon. Gray blocks cut into the sky like the jagged teeth of a long, thin key.

She checks her watch. It has a sensible face. Each number is printed clearly, and its hands glow in the dark.

The second hand turns, rising and falling, and the river drains out and out into the ocean. She folds her lips around her teeth and watches the water. She thinks if she watches for long enough she’ll be able to see the moment the tide finally empties, leaving nothing but white sand and seagrass.

A boxy Honda slows into a space near hers. The familiar chattering voices of drive time radio seep through the windows until the engine cuts.

Kim pushes off her car and stands, upright and waiting, as Glenn walks over.

“Hey, babe,” he says, lifting his sunglasses onto his forehead and squinting at her.

She echoes him thoughtlessly—“Hey, babe.”—and kisses the edge of his lips.

It’s dim inside Paul’s Smokehouse, shadowed and close, but the waitress smiles at them brightly. She exchanges familiar words with Glenn before leading them to their usual table near the window. The waitress smiles at Kim, too, but she has fewer words to share. Everyone always does.

Raw timber beams support a low wooden ceiling, and dark carpet absorbs any stains and whatever light bleeds from the hanging lamps. Outside, on a deck overlooking the river, scattered diners send up plumes of cigarette smoke. Half a dozen regulars sit in careful watch over the wide riverbanks, as if already waiting for the launch that’s still weeks away.

Glenn raises a hand to greet one of the smokers, then draws back Kim’s chair for her. The cushion (pilled and scratchy) sinks beneath her thighs, and the bamboo chair legs creak as she settles. The chairs are always too low here, the tables always too high.

But Glenn sprawls across the space. He clicks his tongue and opens the menu, then he twists to study the specials board. “Oh, babe, look,” he says. “Alaskan snow crab.” He nods, then turns back from the board to her. “What do you think?”

The menu stands lopsidedly, the marker-written items smudged at the edges. Kim hums under her breath. “I don’t know.”

“Sounds damn good to me,” Glenn says. “I reckon we go for it.” He closes his menu and taps the side of it on the table, looking around for their waitress.

He’s wearing the same shirt as their last date. The same tangled palm trees. She stares at the fronds and tries to remember how many other times over the last three years she’s studied these same branches. Over tables and booths and grills. She brings her hands together and looks up. “I don’t think the crab is a good idea.”

Glenn’s eyes change, and he smiles. “No?”

She shrugs. “We’re four thousand miles from Alaska.”

“Oh—yeah,” he says, and he chuckles. “That’s a super good point, babe.” He lets his menu fall open again. “Let’s see, then… well, hell, looks like Carla’s still making her chicken fried steak.”

Kim exhales. She studies her own menu. It hasn’t changed much since she arrived here. No new additions, but every few months she’ll unfold it to discover another item crossed off. Black marker swiping the plastic. No more coconut shrimp. She opens her mouth and—“If you want the crab, go for it. It could be nice.”

“No, you’re right,” Glenn says. “Glad you said something.” He gives her another smile.

She nods and her chest tightens and she orders chicken fried steak. The plates arrive too soon, and her knife and fork slide through the soggy coating around the meat, the whole thing too drenched with oil. She imagines the crack of crab legs instead, the glimpse of white flesh.

Her foot jiggles, out of time with the music playing over the smokehouse speakers. Out of time with the steady chatter from the man across the table.

Glenn’s started a new job, too. Kim’s the one who adds the ‘too’. He doesn’t know about Central Florida Legal Aid. She tells herself that if he asks, she’ll tell him—but she’s good at making these promises to herself.

Not lies, she thinks. She doesn’t lie anymore.

But Glenn will never ask. About her job, her day. Glenn’s happy that she’s happy. And how could she not be happy? His uncle used Palm Coast Sprinklers for his golf course and they did a great job. They’re good people. And did she know his uncle’s company sells golf clubs that use the same titanium as the space shuttles? That’s why they’re worth so much.

She looks at her watch under the table. The second hand is still turning. It glows faintly now, here in the dim smokehouse. She laces her fingers together.

Glenn wipes his mouth on his napkin and grins, leaning back in his chair like it’s a well-worn recliner.

“I—” Kim starts.

He looks at her. If she waits long enough, he’ll finish the sentence. He’s good at that. It’s never exactly what she would say, but it’s something. He’ll always say something—at dinner parties, at company functions, at cookouts. He’ll make it easier.

She folds her lips inwards.

“Carla’s steak was a winner again, huh?” Glenn offers finally. “We’ll have to do Dixie Crossroads on Tuesday. I’m dreaming about their prime rib.” He yawns and wipes his mouth with the napkin again, and then he tilts his head at her. Raises his eyebrows. “You still got some of those Klondike bars in your freezer, babe?”

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” she says quickly.

Glenn’s face scrunches. “What?”

Kim exhales through her nose. “Glenn,” she says. His name feels foreign in her mouth. She wonders how many times she’s actually said it. “I want to break up.”

He coughs, turning and smothering the sound with his elbow. His sunglasses rattle against his chest, and he straightens again, smoothing a hand down his shirt. The palm fronds ripple. He has a long drink from his glass of Diet Coke.

The ice cubes tinkle as he sets it down.

“But…” Glenn starts, and he looks around. He makes a little hopeless face and he stares off in the direction of the specials menu, with its boasts of Alaskan snow crab and house-made margaritas. His gaze drags slowly back to meet hers, helpless. “But… we’re at Paul’s Smokehouse?”

Kim softens. “I know,” she murmurs. “I know we are.” But when she exhales, a little more air leaves the bottom of her lungs, some of the river’s heaviness slipping from her, out into this dim room.

Glenn’s eyes change again, widening now at whatever he sees in her face, and for the first time she lets him witness what he finds there. She stares without looking away.

Her lungs still feel lighter the next morning, and even the fluorescent tubes above her don’t seem to hum as much as normal. She taps her thumb on her mouse pad (ergonomic, peeling) and studies the little calendar on her desk. It’s a promotional gift from a landscaping company on South Hopkins, filled with photos of manicured yards that already seem sun-faded, as if the calendar is a couple of decades old instead of just a couple of months.

The current yard on display is fringed with rocks, each carefully arranged. Shipped in from somewhere out of state.

“Knock, knock!” June’s voice comes sing-song, and Kim looks up to see her miming tapping her knuckles on the half open door.

“Hey, June,” Kim says, straightening. “What’s up?”

“Look what just arrived for a certain someone…” The lilting tone continues, and June reveals a bouquet of flowers with a flourish. Roses and carnations pop from the layers of thin paper and plastic.

Kim smiles flatly, and the bouquet crinkles as June hands it over. The flowers seem paler than they should, weak and wilted already.

June leans closer and whispers, “And I rescued this for you from Cissy’s desk.” She takes the flowers back and sets them tidily in a glass pitcher. The brand of a local furniture removal company is emblazoned over the side. “Just lovely,” she murmurs, tidying a bloom. “The note didn’t say—what’s the special date?”

“Oh,” Kim says. “No, nothing special.”

June’s eyebrows rise. “Gosh, I wish Josh still did this for me for nothing special,” she says, shaking her head. “Glenn must be taking you somewhere fancy tonight, then. You look…” Her gaze drops.

Kim glances down, too. The intricate triangles on her blouse stand out more under the fluorescents than they did in the store last week, clean lines marking zigzags over the dark gray fabric. She turns her wrist and the pattern ripples on her sleeve.

“Nice. You look nice,” June says. When Kim looks up again, her eyes soften, and she smiles.

So Kim smiles back. “Thank you.”

“And these really brighten up the place, don’t you think?” June says. She tidies a carnation again, then heads for the door. She hovers, hand on the knob. “Door open, or closed?”

“Closed,” Kim says quickly. She glances at the desk calendar and then looks back, holding eye contact with the woman. “Thank you, June.”

June nods. She shuts the door with almost as much of a flourish as when she arrived, and Kim closes her eyes. She can hear the lights above her again now, the bright tubes humming. A faulty connection somewhere, a crack in the faultless office.

She wipes her thumb over her eyelids and opens them again and frowns at her computer screen.

There’s a line of dead pixels along the bottom. They’ve been dead for months. Kim settles her fingers on the ergonomic keyboard and replies to the only email sitting in her inbox, then attaches the proof for this week’s flier (half price UV resistance on any purchase) to another and sends it.

Usually, she would look over the copy, making small changes to while away what remains of her afternoon, but these promotions were all decided on twelve months in advance anyway. She clicks through the final reminders on her screen then glances at the landscaping calendar again. Checks the simple face of her watch.

She doesn’t bother closing the blinds.

She removes the folder from her briefcase as if it’s any old stock report or the sales targets for next quarter. She unwinds the string and lets the files fall open. Dense numbers greet her, familiar even if she recognizes none of them.

And the crack when she removes the cap from her highlighter is even more familiar.

She tucks her hair behind her ears, then rests her chin on her palm and starts reading. The drone of the lights and the trill of the phones and the chatter of voices bleeds away, vanishing on outgoing tides. She chews on her lip, tapping her fingers on her cheek, and the patterns in the numbers reveal themselves under her careful scrutiny and the swipe of her marker.

This is important, she thinks, and this—not important. Choice after choice.

There’s a closed sign at Central Florida Legal Aid that evening, but the door’s unlocked when Kim tests it, and she pushes through into the grimey interior. The air is sticky and tight, heavy with dust and humidity, and her blouse sticks to her skin.

Across the room, Patty is lost in a cloud of smoke. Her eyes are closed and she’s leaning back in her chair, a cigarette wedged between her fingers.

Kim passes through the swinging gate into the bullpen. An image of Cary Grant at the beginning of His Girl Friday flitters through her mind, but she lets it pass, because she doesn’t have thoughts like that anymore. She just draws out the chair at the desk opposite Patty and sits, setting her folder down with a low thud.

Patty’s eyes creak open. She bends forward, hovering the end of her cigarette over an empty saucer. A poorly laminated ‘No Smoking’ sign peels from the wall beside her—and, at the direction of Kim’s gaze, Patty snorts and ashes the cigarette onto the white porcelain. “Doesn’t count when you’re the boss, kid.”

Kim just raises her eyebrows.

There’s a calendar beside the sign, hanging lopsided from a tack. It’s decorated with photos of North Brevard hiking trails, the boxes of days beneath them so crammed with dates and meetings and times and phone calls that it’s impossible to read anything.

But lines of black marker cross off weeks at a time, decisive and sure, and Kim tears her eyes away. She fiddles with the string holding the folder closed.

“So!” Patty says, snubbing out her cigarette now. “What did you find?”

“How do you know I found something?”

Patty’s eyes narrow keenly. “Kim, I wouldn’t have given you the phone records to look over if I didn’t think you’d find something,” she says. “This isn’t a damn kindergarten.”

So Kim lets the pages spill open, revealing sheets of dense numbers marked with thick highlighter lines, with tidy annotations. “You were right. He’s been calling a number in Tennessee. Fifteen times in the last two months—collect. I dialed it myself, and a kid answered.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Kim says. “And there are others. These ones here I’ve noted with an asterisk, that’s the reception desk for a local school.”

“Good, that’s good.” Patty settles back again, her chair creaking. “This might be enough, then.” She runs her fingers through her hair, scratching her scalp, then she clocks Kim’s look. “I know, but there are much lower standards of proof in a civil case.”

Kim nods slowly. “I see,” she says, words almost catching—almost, not quite.

Patty makes a thoughtful noise, low and curious. She leans closer, weight on her forearms, her hoop earrings swinging. “Kim, have you ever heard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’?” she says, and when Kim nods, she waves a hand. “Well, we don’t have to worry about that. In a civil suit, we just need to show it’s more likely than unlikely. Okay?”

She’s talking, Kim realizes, as if she’s explaining this to one of her clients instead of a new volunteer. Her gaze holds Kim’s, kind but penetrating, and suddenly Kim’s ears burn with the feeling of being studied, of someone shining a light into the hidden parts of her—

—and she looks down at the papers and shakes her head and flicks to a new sheet of numbers. She clears her throat. “These other calls… there’s three to this number over one weekend, all out of state…”

There’s a slow silence from across the desk, heavy like the humid air, and then—“Here,” Patty says, holding out her hand, and Kim passes over the phone records. Patty hums deeply, and she swivels in her chair. She retrieves some enormous Rolodex and starts sorting through it, her fingers moving nimbly, not pausing.

Kim interlaces her own hands in her lap, tensing and then relaxing. She exhales. This time, her breath is steady. She watches Patty work for another moment, measuring the rhythm, until finally she tries to slide into the same groove. The two of them sift through court records from six months ago, from a year ago, looking for anything that doesn’t sit right.

After thirty minutes, Patty coughs into her fist, and she tugs another cigarette out of the packet and then offers one to Kim. “I won’t tell the sign if you won’t,” she says, and she winks.

But Kim shakes her head. “I don’t smoke.”

Patty laughs raspily. “Give it a week,” she says. “Two, tops.”

“Maybe,” Kim murmurs, not looking up from her desk. She tucks her hair behind her ear, and flicks to a new sheet in her notepad. She jots down names—towns, businesses. Postcodes. The kind of brain-wringing detail work that some associate would charge four hundred bucks an hour for.

And the world around her flattens to the blank page, to these notes that will make sense out of anything and nothing. Kim inhales, and the air is dusty and sour and too damp and too hot, and it almost clears her lungs, almost. On the desk, next to the ash-filled saucer, the packet of cigarettes waits. The plastic wrapper is crushed at the bottom end, catching the light—

—but she doesn’t smoke anymore.

Not unless she’s with him.

Before dawn the next morning, she climbs into her car—a silver Prius, one of several thousand in the city. She slips along empty roads that get emptier with every passing day, following the aerospace jobs that are flowing out of Titusville like they’re being swept along on the Indian River. She drifts through downtown streets that have twice as many boarded-up shopfronts as when she arrived here. She passes the bridge to Merritt Island that’s being forever postponed for another two months.

Signs chastise her as she heads for the exit. Last Stop, they remind her. You’re Leaving Miracle City—the city of the future, of optimism and progress and change. But even the astronauts are fleeing this place for good now, the final manned shuttles launching in a few months. Nobody wants to go to space anymore.

As day breaks, the pale sun uncovers the swampland around the freeway, rays glittering over the mottled patches of water now visible between tangled trees. Kim drives in silence, a mile below the speed limit, overtaken steadily by the cars in the other lane. Half of them are silver Priuses.

It’s about an hour’s drive to the airport. Only an hour from the dead streets of Titusville to the swarming entrance to Orlando International, where the sun’s barely up but still children in Mickey Mouse ears scream and clamber over suitcases and trolleys. The airport atrium is tall and glass-filled, and hotel guests stand on high balconies that overlook the thronging travelers and churning fountains. It stinks of chlorine and the heat and Kim follows a kid with a Shrek backpack down long white hallways, past the gaudy gift shops and bustling food courts to the lines and lines of security checks.

Everything happens at a crawl, the slow run of a river draining. She tightens her grip on her briefcase. Announcements crackle from the speakers, barely audible.

But the voices have nothing to say to her. She sets her briefcase on the conveyor belt and walks through the x-ray machine, lingering there, observed by mechanical eyes and security guards.

On the other side, she feels the electricity lingering, crackling beneath her skin. Setting her hairs on end. The feeling won’t leave her, she knows, not until she’s back in her silver Prius tomorrow night. For now, the electricity settles in her stomach, and her briefcase digs into her shoulder and the automatic train carries her hummingly out to the terminals, gliding over more swampland, over mirrored puddles of stagnant water.

Her breath shakes when she inhales. Her breath never shakes in Titusville.

She tries to steady herself here, in the half-empty departure lounge, on a stiff plastic chair with her briefcase at her feet and her shoe rattling against the polished floor.

But she carries the shaking with her. On the plane, the old man beside her thinks she’s nervous about flying. He murmurs something encouraging and Kim nods. She shakes her bangs back out of her eyes and blinks, staring at the no-smoking symbol. Lines curl at the end of the cigarette.

The sign illuminates as they sit there, as the plane engine rumbles and the exit rows glow. A light turned on.

Mountains rise on either side of the highway. Different mountains, different foothills, but they almost feel the same. Snow creeps from their crests, less of it now than the last time she drove this way—just pools of white clinging in the shadowed places. Patches of missing color, as if the dirt around the snow has eroded away, the world vanishing at the edges with every mile clocked on the rental car.

There shouldn’t be much earth left, now. Not after three hours of pale hills and valleys, of the murmured radio set to some low station that she hasn’t bothered to change.

Sparks turn in her chest. Energy spinning out along the highway ahead, the narrowing passage that winds through these foothills. The voices on the radio keep time—or keep her clinging to time, maybe, to this day in this year and not another day in another year, when they were young and he was asleep in the passenger seat.

She blinks quickly, shaking her head, staring ahead. The highway is almost empty now. There’s just the distant glimpse of a car behind her when the road straightens, or the occasional flicker of any oncoming traffic. Scraggly trees rise from the dusty ground, fewer and fewer until it’s just the earth and the pale gray grasses, clinging to life.

The first sign jolts through her. NO TRESPASSING.

And then: FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL COMPLEX, MONTROSE. Her gaze drags with the words, glued to the text until the sign flashes out of sight. Her breath hangs. ADX Montrose, the next one reminds her. Then, FCC Montrose. The biggest prison complex in the state.

A mile later, a fence begins along the roadside. It’s only a few feet high, just a feeble gesture to the much larger ones visible in the distance between the enormous brick buildings. Those fences tower like cracks in the world, thick lines shattering this place into pieces. At the roadside, the low bollards soon become interwoven with barbed wire, half swallowed up by the hungry grasses and undulating land.

The engine hums through her skin. She slows sooner than she needs to, slows as soon as she glimpses the final sign. As soon as she spots the side road and the entry gates that, after everything, seem almost underwhelming. Curving brickwork that might frame the driveway to a college. A squat gate house with a low roof.

She stops in front of the gate arm. The rental car drones quietly. A guard with a gun on his belt walks over. The holster seems to trap the light, flashing in the corner of her eye.

But her voice is steady as she gives her name.

Above the gates, flags flutter on enormous flagpoles. Waving banners that almost distract from all the screaming signs, almost. The signs command her where to drive and what not to do and warn her that she’s being surveilled, that she’s always being surveilled. She keeps her eyes straight and not on her rearview mirror.

There’s nobody back there. Just the cameras and the floodlights, high on the poles among the stars and stripes.

The guard raises the gate arm. On the other side of the entrance, the road curves, almost grandly, up a gentle incline. Out to her left: tall, narrow buildings, their cement walls harsh and blinding in the sun. Montrose ADMAX, read white letters. Clean and new and shining.

The sides of these buildings are sheer, featureless. If there are any cells or hallways along this face, the windows are too small to see from here. And too small to see from inside, she knows—this new supermax a hell where it’s deemed too dangerous for prisoners to even glimpse the outside world. Whose inmates are forbidden from ever finding a wedge of mountains and sky.

She squeezes her eyes shut briefly and exhales, and she keeps driving.

On the other side of the complex, over a wide expanse of dirt marked with bulldozer tracks, rises the collection of brick buildings she spotted from the road. Older structures and yards that once contained supermax, too, until recently—the place built as a monstrosity in the sixties, but in the end not monstrous enough. A relic of an era long before mandatory minimums and three strikes and a nation of overpopulated prisons—and overinflated prison budgets now sunk into windowless cement hells at the base of mountains.

The visitor’s parking lot is emptier than last time. She pulls into a space and kills the low radio, cutting herself off from time. Floating now, unmoored.

She opens her door. The signs she follows are no less daunting than the first time. They still scream at her. And her heartbeat pulses just as hard as it did a month ago, and she stiffens her shoulders and she tries to walk like somebody who’s visited clients in prison hundreds of times, because she did, because she has.

Cold sunlight clings to her skin, desperate to follow her as she passes through the enormous doors. The visitation building is low, maybe three stories, but she can feel the weight of it all above her as soon as she’s inside. The walls are—they’re normal, painted with pale off-white. The floors are normal, the ceiling lights are normal, the same bulbs you buy anywhere.

None of it is normal.

In the waiting area, a young woman in plain black clothes sits on a plastic chair, papers gripped tight in her hand, and Kim smiles to her gently and moves up to the desk. Her soles squeak and the sound feels too loud, trapped in her head.

“Fill out the form if you haven’t already,” a guard says tiredly, tapping the glass screen above a sheet of curling paper that waits on the counter.

“Attorney visit,” Kim says. She holds her shoulders straight and slides her dense form under the glass. Neat letters she printed back in Titusville, back when her hands didn’t shake.

The guard studies the form. He extends his palm, and Kim clicks her purse open and passes through her ID and bar card. She raises an eyebrow as he examines them, patient. She doesn’t lie anymore.

Not unless it’s for this.

Finally, he shoves his chair back. He moves to a phone on the wall and rings up someone—the administrative sergeant, she assumes, checking the schedule. She’s on there. She’s been on there for weeks.

When he returns to the desk, he looks like he’s already forgotten her, his mind on the next thing. “Someone will bring him to visitation.”

She says it idly, “I need a private conference room.”

“You guys always do,” the guard grumbles. “No equipment requests? Document transfers?”

“No,” Kim says.

A nod. He taps on a computer keyboard and a machine grunts. He slides through a visitor’s pass, which she hangs around her neck, and a key to one of the small lockers across the room. She glances at her cellphone—no messages, just the blinking time, her minutes vanishing—and then she turns it off and stashes it in the locker.

Heavy doors wait beside her, their narrow windows reinforced with crosshatched metal.

She brushes her hair behind her ears, then she tucks the locker key in her purse and moves on. On the other side of the doors, a metal detector sends electricity over her skin again, another layer of charged tension to cover what’s already there.

She’s surprised they can’t hear her from the security room: a low buzzing noise, a fluorescent tube with a faulty connection.

A guard is searching her briefcase now and she breathes steadily. The cigarettes made it through last time. Her ears flush with the scrutiny, burning and burning, and she clasps her hands together, but finally the guard flicks her briefcase closed and hands it back to her. He gestures for a different guard near the door. This one (taller and drowsier, his tie loosened) leads her out through more doors, then more doors, and then she’s outside again.

Here, among the mountains, the sky feels close and heavy, like a blanket (or a white pall) cast over the complex. As if even now, outside but still within the fracturing fences, the weight of the building presses down on her. Three or four or ten stories of cement, crushing down and down until it’s hard to catch her breath.

Nobody’s playing basketball this time. The guard leads her through a creaking gate in a fence, past an ancient brick wall where the word Laundry is almost lost to the weather. Past a worn courtyard where the letters ADX fade beneath FCI, each interlacing with the other until it seems to form a new word. A prison that doesn’t know itself, fifty years worth of clashing identities peeling away with the rain.

Keys jingle as the guard unlocks the final door. It’s not the same room as last time, but it might as well be. An empty space, a void with a table. Peeling walls and cracks in the ceiling.

“The inmate will be in soon,” the guard says, flat. “You’ve done this before?”

“Yes,” Kim says crisply, settling at the metal table like she’s been here thousands of times, like this is anyone. “I’ve done this before.” But the guard is barely listening.

She unclasps her briefcase and rifles through it as if she’s looking for something. Her palm curls over the packet of cigarettes. She holds it for a second, then she removes a sheet of paper, setting it face down on the table as if it’s something important, something confidential.

She’s done this before, but she doesn’t do this anymore.

Not unless it’s for him.

The door opens.

The moment hangs, a frozen tape, stuttering. The creak of the door, the flash of reinforced glass, a hand on the metal handle—

—and then he’s there, he’s in the room with her, his eyes downcast as the guard guides him through the threshold, and she can read him as well as she used to read him, because she knows he’s waiting to look up, waiting to see her, postponing it and postponing it, just in case—

“You can uncuff him,” Kim says. She doesn’t stand. She waits, patient and uncaring. “Thank you.”

The guard rifles for a key. There’s a twist of metal. A huff of breath and of cuffs releasing, and then the guard is done, and Kim continues to sit there neutrally, her face blank.

“Ma’am,” the guard says, and he scans the room and then nods to her and turns back to the door. He draws it closed behind him. Metal greets cement with a hollow thud.

It echoes in the void—

—and then it’s just them.

“Jimmy,” she says, his name a rush of breath falling from her. Her lungs emptying and finally emptying.

Jimmy looks up now. His eyes are blue and drawn and after everything his face is still the same. “Kim,” he manages. And somehow he looks as surprised to see her as the first time—surprised and wary. The smile that haunts the edges of his mouth is tentative, too unsure of itself to really appear yet.

She exhales again. Inhales. It’s shaky, but the air she’s breathing feels cold and pure. She thinks she had words she was going to say now, whatever she wished she’d said last time. Whatever reason she had for coming here again, the part of her brain that needed to pretend it wasn’t just to see him, that it wasn’t just to breathe again.

Jimmy speaks first. “How are you?”

And Kim laughs, warm and soft. “How am I?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says lowly. He’s still standing there, his arms at his sides. His gaze is locked on her. She can’t move under it. He doesn’t repeat the question; he just repeats her name. “Kim.” His eyes change with the utterance of it, turning down at the edges as he stares at her.

She feels the scrutiny like he’s touching her skin, like his palms are on her wrists.

And on his face, she sees… all of it. She sees the mask he tried to wear until it wasn’t a mask anymore. She sees the man who got her out of their home that night, and the one who said he loved her, and the one who didn’t say it, and the one who made coffee in the mailroom, and the one who fell asleep among yellow legal pads decorated with her name.

She sees the Jimmy standing here in his orange uniform. Younger somehow, even with half as much hair and new lines on his face.

His eyes hold hers steadily. He looks worried and tired and calm.

She’s never seen this Jimmy. She’s always seen this Jimmy.

“You look good,” he says finally, still soft. His smile grows now. It’s the same smile as when she chooses the next movie to watch, the next takeout to order. The same smile as hearing about her new case or her new client. “You look better.”

She chuckles. “Well,” she says, “it’s nice to get out of Florida.”

He laughs gently, then he tilts his head. His eyes narrow, and he glances down at the paper on the table, finally breaking the connection. His pupils scan back and forth.

Then metal legs scrape over concrete as he draws back the chair and sits. He settles there easily, comfortably. And he lays his hands on the table, deliberate and slow, like he’s keeping them in her sight. He’s wearing longer white sleeves under the orange today.

His gaze tracks her again, as if it’s the only thing he wants to do. His eyes crinkle and he says, “But I hope you didn’t come back here just to try to convince me.”

“I’m not here to argue with you,” Kim says. Not yet. She reaches into the briefcase and pulls out the packet of cigarettes. She sets it between them. Places the lighter beside it. There’s one cigarette missing from the box, and now she draws out a second. She holds it between her middle finger and forefinger.

His brows stitch together.

“I’m just here,” she says, holding out the unlit cigarette.

Jimmy nods. He reaches for her lighter. Cracks it. Yellow warmth spills from his palms. He passes the color to her.

And she feels it deep inside her lungs, fire in her chest.

When she exhales, her breath leaves as glittering smoke, and he watches her. He watches and watches and his gaze floods through her body like cigarettes, like the hit of tobacco, like two million bucks, like free tequila.

She doesn’t smoke anymore. She doesn’t lie anymore. But it’s not smoking and it’s not lying when she’s here. It’s just this: being seen and seeing him.

Chapter Text

Kim knocks again. The door rattles in its frame and her shadow stretches through the glass, falling over the salon floor. Elastic light from a neon sign catches the edges of a fish tank, of the massage chairs.

Jimmy appears, finally, from the back. His face is dark as he trots over, and then he slips into the light: grinning, his bangs messy on his forehead. “Kim, hey,” he says, and he flicks the lock and pulls the door inward. “Welcome back.”

She steps inside, glancing down at him. He’s still wearing the suit. The thin blue pinstripes, the white club collar. All of it is perfect. It must have cost him a small fortune, this flawless illusion—except Howard Hamlin would never roll the sleeves up like that, the fabric scrunched and already creasing around the elbows.

Jimmy ducks in and out of the red light, locking the door again. He seems smaller in Howard’s clothes, like a kid in his dad’s suit, even though the shirt has been tailored to fit him. He closes the blinds and the shifting neons catch his cheeks as he grins back at her.

A phone goes. The sound carries from the back room, the ringer old and trembling.

Jimmy twists to face it. His eyes widen, hopeful and surprised, and then his gaze finds her again and he chuckles, waving a hand. “My secretary will get it,” he says, and he guides Kim over to the massage chairs with a palm on her elbow. “She’s finally earning her paycheck.”

Kim sits. “Is that right?” she asks, the leather sinking comfortingly beneath her.

“Big time,” Jimmy says, rolling into the next chair. “All of a sudden, everybody wants a piece of James McGill.” He leans his head back, eyes drifting closed. His throat bobs as he swallows. Behind him, tropical fish swim lazily through glowing water, carefree.

She curls her hand behind her neck. “So, I saw the news.”

He turns, eyes snapping open. “I made the news?”

“Channel 4,” Kim says. “Howard screened it in the south conference room.”

“No shit!” Jimmy leans closer, hands coming together. “Please tell me his head exploded this time.”

Kim chuckles lowly. “There was blood all over the table.”

“Yes!” Jimmy hisses, punching the air. He tips his head back again, and his chest trembles with deep laughter. But gradually he stills. His hand curls into a loose fist and he thuds his armrest. “Who’ll forget the name McGill now, huh?”

The words drift between them like the fish, trapped inside glass. She doesn’t know what to say.

But then Jimmy swivels to face her again. “So, let’s celebrate.” He pats her chair now, his palm slapping leather. “And you’re trying the foot bath this time, I’m not taking no for an answer.” He hops up, calling over his shoulder: “Cucumber water? Gin? Tequila?”

“Bartender’s choice,” Kim says. She smiles after him, then she finds the remote for her chair and turns on the lowest massage setting. Her shoulders sink into the leather and she exhales, muscles flowing, warm and viscous. She hums softly.

The phone rings again in the back room. It sounds like something from another time, from an office fifty years ago. Footsteps echo over the tiles, and Jimmy picks up this time, his voice muffled and the British-accented words lost somewhere between her and his water-heater office.

Kim bleeds into the humming chair, sinking and sinking. It leeches the last few hours from her, the last few weeks. Maybe if she sits here long enough, it’ll take the last few years. Back to a dark office on the third floor, back to doc review and late nights.

“Long day?” Jimmy’s back.

She squints up at him. He holds out a plastic cup and she takes it and drinks from it steadily. If there’s any cucumber water in there, it’s lost to the cheap gin, and her throat burns with it.

He chuckles. “Looks like it was pretty long.”

“Those Kettlemans can make two hours feel like eight,” Kim croaks. She wipes her fingers over her mouth then leans on her palm again, tipping her head sideways. “Meanwhile, I’m fighting my ass off to get them a good deal with Weinstein, but…”

Jimmy wheels a stool out and sits in front of her, his elbows on his knees. The sleeves of his replica Hamlin shirt seem even more creased, now. He tilts his head to mirror hers. “But?”

Kim sips her gin and shrugs. But they’re just going to ignore her, she knows.

“Well, whatever you get, they’d be crazy not to take it,” Jimmy says. He scratches his cheek and then grimaces. “Okay, I heard it, too. Even crazier than they already are, then.”

“Your words, not mine.”

Jimmy smiles at her softly. In the silence, she can hear the echo of his words from the other night, when he was sitting in the buzzing chair beside her. Somewhere they care about you, he says again in her memory. Somewhere without windowless offices and late nights.

Tonight, in the darkness, he looks like ten years ago. He looks like everything he represents to her, and he’s even dressed for the occasion: a rumpled version of the proper life, of the tailored towers and offices she says she wants. A creased and flawed version that looks over at her warmly and tells her she deserves something better.

It’s hard to resist. She opens her mouth.

“What?” he prompts now, in the present, his brows tilting.

Kim sits up straighter. “You said something about a foot bath?”

“That I did.” Jimmy wheels his stool back again, hunting for a towel in the shelves nearby. He skids over the floor, returning, and he lays the blue cloth over her foot rest. “Move these,” he says, batting her knees aside. “Let’s see if I can figure this out first try this time…”

She snorts, lifting her legs to make space. Buttons beep and click and he curses. She slips her heels off—finally—and exhales. The chair presses into her shoulders with artful fingers, and then there’s a rush of water and jets as finally Jimmy finds the right button.

The churning water seems to swallow the red neon light, hungry and glittering, so she sinks her feet in, too. She gives another long sigh—and the hot water strips her of whatever still remains of the long day.

No more voice of Betsy Kettleman over the phone, no more rush-hour traffic outside the courthouse, no more Howard Hamlin at her shoulder, radiating disgust because of what’s on the evening news. She closes her eyes and it’s all gone, all of it.

She hears Jimmy moving beside her, settling into the next chair, and she finds her chair’s remote again with blind fingers and clicks it to the next massage setting.

Her bones ache with it and she thinks that she could fall asleep, cradled here in the darkened salon.

It’s the next day, a Sunday. It’s early. Pale light slips cautiously between the bars, finding the peeling walls and the cold floor. Finding her briefcase and her feet beneath the table and the table itself.

Shadows cling beneath Jimmy’s eyes as he watches her. The light doesn’t find its way there. His expression shifts. Ghosts are knocking on the cement walls of this time capsule room this morning. The present day trying to get inside, to join them at the burnished table.

“So, I gotta know…” Jimmy starts. He brushes his forefinger back and forth over his mouth. “Do you install the sprinklers, or just test them, or—?” Kim snorts, shaking her head, and his hand almost hides his smile. “Really, Kim, I want to know.”

She says, “I make the catalogs, actually.”

“Oh, wow, the catalogs,” Jimmy echoes, amusement thick in his tone.

Their old ease with each other comes like this now: in fits and starts, racing ahead and then tripping over reality. Halted again by hollow rooms and handcuffs. “Jimmy,” she says gently.

It always takes him a while to speak after she says his name like that. He taps his middle knuckle, lips twisting. He’s fidgeting more today, much more than yesterday.

“So, what about you?” she says. “Montrose might be federal but they follow Colorado state earned time laws, and if you start working now—”

“Kim.” He shakes his head slowly.

“—and with good time, too, if you can keep your nose clean—”

“Kim.” Sharper, now. “It doesn’t matter.”

She widens her eyes. “Jimmy.”

But he speaks quickly this time: “What, I get out in sixty years instead of eighty?” He shakes his head. “You’ll have to carry me around in a little box.”

The cold air between them is underscored by prison bars. Something important, something to remember. A sentence underlined. Kim folds her lips inward, trapping in words, trapping in thoughts, but then they come spilling out anyway: “You’re already in a little box.”

Jimmy’s face drops. He shakes his head and his eyes soften. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “It’s almost bigger than the nail salon, actually.” A careful smile. “And it doesn’t stink of acetone.”

“Well, you’re living like a king, then,” Kim says—and the words arrive harsher than she intended, barbed and bitter. She breathes out. She holds his gaze and reaches for his hand, the one still fidgeting on the table.

His skin is warm. His thumb stills under her palm. The room seems too quiet, now, without the tapping. Too quiet and too empty.

Shadows cross their skin.

“You can appeal this,” she says. “You could find someone who’s not Bill Oakley to represent you—” His expression shifts and she leans closer, squeezing his hand. “Jimmy. When have you ever lost a case to that man?”

He laughs quietly, then shrugs. “He beat me once.”

Kim raises her eyebrows, but he doesn’t elaborate.

“He’s not so bad.” His thumb moves, brushing the side of her pinky finger. He watches it like he’s not the one controlling it. “And all the good lawyers I know aren’t practicing anymore.”

Kim quirks her head. “Just you and me?”

Jimmy meets her eyes. “Just you,” he says quietly. “And Chuck.”

She tenses. It still surprises her to hear that name from Jimmy’s mouth. It seems to surprise him, too—or if it’s not surprise, it’s relief, his shoulders shifting and his breath leaving him slowly. She wonders if it feels liberating.

And she squeezes his hand again—trapping everything there in the gesture, the feeling of that name spoken out loud again. “Well, we can still find you someone better.”

But Jimmy’s gaze darkens. “What, the same person who’s gonna represent you against Cheryl Hamlin’s goons?”

His eyes narrow—and this is what he’s been waiting to ask her about, she realizes. He’s not moving now. His body is completely still and he stares at her, focused and intense. Shadows cut through his face.

“You haven’t even engaged anyone yet, have you?” His jaw tightens. “Kim, this could bleed you dry.” A crack on the last few words, and he shakes his head. “Look, I understand why you did it—” He swallows, and then lower: “Believe me, I understand. Okay?”

“I know,” she says. “I know you do.” And she does. Something passes between them again, warm and tentative—and then she breaks it, pulling her hand back from his, tucking her hair behind her ears. “But it’s Cheryl’s choice. She has a copy of my affidavit. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Kim,” Jimmy says, leaning closer, slipping into the light. “It’s you. There’s always something you can do.”

She widens her eyes, daring him. Raises her eyebrows, clocking an extra notch.

And then she lets it hang there: always something you can do, words that she traps between them with her hard gaze.

“Well?” she prompts.

He holds the look for a moment longer, and then finally the words seem to catch up with him, and he cracks, leaning back again, metal chair legs groaning. “Goddammit, Kim.”

“It doesn’t have to be eighty-six years,” she says, and she thinks—she was in the courtroom, she knows even from being in that courtroom that there are other angles to take, that Oakley didn’t think of everything, that Oakley didn’t do enough—

Jimmy studies her again, and a smile flickers over his face, and it’s the smile of—of late nights and study sessions. Always this same smile, always this glowing look. “All right,” he says. “You win.”

She nods. “Good.”

His next question is quiet: “Why’d you ever quit being a lawyer, huh?” His face almost doesn’t change. His eyes are steady and patient and nothing shifts behind them.

But still it’s enough for him to transform before her, to become with the question that fractured version of her husband again, his face splitting in half as he watches her pack the last of her things. An image seared into her memory even though she could barely look at him, then. It exists in her imagination tenfold: his shattered face, no begging left. Just silence.

It’s always waiting inside her, that night from six years ago. Waiting as a claw at the back of her throat, or deep in her chest, the claw of a monster that she gave the key to their home.

“I just had an urge to sell sprinklers,” she says, crisp. “Some might say it was a calling.”

And Jimmy laughs, his voice cracking around the sound of it. “Must be the best sprinklers in the state.”

“They’re not bad,” Kim says. “They have abrasion resistance.”

Jimmy’s head tilts, his smile lingering. He falls into that silence again, the conversation ebbing once more into this place of unspoken warmth, as if he’s happy to just exist here in this moment, on the other side of this awful metal table. Stuck here when she leaves, back into the wide open spaces and the light.

She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, then she hunts through the inside pocket of her jacket, her fingers finally finding her cards. She slides one over to him.

He picks it up. It’s cluttered and colorful, a sprinkler making a rainbow over clunky text. Her name, her office number. Jimmy’s lips move slightly as he reads the slogan. Watering Your World…

“Can you keep that?” she asks.

Jimmy nods slowly.

“Good,” she murmurs. She gestures for the card and he slides it back, and then she scribbles her cellphone number on the reverse, finding a spot for it among the falling water and the glittering yards.

Jimmy’s fingers brush hers as she passes it over again. His thumb ghosts over her name. “It’s, uh—” He clears his throat. “It’s kind of a crapshoot when the payphones are available in here, you know. I don’t know when it would be.” He looks up at her and his eyebrows twist.

Her voice breaks over it: “Call me whenever.” She clears her throat, then nods quickly. “Any time. It’s just me. Okay?” She tangles her hands together on the table. “I hear the feds took yours, so I put some money in your account.” She tightens her fingers. “You don’t even have to spend it on long distance phone calls.”

He smiles, weak but then steadying, and he holds her gaze. “I’ll call you,” he says. “We can watch a movie together.”

Kim laughs gently—or something like a laugh, a silent rush of air in the shape of laughter. He’s doing it again. Trying to make her feel better. Softening and joking like that first visit, as if he’s seen something change in her face. Probably he did.

“Actually, I think Caddyshack is playing in the dayroom next week,” he says. “I know, I know, it’s no Bogie and Bacall, but…”

“Bill Murray ain’t half bad,” she says lightly. “It’s a date.”

Jimmy smiles. “Okay.” He turns her business card over between his fingers, the rainbow flashing and the sprinkler flowing. Her name and number dipping in and out of the shadows.

She remembers his voice cracking down the line, jumping with fits and starts down the thousands of miles. You know who this is? Because he can’t say his name over the phone, or maybe because he doesn’t even know what name to say anymore. You know who this is—

As if she wouldn’t.

She leaves the television on. It hums from the living room, the low voices droning. She can ignore it, she thinks. She can avoid hearing the voices at all.

And Glenn never watches the news for long, anyway. So she doesn’t say anything, she just lets the sound drain through her, the measured words and the clipped commercials and the snatched seconds of a speech delivered by a spokesperson for the Albuquerque DA’s office.

She doesn’t say anything. The news will be over soon and then it’s American Ninja Warrior.

They never watch movies. Glenn likes movies fine, but he never chooses them. They’re not real, he says—but this is real, these are real people, Kim, he says again, pointing at the struggling contestants on Survivor or Wipeout. And then the inevitable follow up: How hard do you think that warped wall is really? Because he reckons if he trained enough, if he finally went to his brother’s gym…

The newsreader throws to commercials. The first one is loud, blaring in stereo.

And Glenn exhales deeply, rising from his armchair. He hums under his breath as he moves over to the fridge and then back, shuffling between the jingles and the screaming spokesmen. “Jeez, babe,” he says, lingering behind her shoulder. “That looks super tricky.”

She makes a thoughtful sound and reaches for another jigsaw piece.

“What is it, anyway?” Glenn asks, beer can cracking open. “The sky?”

“Could be,” she says. “I guess it looks like the sky, huh?” She finds another piece, pressing it in place. Those ripples of light over the water, she thinks, could easily be clouds. And maybe the artist was thinking of that when he painted it. Maybe he saw this as both a stormy day and as a stretch of lakewater along the shore.

Glenn plucks a random piece from the pile and frowns at it. “They’re all blue,” he says. “You can’t tell the difference.”

Kim shrugs. “After a while you can,” she murmurs. She points to the top left corner. “This patch is lighter, right? And here it’s darker. See?”

He’s quiet for a while, and she can almost hear him thinking. Finally, he says, “I don’t see it, babe, but I love that you do.” He taps the back of his hand on her arm. “You must’ve eaten your carrots as a kid.”

She chuckles a little, finding another piece and pressing it tidily into place.

In the living room, the news returns. A catchy jingle and then a slow-moving chyron.

She’s not looking at it. She sees it anyway. Fragments of the desert and the sun. Breaking news and deaths and manhunts.

She just focuses on the puzzle. Small shifts, gradations of color. They reveal themselves slowly under careful scrutiny. The differences seem bigger after a while, she thinks, the bright parts and the dark parts. It’s enough.

The sound of the plane engine floods through her head. Her ears pop again, and the hum seems to change pitch, whirring around her.

Kim twists her fingers in her lap. The seatbelt sign is on and a flight attendant moves slowly down the aisle, casting his gaze over the rows. Kim presses a thumb into her palm, and then she reaches for the notepad in the seat pocket again.

It’s a small notepad, barely wide enough to separate her thoughts. A magnet peels from the back, the cheap glue already failing, and a sprinkler glitters from a thin ribbon along the top.

She clicks her pen (plastic and cheap, Palm Coast). She adds another name to the list. But she doesn’t even know who’s left after six years. Tomorrow, in the office, she’ll send out the weekly portfolio like they expect her to and then she’ll start searching. Trawling websites and directories.

For now, another page. Another list. After a few minutes, she makes a low sound and scores the page down the middle and crosses off the last few entries.

She’s filling the page with bars.

Kim tips her head back and flexes her hand. Tomorrow, she thinks, she’ll start circling things instead. And then whenever he calls, she thinks, she’ll have something to tell him. A direction.

The plane turns, wide and arcing. Out her window, the long arms of Orlando reach eagerly through the dark swampland, freeways and bridges cutting the earth into tidy wedges. Florida is vibrant, deep and impossibly green, and tonight it hits her like a knife blade in her chest: sharp and cleansing.

She’s alone the next night. Glenn’s beers wait in her fridge, still half of his six-pack left, but she doesn’t call him. She turns on the television. The image warms into brightness slowly. The swirling banners of the local news appear, then the slick logos and smooth-voiced newsreaders.

She could have seen the images with the television off, anyway, could have seen them with her eyes closed. Heisenberg, a teacher, a man she never met. Sensationalized and melodramatic already, a kingpin whose blaze of glory has already made him something much more than a man and a teacher. He’s already just a stylized face for t-shirts, for kids to spray-paint on the sides of buildings. A twenty-first century Capone.

They’re not real. They’re not real people.

The only real people left are American ninja warriors.

But Kim watches anyway. She lowers herself to the armchair and sits there in the dark, one big knot of tension. It’s an extended report tonight. A special Saturday investigation.

She’s finished her puzzle. A close up of the shoreline at Lake Okeechobee. But the completed image had revealed nothing grander than the thousand individual parts. Shades of the same blue.

The TV screen glows, but it’s the shadows that reach for her, the darkness tightening around her muscles. Heisenberg’s face gives way to more characters. His wife—he had a wife, he had someone who once loved him. The DEA agents who died, the dealers he employed. The smiling corporate image of Gustavo Fring in a fast food polo—

—and her pulse rattles like shell casings, like someone knocking on her heart, over and over trying to get in.

She closes her eyes and breathes and forgets it, she tells herself she’ll forget it, she tells herself it’s possible to forget it.

Her fingers dig into the denim of her skirt and she grits her teeth, holding on.

When she opens her eyes, there are more faces. Faces she doesn’t know. She doesn’t recognize any of them. She shouldn’t, because this is happening half a country away from Titusville, Florida, and it has nothing to do with her.

But then the lawyer.

(He’s always just the lawyer, now.)

Behind the newsreader appear the same old grinning photos of him. Photos that for six years have fooled the city and now fool the country and sometimes, she swears, almost fool her, too.

(One day they will fool her, one day it’ll be possible to fool her—)

But this lawyer on the evening news is a different lawyer. A different man. Not a real person. This is someone who never knew her, and she never knew him. Her thoughts run smooth over well-worn patterns.

Until, flashing briefly—a history of criminal behavior, a dangerous past—the image changes, and for lack of a current mugshot, someone’s found a cheap replacement. Unearthed from a dusty file in Cook County, dug up again after almost thirty years.

He looks defiant and tired and sad and in a few days he’ll be walking into the mailroom with a thrift shop button-up and too much energy, and for the first week he won’t even cut his hair. After a few days, he’ll get the hang of the copy machines, and after two weeks he’ll start looking at her, as transparent as glass, all his thoughts turning inside him for her to see—as he rifles through her law notes, or reads out test questions in her passenger seat, as he drinks cheap beer and drags pieces of her out into the light until she feels transparent, too.

Now, on the television set, he just looks like a kid. Impossibly young and fragile.

He stares out at her daringly, like he’s staring at the trouble everyone said was always going to find him.

And then it’s back to the other photo, the one that’s plastered over every billboard and bus bench. They never show the original—they just show it in those other places, like they’re deliberately making him part of the city. A road or a building or a strip mall, not a man.

His picture doesn’t have the word ‘deceased’ over it like almost all the other photos did, but she sees the letters there anyway, glowing and red. She sees an empty ditch or an empty desert or a covered grave in the middle of nowhere.

(A car idling on a white beach.)

Her heart is running hard and she’s tripping to catch up with it. She feels like she’s still back there, like she’s still driving along a dark road with her pulse in her ears. Like after all this time she’s still driving along the knife edge of a choice: dead or alive, alive or dead, and, gun in her hand, she has to pick.

Chapter Text

Her thoughts move slowly, frozen at the edges. Around her on the sofa, notes on criminal law fight for space between ring binders and the couple of textbooks she’s dared to bring home. She sits cross-legged, a cup of coffee balancing in the hollow of her knee—warm once but long since cold.

Kim has a sip anyway, draining the last of it, the gritty dregs. She hisses through her teeth and stretches forward to set the empty cup on the coffee table, then returns to the next line on her revision schedule.

The midterm notes don’t need coffee or sleep; the notes wait, impatient and judgmental. The notes are right, always.

She massages her fingers into her temples. She closes her eyes. In the darkness, she sees a page divided vertically into six boxes and then splitting again, like tributaries along a river delta breaking against an eastern shore.

“Criminal act,” she whispers, filling-in the topmost box on the left and then following one of the tributaries along the page, imagining the next words. “First, it must be voluntary…”

The caffeine runs at the same trickle as her thoughts, too slow and almost nauseating. Fingers seem to grip her at the nape of her neck. Another headache. She rolls her head back and forth, eyes still closed.

“But omission to act is an exception.” The words are barely more than a breath. As if carried on them, she follows this next river towards the coast. “Duty to act might be”—and the river splits into three streams—“one, statutory… two, because of a contract, or…” She makes a low noise, following the final tributary until—“or three, because of a special relationship between the parties.”

A truck rumbles along the road outside, a late delivery. She breathes out slowly.

“Act versus status,” she says now, returning to an earlier river, further inland up the delta. “Status is not a criminal act.” The delta splits into two here, and she follows one of the streams. “For example…” she whispers. “For example… being an addict is a status, not an act.”

Because it’s not illegal to be an addict. One of the ways the law is clear where life isn’t. This is wrong, and this not wrong, it says. The law chooses for you. The law chooses.

She shakes her head, returning to the current of cold facts. “And the case law is…” She rubs her fingers against her forehead, skin moving over bone. “Robinson v. something… Robinson v. California.”

But the words are coming slower now. The water she’s borne on is heavy with silt, with runoff from nearby farms. Sluggish with foreign material and long days and copy machines and coffee breaks and new things.

Too many new things.

She moves a palm around to the back of her neck, rubbing there instead, as if she can massage the words free. There’s another important case here, she knows there is. She can see the empty tributary. “Something about… something about… uh, dammit!”

Kim grunts, wrenching her eyes open, and she rifles through the papers around her. It’s near the top, she knows, somewhere with the rest of the Crim Law notes that she needs to memorize before her midterm tomorrow—and she sorts through them, pages rustling like prairie grass, yellow and white, white and yellow, pink Post-Its appearing and disappearing like the heads of wind strewn flowers—

Nothing. But there’s nothing.

Her pulse skips, stuttering. A page is missing. Her breath feels tight in her throat and she looks again, useless, scattering leaves and spilling open ring binders and textbooks, and it must be somewhere—but she’s been in this room all day, and all of Saturday, too, forty-eight hours gone in an instant—and where else could she have lost it, where did she make the last correction—

Her exam is in less than twelve hours.

Kim swings her legs off the sofa and heads for the telephone. She opens a drawer in the hall console and flicks through the phone book that’s tucked inside, thin pages threatening to tear as she leaps deeper into the alphabet. When she finds the listing she stills, the moment stretching, frozen at the edges…

And then she dials. The keypad makes atonal beeps around the number, and she presses the handset to her ear. She taps her thumb on her leg.

A line rings and rings, tinny and slightly echoing. She feels like she’s hearing her own call, like she’s calling herself, the wires looping back. It’s a bit late but it’s not that late yet, surely someone is still—

“Ramada Hotel,” the woman on the other end says, without affect.

Kim inhales. “Jimmy McGill’s room, please,” she says, fingers still tapping against her leg, hoping she’s not going to get asked for the room number.

She isn’t asked. The line clicks heavily, and there’s another phone ringing somewhere, way across the city.

It’s as if it’s ringing inside her head, trapped in there with the slow thoughts and the thudding panic, and she picks up the phone’s cradle and paces across the living room with it. The cord trails over the carpet, a lifeline from her to the jack.

More ringing, echoing, and then—

“Hello?” His voice is low and thick and almost unrecognizable.

Why has she called him? Why has she called him now, in the middle of the night, for nothing? Words vanish and leave empty streams, splitting into a frozen ocean.

There’s a sharp breath. “… Hello?” He sounds smaller now.

She closes her eyes and keeps her voice level. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”

“Kim?” he asks softly. There’s a rustle of sheets.

“Sorry,” she says again, “go back to sleep, I didn’t—”

“No, no!” The cheap headset rattles with the sudden volume. “I was up, I’m watching TV.” A burst of sound: commercials blaring, skipping between channels until the volume falls away again.

She can picture it. The small hotel television, the kaleidoscopic light flooding into the darkened room. She paces again, over to the sofa and then back to the TV cabinet. The clock above the line of videotapes says it’s after two in the morning, and she ignores it.

Jimmy breaks the silence. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” she says, tapping the plastic cradle, and then, gentler: “It’s fine. I didn’t realize the time.”

“How did you…?” he starts groggily. “Oh, the hotel.”

“Right,” she murmurs. Tap, tap, tap. She steps over a pile of notes. Yellow peeks from beneath a blue folder. “Look, Jimmy, did you notice if I left anything in the breakroom on Friday?” She bends down, freeing the papers. Nothing, nothing, nothing—“I just can’t—I can’t find—”

She picks up the whole stack and carries it to the sofa, sinking down into the groaning cushions. She rifles through again, and these are all civic notes, not criminal, and they’re out of order now, too, all of it is out of order and disorganized and chaotic.

On the floor: more yellow sheets, and she reaches for them, sorting through pages from last semester, useless old notes she shouldn’t even need anymore, and why does she have these and not the ones she needs—

A metallic echoing from the phone headset. Jimmy’s been saying her name.

Kim lets the notes drop, leaning back. “Yes?”

His voice is steadying. “Kim, I left, like, hours before you.”

“Oh.” She remembers now. She remembers him lightly tapping her shoulder to get her attention before he headed home for the night.

(But she’s not sure if she ever forgot that, not really; not sure if she could forget.)

Her breath falls away slowly. “Damn.”

“What have you lost?”

Kim presses her fingers to her forehead and starts explaining, running through the fractured tributaries of this particular river. She can see it, she can picture the page exactly, except for just there, the second relevant case, something v. Texas, or Pressburger v. something, maybe—

—but once one piece of the image goes, so does the rest of it, until she’s sure she’s lost it all, the knowledge falling through her fingers like sand.

Jimmy’s voice bursts through again. “Kim!”

Paper crackles in her hand. “Yeah?”

“I hate to ask, but when’s the exam?”

Kim sighs. She doesn’t look at the clock in the TV cabinet. “Tomorrow.” And she can already sense the heaviness of the exam room, the stifling silence and the shuffling breath around her. She can feel the thoughts vanishing from her mind before she can trap them on the answer sheet, can feel the empty lines snowballing, first one and then three and then the whole page.

Lines and lines of emptiness reminding her she’s not supposed to be here.

And she feels the same claustrophobic silence now, between her and the plastic speaker crushed against her ear. She clears her throat. “Jimmy?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says quickly. “I’m here. Hey.”

Kim breathes out. She already finds it comforting, his voice. How did this happen? It shouldn’t happen. But she echoes him anyway. “Hey.”

“Turn to channel twelve,” he says. “Watch a movie with me.”

And Kim smiles slowly, despite it all. He manages to make it sound like a question, this Billy Crystal move, yet she feels the irresistible tug of the offer as if it’s not one, and she imagines casting the rest of her revision schedule aside and becoming brainless for the rest of the evening. Just the two of them and a film.

Jimmy presses her anyway. “It’s just getting to a good bit.”

“What movie?” she asks, but she’s already opening the drawer under the coffee table and hunting for the remote.

“Born Yesterday.”

Kim makes a low and wistful noise, and she finds the right channel. She clicks the lamp off behind her and the fuzzy images spill with shifting light into the darkened living room. The film is around halfway through.

The scene is familiar even though she hasn’t seen it in a long time, maybe not since she was a kid. The actors glow in the way Old Hollywood actors did back then. They always seemed larger than life up on the cinema screen, glimpses of greatness on every precious trip to Aurora.

The stars are still larger than they should be, thirty years later in her tiny living room in Albuquerque. In love with each other and eating ice cream on marble steps.

Cars rush past her, vanishing and reappearing behind the thick trunks of palm trees. Sunlight skips from their windshields as they round the next corner, merging onto Edison. It makes her eyes hurt. She pretends that’s all she sees, the sun, and not the photo of him on her television last night, not the endless news reports. She pretends the light is all that makes her eyes hurt.

There’s a lone silver Prius in the empty parking lot of the closed liquor store. It could be anyone’s car.

Anyone could have stopped here to use the payphone.

Nobody else does stop, though. They all head south, following the river, bound for the causeway or for bigger and brighter places: Cape Canaveral or Melbourne or maybe Satellite Beach.

A thin strip of paper shakes in her hand and Kim traps it against the front of the payphone. Still visible between her fingers: the number from the directory in the library, her handwriting tidy and legible.

She puts money in and dials with her back to the road, as if passing drivers could see the area code from behind their steering wheels. She traps the headset against her ear, pressing it there until it hurts. It feels as if she can hear her own blood moving, thudding through her skin, and she hits the final number and it rings.

She could do this from her own cellphone. She doesn’t have to do this in the shadows. She’s still herself. She’s Kim Wexler, and Kim Wexler would call.

But the anonymous line is already ringing out into the thousands of miles, spiraling over the country. Over the swampland and desert and tallgrass prairie.

And then there’s a clunk of the handset being picked up.

“Francesca Liddy,” the voice on the other end says. “What do you want?”

Kim tightens her hold on the payphone. “Francesca, hi,” she starts. “It’s Kim Wexler. I don’t know if you remember me—”

“Kim,” Francesca cuts through. “Of course I do.” And then silence. The familiar silence of someone who doesn’t speak anymore, not unless they have no other choice.

“I saw the news,” Kim blurts out, her chest rising and falling between the words. She tries for warm and sympathetic instead: “And I thought of you, how are you?”

Francesca echoes the question warily. “How am I?”

Kim’s pulse holds steady, knocking at her to keep going. “I hope you didn’t get too caught up in it all.”

“Depends on if five hours of questioning at MDC is ‘getting caught up in it’,” Francesca says bitterly. “But the cops let me go, thank God.”

Kim makes a soft noise. She thinks about offering the name of a good lawyer, but she doesn’t know who’s even left in that city these days. “That’s so good to hear,” she says instead. “When I saw the news report—well, I just wanted to check in on you.”

A thick silence. “Thank you, Kim, that’s very thoughtful of you.” And now the woman on the other end of the payphone sounds closer to the one who once sat in Kim’s old condo, awed over steaks. “I’m all right, considering, you know, everything.” A dry chuckle.

Kim echoes it.

“I actually had enough money put aside to pick up a couple of rentals. I was going to spend everything on a trip to France, but…” And Francesca continues, talking more about this phantom trip than her real life, about the places she had planned to visit, the restaurants she had planned to eat at, and which magazine gave them which great review.

Kim makes the right noises, the right hushed sounds of sympathy or steady agreements. It’s hard to listen for details, though. Impossible to listen any closer. She holds her fist against the change tray, keeping it steady. When the money runs out, she adds more without saying anything, quarters tapping against the metal before she fits them into the slot.

The stream of words from across the country continues, a geyser that’s been held back for too long.

Scattered dreams and hopes and everything lost.

“But how are you?” Francesca asks eventually. She quietens on the next question, as if it’s something she’s not sure whether she’s allowed to ask. “Still far away from Albuquerque, I hope.”

Kim’s throat gets tight. “I don’t think I could get much further.”

“Weather nice?” Francesca says. “You getting some sun?”

“Some sun, yeah,” Kim murmurs, glancing at her feet in the patch of light that cuts beneath the payphone’s overhang.

And the words between them fall away again, the conversation drying out. Just the buzz of the line, the electric current.

Francesca won’t offer anything about him on her own. It’s both painful and a relief.

So Kim swallows. “And how’s—uh—?” She can’t use the other name anymore. There was a time when she could. When she needed it almost as much as he did. A shield against district attorneys and the sharp edge of the straight-and-narrow that seemed to cut and bleed them both. “How’s Jimmy?”

Nothing now, not even the haze of the faulty phone line.

Kim turns to face the open street. The hanging question feels like falling. It feels like walking into a bloodstained apartment and not seeing him on the sofa right away, it feels like pacing her living room with a cigarette in her hands, like dawn breaking after an eternal night of waiting.

It’s always the same as back then. The dense stone in her stomach is the same stone. A magnet dragging the rest of her body inward and inward.

But Kim inhales, and fractures the silence, and she tries a different question. A simpler question. Black and white. It rushes out of her, trembling: “Is he alive?”

A sharp breath. “He’s, uh—” Francesca says now, voice splintering over the fragile connection. When she sighs, that carries through, too, cutting off at the end like the call has disconnected.

“He’s…?” Kim’s fingers lock on the handset. She folds her lips inward, holding herself frozen.

“He’s nothing,” Francesca says. “I have no idea. Probably crawled under a rock somewhere in the Bahamas, cleaning his wounds.”

Her words drip with disgust, but there’s something else there, too. A layer under it. Kim shakes her head slowly, her eyes shut tight. Something somewhere is rattling against the payphone, metallic and staccato.

Francesca’s voice changes again. She softens. She sounds like old offices with golden glass and murals on the wall. “When I see that asshole again, I’m going to give him some new wounds to clean.”

The tone grips at Kim’s chest, pulling at her like it’s trying to find something inside her.

And, still gentle, Francesca says, “Don’t you think that’s fair?” The question hangs there, trapped between them. “Kim?”

Kim manages, “When you see him again.”

“Yes,” Francesca agrees quickly, exhaling with this thing that’s passed between them down ancient phone lines, a broken message. That Francesca doesn’t think he’s in an unmarked grave, that she doesn’t think he’s dead.

Kim lets all her breath spill out, breath she didn’t know she was holding, and she laughs as if something’s funny. Maybe something is. “Right,” she says, chuckling thickly. “Okay, good.”

And even quieter now, the softest tug of agreement: “Yeah.”

Kim swallows again. She blinks up at the payphone overhang. Moss creeps under the edges, humidity finding a home there. She grits her teeth and nods. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you, Francesca.”

A dragging silence before: “It was so good to hear from you, Kim.”

“Yeah,” Kim says. “Yeah, you too. Keep well, Francesca.”

She hangs up the call, the handset rattling back into the cradle, metal on metal. She presses her palms against her skirt. She’s still holding the torn slip of paper with Francesca’s number on it, crumpled now, and she shoves it deep into the pocket of her cardigan and then folds her arms.

It’s easier to breathe with her arms trapping her chest.

Her lunch break is almost over, but she stands here a minute longer, hidden from her coworkers and her boyfriend and Titusville. At her back, the cars rush past, and the sound of their engines echoes under the payphone overhang, hollow and growling.

Notepads creep like moss over her kitchen table. Loose sheets of paper that seem desperate to be stitched together like jigsaw pieces, this sheet matched to that. Pairs of ideas or plans. Half-finished thoughts begun on the plane ride back from Denver.

(Her white jigsaw is packed away in its box again now. She hasn’t started a new one since.)

Kim taps the side of her cellphone on the topmost page of a new pad. It’s empty so far—or almost empty, just a number written on the first line. She nods to herself and tucks her hair behind her ears, still tapping. A dull rhythmic pattern, as if she’s waiting for someone to respond. To echo it back to her or to open a door.

And then she snaps into movement—punching in the number from her page, lifting her cellphone to her ear. Her foot jiggles, the movement traveling down through her body from her hand and finding a new home there. Her sneaker bounces off the linoleum.

And the call rings and rings.

Her heel keeps time with the sound. More movement stutters through her, emerging from her fingertips now, and she taps the notepad with her forefinger, marking the number’s area code.

An abrupt shift, the line engaging. “Robles and Goto Partners,” the receptionist says musically. “How can I help you today?”

Kim’s heel drums. “Hi there. Is Ms. Goto available?” she asks.

“One moment, I can put you through,” the woman says. “And what can I say this is regarding?”

Kim pauses. She stares at the empty lines on her page, then says, “Just tell her it’s Kim Wexler.”

The name means nothing to the woman on the other end of the line. She repeats it flatly: “Kim Wexler, okay. Sure thing.”

The line clicks again, transferring. And then it’s ringing.

It’s not long before the phone is picked up this time. Viola’s voice emerges, familiar and tentative: “Kim?”

“Hey, Viola,” Kim says, smiling softly. “Do you have a minute?”

Viola lets out something close to a laugh. “Six years and that’s your first question?” she says. “Well, jeez, Kim, for you I have ten.”

Kim chuckles now, too. “What about a draft on a contract?”

“I have paralegals who take care of that for me now, actually,” Viola says. “And I even let them take the first pass, too.”

“No wonder you’re doing so well,” Kim says. Her chest warms. “I looked you up. You didn’t take long to get out from under Rich’s wing, huh?”

“Rich retired, actually,” Viola says. “He’s giving talks at UNM now.”

Kim shakes her head. “Of course he is.”

“It turns out they can’t keep him away,” Viola says, laughter bubbling up again. “And they’ve tried. I think he’s sending half the 1Ls to sleep.”

It doesn’t take much to picture Rich on stage behind a lectern, gesticulating through long and winding stories.

Viola makes a soft sound. “It didn’t feel the same there without him. And I wanted… well, I wanted a fresh start.” Her words are tentative, as if she’s still talking about a dream and not something she’s already made happen. “Less big bank, more little guy. And Lynn has family up in Santa Fe, so when she found us a place here… it just seemed meant to be.”

“I’m really, really happy for you, Viola,” Kim says again, quiet and warm. Her smile holds for a minute and then slowly falls, as her gaze lands on the invasive growth of notepaper on her table. “Speaking of helping the little guys…”

Viola’s tone shifts immediately. “Should I close my door?”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Kim says quickly. “I just had a question. It looks like your firm takes on a pretty wide variety of clients?”

Viola hums in agreement. “Well, I make sure half our cases are pro bono, but we also handle a lot of IP suits for the tech companies here. And Gina and her team specialize in employment law, so we have a lot of flexibility.”

“That’s great,” Kim says, shifting the handset to her other ear and watching the fronds outside her kitchen window. They sway steadily, conducting her next words: “How would you feel about taking on a defamation suit?”

An intake of breath. “Are you asking what I think you’re asking?” Viola sounds stronger now. She sounds like the partner in a thriving Santa Fe law firm. “Because that’s a loaded question.”

Kim chuckles. “Well, how much do you know?”

“Kim, every lawyer in the state heard exactly what you wrote in that affidavit,” Viola says. “I’d never actually seen people gossiping at a water cooler before, but now I’m considering posting a time limit.”

Kim idly picks up her pen. She clicks it, then unclicks it, then taps the end of it on the paper. “So, is that a no?”

“Of course it’s not a no,” Viola says. A phone rings in the background, the bustling noise of a busy firm, and Viola’s tone is firm: “Kim, I owe you.”

Kim taps her pen again. She remembers Viola in the driver’s seat, ferrying her from place to place while she sat, frustrated and useless, trying to sort through meeting notes with one hand. “You don’t owe me at all.”

“Are you kidding?” Viola says. “Do you know how many other partners hire paralegals with zero experience? Without you giving me a head start, I’d still be a second year associate.”

But Kim just shakes her head again, as if the gesture can carry down the line. “If you know about the affidavit, you know I didn’t make this defense at all easy.”

“Psh, what’s life without a challenge?” Viola says brightly. “Kim, I’d be honored. You don’t need to shop around for anyone else. Robles and Goto are your girls.”

Kim exhales deeply. “Thanks, Viola.”

“Of course.”

But Kim thumbs the bottom of a notepad. This one is filled with twice the number of notes, the writing more erratic. The paper brushes her skin. The pad of her thumb feels oversensitive, as if the edge of the sheet is brushing against a healed wound. “The thing is…” she begins slowly. “The thing is, as far as new cases go, it’s kind of a two-for-one deal.”

Viola’s voice sounds slightly distant, as if she’s moved the phone aside to start working on the Hamlin suit already. “What do you mean?”

“Well, if you like a challenge, you’ll like this…” Kim says. She takes a breath and then drops it: “Jimmy’s going to file an appeal.”

A charged silence rises on the other end of the phone. Just the hum of the line, and then there’s the sound of a drawer sliding—open or closed, she doesn’t know. A distant beeping, maybe a copy machine. A receptionist answering another call.

“Jimmy?” Viola repeats, finally. She doesn’t sound upset. She sounds like she’s huddled over the water cooler, like she’s been leading the charge there all along. She sounds like rushed lunch breaks gossiping about Judge Green’s retirement or Judge Patch’s food order. She sounds like the corners of busy days when her eyes would light up and she’d lean in closer and giggle, pointing out something under her breath. “You’re in contact with him?”

“I am,” Kim says shortly.

When Viola speaks next, she’s measured again. “Kim, that case… the court released the transcripts of the hearing.” A pause, like she’s waiting for that to sink in. That everyone knows. “You were there. I don’t know what else you think anyone can do.”

“Don’t you?” Kim prods. Outside, the fronds dip with sudden wind, flickering the streetlights. “Come on, Viola, I bet your fingers are already itching for a Westlaw terminal.”

Viola gives a low chuckle, but she says nothing.

“So, that’s what I’m shopping around for.” And Kim taps her pen again. A judgment. “Both cases. It has to be both.”

“Will you let me think about it?” Viola asks. “And I should talk to Gina, at least. I can’t imagine this will be good for the firm’s image.”

“Probably not,” Kim says dryly. She draws a question mark next to Viola’s name on her planning sheet, and adds, “Take whatever time you need.”

“Oh, heck it,” Viola says. “Listen to me, talking about the image of the firm, I used to hate that!” She speaks louder now, more decisive. “Let’s do it. I wouldn’t trust anyone else on this anyway.”

Kim lets her eyes fall closed. She breathes out, leaning back in the stiff kitchen chair. Her feet are steady on the floor.

“Where are you based now? If you’re still local, I can come by and talk turkey.” The phrase carries the Texan twang of Kevin Wachtell, a piece of a time long gone.

Kim smiles, leaning forward. She rests her chin on her palm and curls her fingers over her lips, staring into the night.

As if it can tell it’s being observed, the palm tree outside her kitchen window stills. Stage fright. A car drifts past on the road beyond, a silver pattern through the fronds, bound for the main road.

“I wouldn’t say local,” Kim says finally, and she turns to a new page in her notepad. “But we can make it work.”

Kim swivels the blinds closed, cutting off some of the harsh afternoon sun. The strip mall is busy today, though hardly anyone’s entered the legal aid office—just the tall woman who’s currently seated in the waiting area, her knee bouncing erratically, the movement rattling the wooden chair.

At the arrival of the shade, the woman exhales in relief. She flips a page back on the clipboard she’s holding and starts filling out the next part of the questionnaire with a trembling hand.

“It’s okay,” Kim says gently, “take your time.”

The woman nods, but if anything her writing speeds up. The pen skids over the paper, ink vanishing. It carves invisible tracks. “Dammit!” she hisses.

Kim slips a pen out from inside the spiral ring of her notepad. “Here,” she says, holding it out.

The woman takes it with unsteady hands. She starts filling out the next line, black letters emerging from the nib now. “Thanks,” she says, shrinking. “I’m okay, I’m just nervous, I guess.”

Kim nods. “Well, you’re in the right place,” she says. “And we mean it, okay? It’s all free.” She pats the woman gently on the shoulder.

As she pulls her hand back, her cellphone rings, loud and blaring at max volume.

“Sorry,” Kim says, pulling the phone out to mute it—

—and it flashes with a Colorado area code.

Kim freezes. The numbers scroll over the screen, running and running, and then she murmurs another apology to the nervous woman and pushes out through the door. The parking lot is bustling and hot and her scalp prickles with sweat immediately.

She ducks into the shade of the overhang next door and answers. “Kim Wexler.”

A robotic tone speaks immediately: This is a prepaid call from—and then Jimmy’s own voice clicks in, a hollow recording: “Uh, Jimmy McGill?” before it shifts back to the robot—… an inmate at Montrose Federal Correctional Complex. Press one to accept the call.

Kim presses the keypad immediately, then she returns the phone to her ear.

A heavy clunk, and the call connects.

“Kim Wexler,” she says again, steady. Just in case.

But it’s really him. His voice sounds cavernous and tired. “Kim, hey.”

“Hey,” she echoes. “How long do you have?”

His words skip and slide over the bad connection. “I paid for fifteen minutes.”

She swallows and squints at the bright street, the sun burning her eyes. “Fifteen minutes,” she murmurs.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. The line clicks again then returns stronger. “So we might not be able to fit in that movie, huh?”

She chuckles. “Just the good bits.”

Loud voices shout in the background, closer and then vanishing again, but Jimmy continues, unswayed: “We said Caddyshack, right? So we’ll just fast-forward through all the Chevy Chase scenes.”

Kim snorts. She ducks her head down, and her hair tumbles loose from behind her ears. When she looks up again, she tries to see him there in the prison, somewhere vast and yawning, lined with impenetrable metal. Shadowed by a low sky.

“Y’know, it’s a funny thing,” Jimmy says, crackling and hissing at the edges, so far away. “I can’t stop thinking about what the weather’s like out there.” His voice catches again, and then quieter, almost lost: “Someone must’ve put the crazy idea in my head.”

She smiles softly. “Now, who would do that to you?”

A raspy laugh, crunching like dry leaves—but the next question slips through unmarred by the bad connection, as close to her ear as if he’s suddenly beside her: “Is the sun shining in Florida?”

Her breath seizes. “Almost always,” she says, the warmth pressing on her chest.

“Good,” Jimmy says, the line fading again. “Good.”

She can feel the time slipping now, too. The seconds vanishing and vanishing. She tries to hold on to them. “Jimmy, I found you a better lawyer.” Nothing, just the hissing wire, but she pushes on. “Do you remember Viola?”

“Your old paralegal?” Jimmy cuts through.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Okay—” he says, but something’s off. It doesn’t sound like him. There’s a rush of static and then: “What about you?”

She swallows. “Viola will be representing me, too,” she says, and she almost tells him he won, but it’s not about winning anymore. “Or her firm will be, at any rate. She has her own firm now.”

“No, I meant—” Jimmy starts, and the tone is suddenly so familiar she can see him clearly, can see him shaking his head and staring at her pleadingly. “What about you as the better lawyer?”

The question flashes into her, burning like the sun in her eyes, and she tips her head back. Swaps the cellphone to her other ear. If the connection weren’t so precious she might sever it to avoid answering, or just to avoid thinking about the possibility. The hope posed in a voice that rings with nail salons and mailrooms.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Jimmy says. His words echo and echo with hollow metal. “I’m just… I guess I’m just putting the idea in your head. Okay?”

Kim exhales softly, shaking her head. A car pulls into a space nearby, and she turns, angling her body away from it.

“Just mull it over for a few days,” he adds. “They have bar exams in Florida too, you know.”

Kim chuckles in the back of her throat. “Jesus, Jimmy, could you go through that again?”

“You forget that I did,” Jimmy says, and she can hear the smile beneath the words now. “Three times. You’re down by two runs, Kim.”

Her laugh comes stronger, now, and she’s shaking her head. Dammit.

“Bottom of the ninth,” he presses, and then lower, teasing and familiar: “What’re you gonna do, Roy Hobbs? You gonna swing?”

The question grips her like he’s right here, hands on her skin.

Holding steady. Not letting go. Waiting and waiting.

But he doesn’t push her for an answer. He moves on, and the conversation drifts onward, back to light things that pass over the crackling line between them. Old ghosts in new voices, or new things in old voices, something like that. It feels like an hour and like no time at all, the sun weighing hard on her skin, the damp breeze curling in from the river.

She feels better hearing it, his voice.

She always feels better.

The air conditioning blasts inside the legal aid office, finally fixed a couple of days ago, and it hits Kim as soon as she passes back through the door. The woman who was waiting earlier is sitting near Patty’s desk now, writing out something long and involved on a pad of paper. A statement.

Patty’s working at her computer, peering at the old curving monitor. When Kim passes through the bullpen gate, Patty glances over and acknowledges her with a quirk of her eyebrows, then returns to whatever she’s reading.

Kim sits at her makeshift desk. She presses her palms onto her thighs for a moment, for a minute, for two minutes, steadying. The air conditioning prickles her skin and she threads her fingers through her hair, then tucks it back again. She clears her throat and tries to find where she left things off.

Later, after the office is closed, Kim sorts through contact numbers scribbled on three-by-five cards. There’s no system to it, just hundreds of names shoved in a dozen narrow boxes, and she’s halfway through the slow process of alphabetizing them.

The air con grumbles and rattles, cycling, then it falls quiet again. Cool air ghosts over Kim’s cheeks.

Patty clears her throat, splitting the humming silence. Her chair creaks as she reclines.

Kim turns to her.

A packet of cigarettes crinkles, but Patty doesn’t open it. She passes it between her palms then returns it to its drawer. “You’re a curious one, Ms. Wexler,” she says finally.

“Sorry?” Kim asks.

“Come over here,” Patty says, indicating the chair next to her. Its stuffing peeks from beneath cracked leather. “Take a load off.” She doesn’t elaborate.

So Kim folds down the edge of the latest card, marking her progress. As she wanders over, Patty swivels, facing her monitor again. Lines ripple up and down the screen, the image struggling to remain in one place.

“But you’re a good writer,” Patty says idly, and she taps the screen with a nail. Words leap out now: New Mexico Law Review. “I’m not sure if I agree with your position on bystander rights here.”

Kim tenses. She stares at the screen flatly. Expressionless.

“I think it would be far better approached through The Fourth Amendment,” Patty says. A creak again as she leans back. Her earrings swing. “But you argue a point well and express yourself lucidly.” Another gesture to the chair. “Sit, sit.”

Kim doesn’t.

Patty tilts her head. Her earrings swing again. “So, what’s someone who can write an article like that doing all the way down here in little old Titusville, volunteering for little old me?”

Kim’s voice is flat. “What else did you see?”

But Patty’s eyes soften, and she shakes her head. “Do you trust everything you find online? I never do with our clients.” She leans closer again, elbows on her knees. “I want to hear it from you.”

Kim’s thumb is drumming against her skirt. It’s been drumming for a while. She stops it and checks herself for other movements, but there’s nothing.

Patty holds her gaze, studying her, and then she sighs. She relaxes, backing off like someone used to wearing kid gloves for most of the day. “All right,” she says. “I won’t push. You’re okay.”

Kim glances at the door. Dusk is arriving now in faded tones, like someone has brushed away the top layer of the world and revealed the pencil markings behind all the palm trees and shopfronts. The sketches of empty roads and empty buildings and half-finished bridges across the vanishing river.

“Oh, please, I can’t manage without you now,” Patty says, chuckling. “Stay, stay. How else will I learn the alphabet?”

Kim lets out a breath.

“I get it, believe me,” Patty says, low and serious. “Doesn’t everyone run away to Titusville because it’s as close as they can get to low Earth orbit?”

Out the glass door: the fading light of the evening, the world blistering away to nothing. Nobody out there is launching into space.

“You came to the right place,” Patty intones. “You’re safe from him here.”

Kim turns back, quirking her head, glad for the possibility of confusion instead of dread. “From who?” she asks, mind stumbling through possibilities—but then she catches up.

She sees the billboard photo that everyone uses, the leering smile.

“Oh,” she manages.

But Patty’s expression is already shifting. Her eyes narrow and she frowns, then she turns again to her ancient monitor. “Yeah, you’re a curious one, all right,” she murmurs, tapping on the keyboard and then, loud over her shoulder: “Come on, girl, I know for damn sure those cards won’t sort themselves. They haven’t after thirty years.”

So Kim returns to her desk, feet moving mindlessly. She doesn’t let herself have a moment to collect herself this time. She sets her cellphone beside her on the table, and then she returns to the three-by-five cards, her fingers nimble.

But she doesn’t see the cards. She sees her old research notes on bystander rights, sees draft after draft of her article, hundreds of them completed before she submitted it to the law review. She hadn’t been completely happy with it, but she’d felt okay in the end, and Chuck had even stopped her in the third floor hallway—

Kim sorts through cards faster, trying to clear her mind, as if Chuck’s name is written down with the others and can be shuffled back into the ‘M’s, vanished out of mind.

But the memory doesn’t vanish. Her brain struggles to hold the image of reality. Everything bleeds out like it’s rendered on Patty’s dying monitor. Instead of contact cards, Kim sees lecture notes and midterm plans and revision schedules. She sees the buds of pink and purple Post-Its blooming on yellow paper divided with black lines.

The air con kicks on again, cycling into life, and the hum seems to press against her ears. Her heart jolts with the frenzied memory of putting together bar outlines for every subject, finding time between mailcart trips along the third floor. The exam had weighed on her skin, the two-day marathon draining her of everything, energy and clarity and even time. Ordinary minutes had slipped through her fingers, and the answers had run away from her, and her thoughts had vanished from her head before they reached the page. Forty-eight hours of trying to recall case law, trying to pin her answers down like moth’s wings before they flew away again.

All of it in pursuit of a world of black and white. Right and wrong and correct and incorrect.

She’d forgotten the bar exam, in the months afterwards. By the time she received her score, she had barely remembered what questions she’d answered, what subjects she’d written on.

But it comes back to her now, fifteen years later. Memories unearthed by her hands shuffling through Patty’s old contact cards. With each card a new moment, something else she’d once thought vanished: the practice drive to the convention center, the dinner at Flying Star the night before, the sight of the city moving through a car window in the dark, all the lights watching her.

More cards and more memories: her mind blanking that first morning, and the ding of the bells that were supposed to keep her in time, and the feeling of her lunch sticking in her throat, and knocking on Jimmy’s door that night—

She should stop.

She should stop the flood of thoughts, but the dam is cracking now. The separation between her lives is splintering, and for now her breath comes quicker and she’s carried along on the current, old thoughts and old dreams fighting for space like churning water heading for the shore.

Chapter Text

Kim turns over to a new page in her desk calendar. The backyard for May looks disappointed in her, the grass faded and the hedges brown. In the corner of the frame is a house that could be one of hundreds in Titusville, the weatherboards peeling with the humidity and the heat. She can almost smell the water running through the narrow canal behind it, can almost hear the creak of a boat bumping against its mooring.

Kim settles the calendar back on her desk. The yard has reason to feel disappointed. She’s a few days late in changing the months over (almost a week, really) and she writes nothing in any of the thirty-one boxes. Nothing to make the people here think she has a busy and normal life, no big events other than those that come printed already. Memorial Day weekend.

She sets a reference manual on thermal pipe systems back on the shelf behind her. It slips slowly from the end of the row, drawn downwards until it’s lying almost flat.

A phone rings. Out near Cissy’s desk, maybe.

Kim glances through her blinds. The call is picked up, unseen, and the office beyond is once again quiet, everyone plodding through the mid-afternoon lull. Without looking down, Kim slides open her desk drawer and retrieves a notepad. She sets it beside her keyboard. She scans the office a final time.

And then she flicks the notepad open and starts reading.

The words absorb her immediately—new ideas springing out, things she’d forgotten. She taps her fingertips on her lips and hums. Discretionary disclosure, she writes, and then she circles a reference number. She needs to remember everything.

It feels like stretching atrophied muscles. Like trying to run on legs that can’t bear her weight anymore.

She hasn’t completely left the headspace when she heads out to make coffee. Her hands work the machine mindlessly, setting it brewing. The coffee scoop reminds her that she is JAZZED 4 JAVA. How could she forget? She cleans out a white cup that has the logo of a state-wide paper supply company on it. A little man wearing a paper hat.

The man grins mindlessly at her as she fills him with coffee.

A hand prods her shoulder. “Kim?”

Kim sets the coffee pot down on the kitchenette counter. She disguises her sigh as she turns, the exhalation becoming words: “Hi, June.”

“You have a late one last night?” June asks, and then after half a second of silence she nudges Kim again. “Your afternoon coffee, silly goose!”

“Oh,” Kim says again, looking at the cup in her hands.

“Is everything okay?” June’s face creases with worry. She peers around, then leans closer, and in a whisper: “I haven’t wanted to say anything, but Glenn told Josh what you did. Kim. You didn’t mean that.”

A flash of the past, like sun catching broken glass. An old knee-jerk resistance to being told what she did or didn’t mean.

“What happened?” June presses.

Kim tests the side of her mug. It’s scalding. “We weren’t right for each other.”

“Oh, Kim, that’s not true.”

The bright flare flashes again and Kim smiles flatly. She tries to feel like she felt a year ago. She’d gotten really good at letting people tell her what she wants. She’d made an art of it. Of doing exactly what they thought was best for her and feeling nothing.

At her silence, June’s expression falls, and she pats Kim’s shoulder softly and pityingly. She collects a dirty plate from the table and rinses it in the sink. Balances it in the drying rack. She hums something under her breath, a tuneless song that’s almost recognizable.

For the first time, Kim wonders how many times this woman has hummed the same song, has cleaned the same plate. She curls her palm around the warm base of her mug and leans against the counter. “Do you ever get sick of Red Lobster, June?”

June turns. “Oh, huh!” She seems as if she really appreciates the question. “Well, when I was pregnant with Toby, I had such naughty cravings for their biscuits. I must’ve eaten about a hundred a week, I was always sending Josh out to buy a dozen as soon as they opened.”

Kim sips her coffee.

“Took me a little while before I could go back there,” June says, laughing as if she’s embarrassed by it. “But, wow, the whole family love it. I used to joke that Toby was more Cheddar Bay Biscuit than boy!”

Yet another nudge to Kim’s shoulder, so Kim joins in, chuckling.

“It’s never a bad pick for dinner plans,” June says. “You’ll always find something nice.” She dries a couple of the dishes from the rack and stacks them.

“Thanks, June,” Kim murmurs. The coffee machine clicks and hums, and Kim sips her coffee again.

June’s face shifts. Her eyebrows draw together as she stares at Kim leaning there. She delivers the next question with all the solemnity of a detective in a parlor mystery: “Is Red Lobster… Glenn?”

Kim snorts—and then it turns into full laughter. She folds inward. “No,” she says, catching her breath. She straightens. “Oh—I mean, sure, why not. He’s Red Lobster. It’s all Red Lobster.”

June’s staring at her, frozen, the expression on her face something between confusion and terror.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kim says. “Thanks, June.”

But when Kim turns to go, June makes a quiet noise. Kim slows, and June’s lips move thoughtfully for a moment before she begins, as if she’s repeating the question to herself. Does she ever get sick of Red Lobster? She clasps her hands together. “Well, I think sometimes…” June starts, “sometimes, I…”

But then her words vanish. She stands there like an uprooted tree, something that shouldn’t be here, disconnected. Kim tilts her head and softens, waiting, just in case.

But then June’s cheery expression snaps back up. “Oh, well!” she says. “Time’s wasting. I’ll see you tomorrow, Kim!”

“Monday,” Kim corrects, and then regrets it. She clarifies anyway. “I’m off tomorrow.”

“Oh!” June pokes Kim’s shoulder. “Look at you.” She flashes another grin and then leaves, heading for her office, hair swinging just above her shoulders.

Kim exhales. She tops up her coffee and wipes the countertop clean. A framed poster of sprinkler heads reminds her how easily everything fits together here. Fittings designed to snap right into place.

She lands in Albuquerque before dawn. It feels as if she’s slinking unseen into the city, hidden from it while it hides from her. No shadows of the Sandias are visible against the horizon, no twisting Rio Grande cutting through the dry land. In the darkness, the plane wheels seem to touch down in her own stomach, a heavy landing that bumps and skids over the tarmac before settling like lead on the Earth.

On her drive out from the airport, the sun rises. It reveals the level desert, the cut tracks of new roads and once-new roads, this place that’s so much bigger than the one Kim moved to twenty years ago. Bigger but frozen again—stagnant with development projects left dead since the financial crisis. The desert seems to be reclaiming earmarked land—clawing its way back like it always wanted to, this great expanse waiting at the edges of the city, biding its time, ready to erase everything again. Flat and dangerous and hungry.

It’s a clean slate kind of city. Emerging from the hot dust like an iron from a forge, still hissing.

And when she lived here, she was a clean slate, too. She was level and she was making something of herself, growing and growing. She was coral snakes in the shade, eyes glittering.

The mountains slide by her windshield now, the one thing that’s familiar and unchanging, timeless. The sun climbs above them, spilling warm light over her skin, over the bare land. Reminding her that this place is ready to be new again for her, if she wants it.

She’s glad of it, though—the light revealing the city. Without the light, it’s just dark freeways, the world slipping around her in black with a gun in the glove compartment.

And then Albuquerque vanishes behind her. The freeway curves northward. The foothills here look like evening drives up to a corporate apartment, look like a bottle of red wine in crinkling plastic waiting in the passenger seat.

Kim shakes her head. The feelings cling to her anyway, as if the place itself is reaching for her, holding her down, making her part of it like places always do. In Albuquerque, she was Albuquerque—and in Red Cloud, Red Cloud.

And Red Cloud was dying. Red Cloud was dying and angry and storm-filled. It was bits and pieces of something pretending to be a town. Holding itself together as if it could fool… well, she never knew who they were trying to fool.

Because everybody saw through it, or everybody who looked, anyway, and nobody came to look anymore. Not at Red Cloud, and not at anything else.

As she arrives in Santa Fe, the sky settles into morning, bright and clear. The buildings here haven’t transformed as much, or maybe Kim just doesn’t notice the changes. She winds her way up into the hills, up with the glittering restaurants and boutique shopfronts. She makes a wide turn into a street filled with low adobe-style buildings, their doorways and windows fringed in bright blue. The roadways are narrow and empty here, curving organically between parking lots. It feels like a college campus, but the buildings are signposted as physios or youth symphonies instead of academic departments.

A sign for Robles and Goto Partners leads her up a gentle incline to a parking lot. She wheels into a space and shuts off her engine. Checks herself in the rearview—and she’s surprised by her reflection, by the dark hair and the bangs, which stopped catching her by surprise years ago.

(Except when she visited here for the trial. She’d been so angry then, and righteous, and the righteous and angry eyes had not seemed to belong in the face of this other woman as she caught sight of it in mirrored elevator doors, as she washed her hands in the courthouse bathroom.)

Now, though, her face returns to familiarity in the reflection. She looks as tired as she feels. Exhausted, but alert, and it’s familiar and almost welcome, this tiredness. There had seemed something wrong about getting eight hours of sleep a night for almost seven years. It had made her body sick.

Kim gathers her briefcase from the passenger seat and locks the rental car, then crosses the parking lot to the blue-fringed entrance to the law firm. As she enters, her first impression is of ordered chaos: books stacked in the waiting area, piling on the end of the empty reception desk. Boxes of files perch in places that look like a temporary solution become permanent.

Baskets of broad-leafed plants hang in long lines from the ceiling, a wall of green separating the entrance from the rest of the office. Kim touches one. It’s real, not plastic, and slightly damp, as if it’s just been misted with water.

The reception phone rings, and a man hurries back from the other room, coffee in hand. He spots Kim and beckons for her to approach as he smoothly answers the phone and then puts the caller on hold.

“How can I help?” he asks Kim, setting the handset back in the cradle.

“I’m meeting Viola at…” She checks her watch and grimaces. “Well, in forty minutes. I’m early.”

The receptionist opens his mouth—

“Kim!” Viola calls, emerging from behind the hanging plant divider. Her smile is wide and familiar. “Kim, you made it.” She wraps Kim in a warm hug, then pulls back, staring up at her. “Did you change your hair?”

Kim chuckles. “A little.”

“I’m always bad at hair. Noticing it, I mean!” Viola says, eyes crinkling warmly behind her glasses. “Come through, I cleared my morning. Didn’t I, Nick?”

The receptionist, Nick, nods. “Parnell Solutions couldn’t do Thursday, but I managed to fit them in on Friday at noon.”

Viola thanks him, still gesturing for Kim to follow her. They steer around the hanging plants and through to the main office floor. The desks and fixtures are all modern and minimalist, juxtaposed with the mess of research papers and files that crowd for space between them all.

Viola’s own office is tucked into the corner. The door is glass, with a frosted pattern of twisting leaves and vines around the frame. “These doors are all reclaimed, actually,” Viola says, closing them inside. “We worked with this great salvage yard—my desk, some of these shelves here, too, all reclaimed. The window shutters, of all things.”

“It’s a great space,” Kim says, warmly.

Viola ducks her head and smiles. She indicates a pair of armchairs tucked in one corner. “Let’s sit over here?” she suggests. “Less formal. I still hate the whole desk thing!” She sits, and smooths her skirt flat, then folds her hands together.

Kim leans her briefcase against one of the armchairs and settles there. The bookshelf beside her is filled alternately with reference books and then empty cubbyholes. In one of the empty spots stands a framed picture of Viola and Lynn at Tent Rocks, smiling crookedly from the frame. Kim smiles back.

“How was the red-eye?” Viola asks. “You must be exhausted.”

“I managed a little sleep, I think,” Kim says. “The woman next to me kept throwing me dirty looks for keeping the reading light on, so I gave up on that.”

Viola chuckles. “Not a show-biz biography, I guess?”

“You guess right,” Kim says. “I have—” She gestures to her briefcase. “I have a couple of thoughts about Jimmy’s appeal.”

The name slices through the space between them, but Viola carries on smoothly enough. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t,” she says. “But, Kim, you don’t have to worry about any of this now. It’s not your job.” She gestures through the frosted glass door. “It’s our job.”

Kim nods. The chair beneath her is soft and sinking and she twists her hands together for now. She can wait. “What do you need from me first?”

Viola smiles, almost embarrassed. “Well, I’d like to get a clearer picture of your finances—if you’re comfortable.”

“Of course,” Kim says.

Viola gives a short laugh, holding up her hands. “I’m sorry to just dive in like this!” she says, but she continues anyway, and this was why Kim picked her, recently and years ago, because she was always this giddy about the law. “It’s just to make sure we’re representing you well when we negotiate a deal with Hamlin.”

“I’ll fill out a disclosure form for you,” Kim says. “I’ve had most of what I made at S&C sitting in a savings account for the last six plus years.” She hadn’t even needed to break into that account for the down payment on her house, not in the backstreets of Titusville during the housing boom. She hadn’t looked at it. She never looks at it.

(Not unless it’s for him.)

But Viola’s eyes widen, clearly still familiar with a partner’s salary at that firm. “Well, that might give us more wiggle room than I expected.” She adjusts her glasses, settling them higher up her nose. “Howard’s life insurance didn’t pay out, and he had a pretty significant policy, as I’m sure you can imagine,” she says. “So the damages we’re talking about here are likely fairly, uh—” She clears her throat. “Significant.”

Significant damages. Kim nods.

“But I think we’ll be able to get a deal,” Viola says, and then, clearly taking Kim’s silence as disbelief, she leans forward. Her glasses slip lower again. “Kim, you know this as well as I do. It’s basic stuff, it’ll be the best thing for everyone.”

The best thing for everyone. Another nod.

Viola leans back. She nudges her glasses back up her nose again, fingertip pushing on the bridge. “I’m sure you can name half a dozen CEOs who’ve made a costly civil suit vanish by declaring bankruptcy. It’s a common play because it works.” She shrugs. “If Hamlin pushes you to that point, she gets nothing. So, that’s our stick.”

Cheryl, who’s had nothing for years. Cheryl, who’s already learned to live with nothing. Kim shakes her head. “Do you think she really cares about the money?”

Viola frowns. “What do you mean?”

Kim stares at the bookcase. Spine after spine of the New Mexico Law Review. One of them might even have the piece she wrote years ago about bystander rights. In another empty space: more photos, and pieces of pottery, eclectic enough that they must mean something to their owner. They’re not just corporate window dressing. “I mean…” Kim starts, “there’s fancy legal footwork, and then there’s the human part.” She meets Viola’s gaze again. “If we go to her side with a deal, it’s Cheryl’s call.”

Viola nods.

“I doubt she really wants money,” Kim says. “Cheryl has money.” She hasn’t thought about this; she hasn’t stopped thinking about this. She’s not going to argue over a settlement number. She can’t.

Viola presses her hand to her chin, thoughtful. Kim wonders how much work she’s already done here, running through historic defamation suits with a fine tooth comb. Testing out statute of limitations defenses, maybe.

And Howard’s life insurance hadn’t paid out for a suicide. Of course it hadn’t.

“What angle are you thinking?” Viola asks finally. She sits a little straighter with the question. It’s familiar, it’s seven years ago.

“She wants to make sure I feel it,” Kim says. “She wants justice, for once.” But that doesn’t sit quite right either. Kim sees the severe woman in her empty house, leaning on the back of a chair just to stay upright. “She wants—”

—a shadowed room, with light carving slices from peeling walls and metal tables. A cigarette and a lie and familiar eyes and his name in her mouth again. A time capsule and a time machine and the words come falling out—

“She wants her husband back.”

Later, the afternoon curves warmly through the office, catching flecks of dust in the air. Viola sits behind her desk now, as if establishing a clear division. There, by the bookshelves, in the soft chairs: Kim’s civil suit, and the approach to take with Cheryl, and how to return Howard Hamlin to the Albuquerque legal community.

Here, with the heavy reclaimed desk between them, it’s—

“Mr. Goodman,” Viola says, tapping the end of her pen on a printout. “Sorry, Mr. McGill. Uh, Jimmy.”

“I call him Jimmy,” Kim says simply.

“Okay,” Viola says. “Jimmy.” It’s like she’s testing the feel of the name again. “I spoke with him last week. The line was bad, but…”

Kim leans in. “What did he say?”

“Actually, he wanted to talk about your civil suit,” Viola says. “I didn’t give much away, just in case, but… Kim, I don’t know if he even wants new counsel.”

Kim nods. “He does.” More simple words, clear and precise.

Viola adjusts her glasses. “Okay, then,” she says quietly. Her gaze flicks up to meet Kim’s from behind the smudged lenses, and then back to the papers in front of her. It’s his court transcripts. Everything rendered in black and white lines. Viola looks almost terrified of it.

“What’s wrong?” Kim asks.

“It’s just… we saw a lot of him around the courthouse after you… uh, after you left,” Viola says, and she gives a strange chuckle. “It was kind of hard not to see him, actually.”

“I bet,” Kim murmurs. The billboard photo grins in her memory, vivid.

“I guess my point is… Kim, a lot of skeletons came out of that closet,” Viola says. “But—jeez, who knows how many more are left in there?”

Kim holds herself still. She waits.

“There could be stuff you don’t know about.” And then Viola adds, quieter, “We might find something that you wish we hadn’t. You might change your mind about all this.”

“I won’t.”

Viola’s soft tone continues. “No offense, but how can you know that?”

Kim shakes her head. She has no answer for the question, other than that nothing he’s done has truly changed her mind about him yet. She tightens her hands on her lap. “I’ll risk it.”

“Well, okay,” Viola says, and she nods. A choice made. “But for this case we might need some of that fancy legal footwork…”

Kim is already reaching for her briefcase. She clicks open the clasp and finds her main notepad, the pages curling, additional sheets of paper stuffed near the bottom. She sets it on the table, then flicks to her makeshift index, past scribbled notations and rejected ideas. Case law headnotes on the backs of sprinkler marketing text. She pulls a couple of binders out next, copies of everything, copies of copies, and lines them up along the desk.

“Kim…” Viola’s voice is hushed. “How have you done all this?”

Kim chooses the pragmatic answer. “I’m volunteering at a legal aid,” she says. “The woman there lets me use her Westlaw terminal sometimes.”

“This is…” Viola shakes her head slowly. “I’m not going to insult my killer staff, but we could always use more people like you.”

And Kim smiles. “I was meaning to talk to you about that, too,” she says, watching for the other woman’s reaction.

Viola’s eyes shine behind her glasses. “Oh, yeah?”

“I have a proposal,” Kim says, and then she taps her notepad. “But this first.” At Viola’s nod, she uncaps a pen and marks a dot at the first point on her list.

And everything spills from her, a broken and breaking dam, all of this flooding out through the cracks. There’s a plan, there’s a checklist, and more things to research, more case law to find—and court procedure to interrogate, and more tiny charges to exploit, the most complicated dance she’s ever tried to choreograph.

Kim flicks another page. “… and this is a huge vulnerability.”

Viola’s gaze flicks down to the paper. “The murder charges are a vulnerability?” she asks, incredulous.

“They’re not using RICO to stick the murders,” Kim says. “They got the meth distribution and manufacturing under RICO, but for the murders Jimmy was tried as an accessory-after-the-fact.”

“Goodman stood in that court and told the judge under oath that he knew about the murders,” Viola says. “Sorry—Jimmy did.”

“But knowledge and silence alone isn’t enough to land an accessory-after-the-fact charge.” Kim taps the end of her pen to emphasize her point. “And then there’s lawyer-client confidentiality on top of that.”

Viola frowns. “Confidentiality can be broken if you think your client’s about to do something that’ll result in imminent death,” she says. “Or, what is it?”

“Substantial bodily harm,” Kim says, finding it in her notes. “But that’s discretionary. There’s no mandatory disclosure under the New Mexico bar association rules.”

Viola makes a low noise.

“And how do you determine if it’s imminent death or a general threat? Lawyers get burned by that language every day. I think accessory-after-the-fact was the wrong play here,” Kim says. “It’s weak, it’s a weak choice. Why did they make a weak choice?”

Viola’s expression is shifting now, jotting down words in her own notes.

Kim makes a checkmark next to a section of her list and carries on. “Now, this next one might need some dancing shoes, but you said it yourself earlier. Everyone in the Albuquerque legal world knew Jimmy. Everyone had dealings. And most of them weren’t even with Jimmy. They were, well…”

“… with Saul Goodman,” Viola says carefully. Her eyes soften, and she adds, “You probably didn’t see it, but things really changed after the Salamanca stuff came out, too.”

The name jolts through the air, but Kim barely stiffens.

“Jimmy was like public enemy number one around there,” Viola finishes. “Nobody would touch him.”

Nobody would touch him. Kim swallows. She doesn’t think about that time, she can’t think about that time. It’s heady and intoxicating and toxic and too terrifying to consider—her fingers on his cuffs in the morning, sending each other out into the world.

The afternoon sun is warm and prickling against her cheek. New Mexico reminding her it still exists.

“And yet,” Kim starts, finally. “And yet there was a local Albuquerque judge presiding over the hearing. And his advisory counsel was someone he’d had a pretty combative history with—anyone who worked at the courts back when Jimmy was a public defender could tell you that.”

Viola blinks behind her glasses. “Jimmy chose Oakley.”

“I know, but it’s ammunition to get an appeal, if nothing else,” Kim says. “And I’d want to at least try arguing that the sentence was an aggravated departure. Almost eighty years more than the government’s sentencing recommendation? It doesn’t look good from the outside.”

Viola peels back the top page of the trial transcripts. “When you read what happened, though…”

But Kim keeps talking. “You know those ‘kids for cash’ judges? A forty-eight count indictment from a federal grand jury—racketeering, money laundering, extortion, fraud, and a couple million dollars in kickbacks from child detention centers for putting kids behind bars for longer.” Kim counts the list off on her fingers. “Last I heard, they were talking about twenty years.”

Viola is nodding again. She’s kept up with the case, too.

Kim jabs her pen down. “So we’ve got an Albuquerque judge who knew Jimmy, knew his history, knew his brother, and a sentence more than ten times longer than the government rec?” She holds up a palm, waiting—then grimaces. “Sorry, am I treating you like a paralegal?”

Viola’s eyes crinkle. “Oh, no, you would never have trusted me with this much as a paralegal.”

Kim laughs, warm and easy.

“But I agree with you,” Viola says. “It’s enough to file a circuit court appeal.”

“And then the murder charges are the weak point,” Kim says. “There’s no overturning the RICO stuff, Jimmy’s swimming in predicate violations. You could throw them at a wall blindfolded from a mile away and still two of them would stick. That’s a lock.”

“Unless we could prove multiple enterprises,” Viola says lowly.

Kim blinks. “What?”

Viola rolls her chair along her desk brings up something on her computer. She speaks as she types, fingers moving independently. “Right now, everything Jimmy’s charged with under RICO relies on Walter White’s operation being one continuous criminal enterprise,” she says. “If we could show otherwise, then they’d need to prove Jimmy’s membership again in each new enterprise. Two more criminal acts in connection with each one.”

Kim leans closer. The sunlight cuts clear paths over the wooden table, glittering with dust, with the swirl of the air currents, and Viola types speedily and clicks through search results.

“Ah, here—Boyle v. United States,” Viola says, pointing to the screen. “I read the Supreme Court opinions on this decision last year and wondered about it at the time. If structure and leadership aren’t required for a criminal group to be defined as an enterprise, like the court’s decided here, then how much weight can they have for establishing continuity?”

Kim smiles slowly, shaking her head.

“I’m thinking not as much as they once did,” Viola says, swiveling back, and then her gaze catches Kim. “What? Is there something I’m not seeing?”

“No,” Kim says. “Something I wasn’t seeing. Keep going.”

Viola grins proudly, her face scrunching warmly with it, and she turns back to her keyboard. She types something else, searching through the Supreme Court opinions on this case again, but Kim is already scribbling more notes.

They fill more pages, talking in half sentences and tentative thoughts. A pot of coffee appears and then drains and Kim’s neck aches. Her sleepless night presses at her temples like an old friend, glad to welcome her back.

The metal table cuts a hard edge into Kim’s palms. She breathes steadily, keeping her thoughts ordered. It’s warmer than last time she was in this room. The sun that slides between the bars seems closer, more direct. Her briefcase waits on the table in front of her fingertips. Heavy.

And then Jimmy is led through the door, cuffs rattling. Kim curls her hands tighter but keeps her expression flat. The guard releases the handcuffs without asking, patting Jimmy sharply on the shoulder. At Kim’s nod, he closes the door again.

Another punctuation point, hanging in the air.

Jimmy steps forward. There’s a bulb buzzing in the ceiling. Light carves through him.

And Kim smiles. The image she holds in her head between visits is never enough. It’s always missing some detail, something that strikes her on her return, and today it’s the new creases at the edge of his eyes. Not quite smile lines, something else. Something tireder.

But he smiles back at her right now, eyebrows climbing in wonder.

“Still surprised?” she asks softly.

“Yeah, well,” Jimmy says, rubbing the fingers of his left hand around his right wrist. “I was always surprised. Even before—” A wave to the visitation room.

That’s probably true. Kim presses her hands against the table, keeping herself in place. As if she’s the one locked up here. Her foot bounces and bounces, her heel hitting the cement floor.

Jimmy’s face furrows. “Is everything okay?”

She hears Viola’s words from yesterday. You might find something, something that makes you change your mind. Some skeleton that will turn you against him, finally. And looking at him now, Kim knows that it really might exist, might even be the thing trapped in the tired new lines around his eyes, in the pale cast over his skin. “Everything’s okay,” Kim says. “Everything’s good.”

Jimmy nods slowly, doubtful. His eyes flick in the direction of her trembling foot, as if he can see it through the impenetrable table.

Somehow he knows what she’s doing—always knows.

And the anchor of her hands on the table isn’t working anymore, so she lets it go. The chair squeaks roughly behind her as she stands. She steps closer to Jimmy and he freezes, watchful, waiting.

She moves right up to him.

The bulb flickers and hums and casts yellow-tinged shadows, and then she wraps her arms around him carefully, as if he’s made of glass and burning filament, too.

He doesn’t shatter. As she presses against him, Jimmy’s breath leaves him in a rush, and she feels as if it’s being transferred to her, swelling warmly inside her chest. He’s solid and steady and she thinks he could even bear the weight of them both, if she asked him to.

She scrunches her hand in the back of his orange uniform, the fabric coarse. It’s rough on her cheek, too, as she presses her face into his shoulder. Jimmy’s palms rest tentatively on her back, the faintest pressure, as if he wants to make sure she knows he’s willing to let her go again.

But Kim just tightens her grip on the orange fabric, like someone grabbing the eighty-six years and ripping them back, piece by piece. Destroying it charge by charge with dizzying legal footwork.

“I have something for you to sign,” she mutters into the warmth.

Jimmy doesn’t move except to breathe against her. She can feel it; it’s all she can feel. His chest is like a bellows, slow and steady. It’s a long time before he says anything, a whispered: “You have what?”

She pulls back, and the ghost of disappointment falls from his face right as she catches his expression, almost not visible there at all. “I have something for you to sign.”

He nods, and she separates from him fully now, moving over to the table and clicking open her briefcase. She removes the top sheet of paper and sets it down on the palm-burnished metal. It’s simple and short. Not at all elaborate.

She slides the paper towards him.

Jimmy moves closer. She watches his profile. Frown lines appear around his eyes, but then his lips ripple with a smile, and he turns to face her again. “A letter of engagement from Robles and Goto Partners.”

She nods. She finds a pen in her jacket pocket and holds it out to him.

Jimmy takes it and signs. James McGill. A flourish over the ‘M’ and the ‘G’, familiar and smooth. He doesn’t write anything else.

But when he hands the pen back, instead of pocketing it, Kim signs too. She fills out the line over Viola’s name: p.p. Kimberly Wexler.

Jimmy leans in again, studying the paper. “What’s this?” he asks, but his eyes are glittering as if he’s already sensed the answer. “You have authority to sign things on behalf of Viola now? Your paralegal?”

“Try the other way around,” Kim says, and then she quickly adds, before his hopes soar, “It’s very part-time, I’m not moving back to Albuquerque any time soon.”

“Not ready to say goodbye to the sprinklers, huh?” But the intense way he’s staring at her betrays the attempt at a joke. He tilts his head, brows quirking. “Or the dazzling Florida sun?”

Kim chuckles. “No, not quite,” she says. “But for a few hours a week I’ll be making junior paralegal rates assisting Robles and Goto Partners with some important case research.” She takes the signed letter and tucks it back into her briefcase, snaps it closed, and then she draws out a chair again.

She sits, staring up at him.

And she gestures to the chair opposite. “And maybe conducting one or two client interviews.”

Jimmy’s gaze flicks from her, to the briefcase, to the barred windows, then back again. And suddenly his whole body seems to exhale, like his strings have been cut, the pieces of him falling and falling. He drops into his chair and his shoulders shift and he covers his eyes with a palm and makes a ragged sound. “I thought…”

Kim softens her expression, but he doesn’t lower his hand, doesn’t look at her.

And the flickering bulb above them seems like it’s inside him now, a quivering light over his face, his shielding fingers. “I didn’t think you could keep coming here like this for much longer.”

“Well,” Kim murmurs, “that’s why we’re a team.” And she smiles, so slowly. “I figured out how.”

The ragged sound he’s making is laughter, cracking and joyous. His fingertips press against his eyes. “You could’ve told me.”

“I only just thought of it on the plane,” Kim says. “Stuck in the dark on a red eye.” She leans forward, trying to cross the table. “Jimmy.” He doesn’t react when her fingers land on his skin, curling around his wrist.

But he lets her draw his arm away from his face. He looks at her with the same surprised expression as when she arrived, as when he first met her.

She mirrors it back. She can feel his pulse in his wrist. It twinges through her, her fingers trapping him, and she almost releases him—but he covers her hand with his, a little interwoven bundle between them on the metal.

“How are you?” She’s been scared to ask him such an open question, not when she can just read his face instead, but it falls from her now. Now that he’s stuck with her, now that she’s here for real. Now that she’s not a ghost in the system.

Jimmy chuckles again. “I’ve been worse,” he says. “A lot worse.”

Kim twists her eyebrows up. She says, quietly, “You’ve been better, too.”

He exhales. He seems to give the observation real thought, sincere reflection, like he’s weighing it on a set of newly calibrated internal scales. And he brushes his thumb against her hand. “Sometimes I was better,” he says, finally. “But I never could figure out being better all the time…”

She wonders if he means feeling better or doing better, or both.

“Hey, but I nailed all-the-time worse!” Jimmy says, brighter now, fake tone disguising whatever he’s feeling beneath. “Believe me. You need an expert witness in being worse? I’m your man.”

She stares at him, soft. “Jimmy.”

He doesn’t soften in reply, he just keeps talking. “You know,” he says, “a lot of paralegals are getting ready to sit the bar exam.” He squeezes her hand. “That could be you. In between sprinkler tests. C’mon Kim, you could pass that damn thing in your sleep.”

Kim replies first by tightening her fingers around his wrist, just slightly. She gets it. He doesn’t want to talk about all-the-time worse, not right now. So she lets him change the subject. “I could maybe scrape through the MBE, maybe, but not the local day,” she says. “I don’t know anything about Florida Constitutional law, and that’s always in there.”

Jimmy’s eyes flash. “You’ve been looking it up,” he says, grinning wider as if he’s trapped her. She sees a flash of him in a courtroom—you didn’t recognize him either your honor, gleeful and glittering.

She breathes out, long and relenting. The thought clings to her skin: the bar exam, the study and the long hours and the longer days and the awful waiting and then, and then…

But she shakes her head, pulling her hands free. “Jimmy,” she says. “After everything…” She shrugs, helpless. The hope sparks in her, and she doesn’t know how she lived for so long without it, without someone looking at her like this and wanting more for her, always wanting more. But she folds her lips inward and says, “I don’t know yet. I need to make sure it’s what’s right for me.” And how can she be sure? She’s been sure before, she was always so sure, and—

“Okay.” Jimmy smiles again gently. “Okay, then.” He taps a knuckle on the metal, hollow and echoing, and then he lets it go, changing the subject yet again. “So, Kimberly Wexler of Robles and Goto Partners, you’re the voice of my attorney now.” He tilts his head, the light shifting over his face. “Let’s have some legal advice.”

The metal table between them is a desk now, is a mailroom workbench, is a bedspread covered with study guides and bar outlines. Kim almost reaches for her notepad and a pen, but she waits instead. Waits for him to finally speak about his case.

Another tap on the metal. “I got a visitation request sent through to me yesterday,” Jimmy says. “And I can’t decide whether to approve it or not.”

“Viola told me she wanted to see you in person—” Kim starts.

“No,” Jimmy says. “Not Viola.”

Kim frowns. “Who?”

And Jimmy lingers on it for a second, as if still debating whether to say it, as if holding on to this moment before he finally answers: “Skyler White.”

Chapter Text

Morning hangs heavy over the parking lot: a low cloud that lingers as fine water in the air. The cement is slick, a mirrored surface in which the enormous fences are doubled. It’s as if the crosshatched wires extend down into the dirt here, too—a prison encased on all sides.

Tires squeak as more cars arrive for the start of visiting hours. They’re doubled in the dark mirrors, too. The sun hangs above the prison towers, a pale disk barely cutting through the gray, and the air feels thin and mountainous. It’s not raining but even the mist is enough to stick to her, leaving a film on her jacket as she steps through the visitation entrance.

Kim’s still not used to how this complex seems to gather over her like tombstones. The crushing weight above her feels the way dirt feels to her in nightmares, burying her and burying her.

Beyond the doors, the light of the front lobby is harsh and dissecting. There are no shadows in this place.

A line of people wait at the reception window today. The officer behind the glass dispenses visitation forms flatly. Kim takes one. A pen hangs from the top of the clipboard on a cord not quite long enough to let her write normally. The words at the top of the form are simple—Notification of Visitor—in contrast with the convoluted boxes and checklists that account for the rest. She starts filling out the details of her Florida driver’s license.

The entrance doors swing open, admitting more visitors. This next group is chattering and laughing as if they are used to all this, as if they’ve done it hundreds of times.

Kim scans the lobby. She frowns, and checks her watch, then she returns to the form.

When she’s done, she stashes her bag and cellphone in a locker—high on the wall, near the top. In the next room, she passes through the almost-familiar tension of the metal detector. Today, the lingering mist from outside almost feels like a protective coating over her skin.

A guard takes her form and leads her through a different door this time, the two of them remaining in the tombstone-like complex rather than heading outside. He matches her license against her form again, then stamps her hand—the ink invisible until he checks it with a black light, its words or symbol hidden even from her.

Kim follows him down a passageway, and then they pass through another metal detector and into a double-doored security area. A second officer checks her form again. He re-illuminates the stamp on her hand. And then he guides her through into the main visitation room, pointing wordlessly at one of the round tables.

White markings divide the floor into dozens of boxes. The indicated table is trapped inside one. Kim sits on a metal stool that’s affixed both to the floor and to the table, the whole thing an immovable unit. The stools have white markings around them, too.

She feels like a pawn on a chessboard, confined to her space.

And in this room, Kim thinks, she can hear the prison. Distant noises, unspecific but ever-present. Echoing from elsewhere, drifting into the sprawling and tall-ceilinged visitation space. High windows of reinforced glass admit some glowing amount of light, pale and gray like the morning. There’s an alcove of vending machines off to one side of the room, between the controlled entryway and a huge red-lettered sign reminding everybody of the rules.

One of the other visitors approaches the machines and buys a soda. Back at his table, he cracks the can, and Kim can almost hear the hissing. Most of the other tables are still empty.

Soon, a prisoner in orange is led into the room from another door. He hugs an older woman for a couple of seconds, and then the two of them settle opposite each other at a distant table.

Kim twists her fingers together in her lap. The gesture is hidden from the controlled visitor’s entrance, from whoever is almost visible through the square of reinforced glass.

A dark shape moving; a dark shape having their ID checked against their visitation form. Having ultraviolet light shone on their skin to make sure they’re supposed to be here. A dark shape answering questions and nodding and waiting to be let in.

Then the door opens.

Skyler White is dressed for prison. She wears black long sleeves, long pants, no jewelry. Everything simple. Above her dark collar, she looks tired and angry and drained. The expressions are easily legible on a face free of make-up, free of pretense. Her hair hangs just above her shoulders, almost glowing under the strips of ceiling lights.

Skyler White is dressed for a court appearance; Skyler White is dressed for a funeral.

The officer leads her over to the table, crossing between the white lines, traversing the board.

Kim stands, hands tucked before her. Her palm folds around the wrist of a sleeve still damp from outside. “Mrs. White?”

Skyler casts her gaze down Kim’s body then back to her eyes. “You’re the lawyer, then,” she says flatly. “They said you’d be here.”

The statement hangs between them. Not a question. Easy enough to agree with, and even silence would be an agreement. But Kim opts for honesty. “I’m Kim Wexler. Paralegal.”

(It’s not honest, though, it’s not at all honest.)

“You guys always stick together, huh?” Skyler says. “Lawyers.” She settles on one of the attached stools. Her fingers curl around something: a collection of papers and a red notebook inside a ziplock bag. She tilts her head up at Kim, though even seated, she’s almost as tall. “Here to protect him from the big bad widow?”

Kim chooses silence this time. She returns to her own stool, now beside Skyler. And she thinks, again, like she did at that first news report: He had a wife?

Skyler’s hands tremble slightly. She straightens, her back stiff. She’s staring off towards the vending area—the opposite side of the visitation room from the prisoner’s entrance, as if she’s not at all interested in whoever might be joining them. As if she’s deciding whether to buy Fritos or a coffee.

But Skyler still reacts when the prisoner’s door opens. Her shoulders stiffen even more, like her spine is being wound tighter and tighter with a manual crank.

An officer lingers at the doors, checking something, obscuring Jimmy’s body. If Kim didn’t know him so well she might not be sure, either. She might freeze and wait and hold herself tense, too. But then the two separate men, and the guard reveals Jimmy fully, and they cross the white paint lines, moving horizontally, like castles.

Jimmy’s expression is flat and neutral. He carries himself carefully. The guard releases his cuffs and seats him at the table, and his gaze never meets Kim’s. He studies the dull metal as if he doesn’t know how to act—or who to act for.

He swallows. Kim clocks it a split second before he decides to be the first one to speak—

He claps his hands together, hollow. “So, the incomparable Skyler!” Jimmy grins at her, and he’s settling into this version of himself, staring only at Skyler, as if Kim’s not even there. “You look as good as ever.”

Skyler’s expression remains flat. “You look like shit.”

“Hey now, that’s no way to greet an old friend,” Jimmy says, spreading his palms out pleadingly.

Skyler raises an eyebrow. “I don’t like you.”

Jimmy just grins wider. “Aw, come on. Even in here, you don’t like me?” And he widens his arms, encompassing the scope of the visitation room.

Her lips twitch. “It’s better.”

“Orange has always been my color,” he says. “Should’ve been a Giants fan. I would’ve been a lot happier last October.”

Blonde hair brushes dark fabric as Skyler tilts her head. Her voice is silken: “Oh, did you have a bad year?”

Jimmy chuckles genuinely—and he likes her, Kim realizes. He likes her and he’s glad she’s here and alive. As if Kim’s spoken that last thought aloud, Jimmy finally looks sideways—and in his eyes, she sees a flash of that other man, the one who’s still new to her. The downward creases on his face.

As he returns his gaze to Skyler, he settles his hands on the table. Like flags coming down to rest, their fluttering ceased. “Not as bad as yours,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

But Skyler scoffs. “What, are you an alcoholic now, making amends?” She gives a bitter laugh. “I don’t care if you’re sorry.”

Jimmy glances at Kim again—the same new eyes. A line appears on his forehead, and he taps his thumb on the table, then his other fingers, rolling a pattern over the metal.

Kim shifts on her stool, wishing she could edge it closer to the table. “In your visitation request, you mentioned there was a material reason for the visit.”

Skyler glances at her like she’s forgotten her presence. A cloud passes over her face, but she exhales. She lifts her hands from the ziplock bag and slowly opens it. The paper she withdraws is folded in half, and she spreads it smooth between them. “What do you know about this?”

Jimmy picks up the paper. He squints at it, then moves it slightly further away, and for half a second Kim wonders if he needs glasses to read now. “You’re creating a trust?”

He slides the paper over to Kim. She scans it, too. It is a trust deed, the language boilerplate. Her gaze lands on the number at the bottom, and she breathes out, hushed. “That’s a lot of money to put into an irrevocable trust.”

“Not me. It has nothing to do with me.” Skyler’s voice trembles now. “But the sole benefactor will be my son, on his eighteenth birthday.”

Jimmy whistles lowly. “Richie Rich,” he drawls. “Hey, I’m sure he’ll throw a bone to dear old Mom. Get you a nice new Lexus.” He makes a little gesture for the deed, crooking his fingers into his palm, and Kim slides it back. He frowns again. “So who’s coughing up the dough?”

Skyler just takes the whole thing in her stride, the scattered comments and questions—and maybe this is just how she knows him. Maybe it would be worse for her if he wasn’t like this. “My husband’s old business partners.”

Jimmy’s face changes, something clicking.

Skyler catches it, too. “You know them, then?”

“Walt started a company in college, right?” he says. “He told me.”

“Did he?” She sounds genuinely curious.

Jimmy taps his palm on the table idly, and he nods. “We were talking about…” He shrugs. “Regrets.”

“Yes, well,” Skyler says, “that was always his biggest one, wasn’t it?”

Jimmy’s lips flatten. He turns the deed over to the blank reverse and then flips it around again. “Well, I guess they’re finally makin’ right,” he says. “Good for you. And you wanted my… legal opinion?”

Skyler scoffs. She shakes her head, and she points to the deed. “With everything you know—Is that him? Could it be him?” She’s not using the name, as if somehow she can keep Walter White out of this conversation that’s currently being held about him. “You would have helped set this up, right? I deserve to know.”

Jimmy’s brow furrows. He taps the table again, thoughtful, like he’s turning something over and over in his mind. For a moment, he looks suddenly young again, hunting through pages of bar outlines or study notes, or pretending to understand one of the new cases passing through the mailroom.

“Jimmy?” Kim prompts.

He looks up immediately. The name seems to have cut through the air, flaying the conversation. His eyes scan back and forth, but then he reacts honestly, the thoughtfulness clearing. “If this is Walt, he didn’t come to me. He never even talked to me about it.”

Skyler’s hands tremble. Her shoulders are iron.

Kim leans closer. “Billionaires do this all the time,” she says. “It means these assets aren’t taxable anymore. They might actually be saving money.” She glances to the deed, then back again. “Have you spoken with them?”

“Yes,” Skyler says. “They wouldn’t answer my calls for days. And then, when they finally did, they… didn’t want to talk.” She shrugs lightly. “They said it was their money. That they felt guilty about everything. Wanted to appease their consciences.”

“Well, in case you didn’t know, the feds will already be looking into this,” Jimmy offers, rolling his fingers over the table again. “If there’s anything shady, they’ll find it. It’d mean an extra nine million bucks for Uncle Sam, right?”

The visitation entrance opens, and the pressure of the room seems to change, lowering. Another family passes nervously out of the controlled doors and then sits. A little girl waits with her head lowered, hands clasped together.

“He told me he had nothing left, but…” Skyler shakes her head. Her hair frames her cheeks now, hanging in obscuring curtains until she straightens again, fixing Jimmy with a hard stare. “But I can feel him in this. Nine million bucks. He had eleven the day he kidnapped my daughter.” Her voice splits over the last few words.

“He had a lot more than eleven,” Jimmy says, low in his throat. “I knew about eighty. I watched him drive off with it in the back of a van, and then—”

“He buried it,” Skyler says simply. “Out in the desert.”

A look passes over Jimmy’s face, distant and vacant, like sun on sand. “Hey, then, he gave you something to trade after all!” he says, faux bright.

Skyler’s jaw tightens. “The men who killed my brother-in-law and his partner, they took it,” she says. And still no names, Kim thinks. A conversation about nameless people. Relationships and descriptions, nothing concrete. “Most of it was found at their compound.”

Jimmy nods slowly.

“Not all,” Skyler says. “Millions unaccounted for. So I don’t know how much he really—how much he had left.” She stares at Jimmy across the table as if she’s staring across something much bigger, something much wider. And her voice comes softer, “It didn’t stay buried.”

Jimmy’s words are soft, too. “Nothing stays buried,” he murmurs.

Kim holds herself still. She’s not used to being on the outside of a conversation when Jimmy’s there. It feels like they’re talking around her—or not around her, but passing something extra between every word, some additional meaning for which she lacks context.

Jimmy taps the trust deed, a fracturing punctuation mark. “I didn’t set this up,” he says. “But I did—” He clears his throat. In his prison uniform, he looks small and tired and empty. “I told him getting money past the feds would be impossible,” he mutters. “I said he’d never be able to get all his cash to you and your family.”

Skyler’s face flickers with something, possibly with recognition of what a challenge would mean to a man like her husband. She slides the paper back and folds it in half again, vanishing the words. “He’s been dead for half a year and I still see him every day. Every bad thing is because of him, and every good thing, too.”

Jimmy’s eyes soften almost imperceptibly. Maybe it is imperceptible to Skyler—but Kim sees a ghost in the expression. Or someone who used to be haunted by ghosts, too.

“So I fear the bad things and I can’t trust the good things. It’s all just—” Skyler waves a hand, scattershot through the air. Nothing. Everything. And then her gaze crawls back to Jimmy. “I heard about what you said at that trial,” she says lightly. “Do you know how much it would have upset him?”

Jimmy smiles, a faint thing that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Maybe so.” But he shrugs. “That’s not why I said it.”

“Why did you say it?” Skyler asks.

He tips his palms upwards, hands on the table. “Because it’s the truth.”

And Skyler laughs now, really laughs, dark and bleak. “I guess you’re a lawyer after all,” she says. “What’s the ‘truth’ in all this mess?”

Jimmy looks down at his hands. Behind him, the sun struggles with the high windows, sneaking in pale glints through the crosshatched wires locked inside the thick glass. “It’s not nothing,” he says, finally, looking back up again. His eyes seem to glint with the sun now, instead. “It’s worth living with.”

Skyler’s expression doesn’t change. She stares at him, cheekbones sharp and eyes hollow, and then she runs her finger and thumb along the crease in the paper, honing the edge. She puts it aside, and then she reaches into the ziplock bag again, and this time she takes out the small, red journal.

As she opens it, Kim sees that it’s not a journal after all: it’s an accounting book, a ledger repurposed. Red lines divide the pages, expecting dollar amounts and sums. Instead, the columns are filled with dates. With sentences and question marks.

“I’m supposed to live with this, too,” Skyler says. “But I don’t get to know the truth.”

Jimmy’s eyes cut to Kim’s then back to the ledger.

“I don’t want missing pieces in my life anymore.” Skyler’s words are precise, and her handwriting is precise, like someone used to doing very precise work. She flicks pages, and more gaps appear in the writing. Voids and empty holes. More question marks. Sentences underlined.

“Looks like a lot of missing pieces,” Jimmy murmurs.

“Yes, it is,” Skyler says simply. She clicks the end of a plastic pen. It’s cheap and small and has the name of a hotel on the side of it. And then she clears her throat. “Did he really kidnap you?”

Jimmy almost flinches, his fingers tightening on the table.

“I thought so,” Skyler says. “The desert?”

Another flicker passes over Jimmy’s face. He brushes his hand over his shirt, then exhales. “Of course,” he says, and he settles in his chair again, getting comfortable. “Closer to the city than the border.”

Skyler nods. “Near the Hi-Lo down in South Valley?”

Jimmy blinks. “What?”

“And could this have been the weekend of November 8th?” Skyler asks, pen still hovering over the ledger.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy says. “I don’t think so.” He swipes his forefinger over his lip, then shakes his head firmly. “No, it was a weeknight.”

Skyler makes a thoughtful noise, almost disappointed.

While she studies her notes, Jimmy looks over at Kim. She widens her eyes slightly, trying to hold the connection for a moment, and he shakes his head. Nothing worth talking about, he seems to want to say—but the gesture feels as if it holds something else instead. No, you don’t know everything, it says. No, you’ll never know what happened.

“Were you out there long?” Skyler asks.

“They brought me back before morning,” Jimmy says, almost light again now. Just the facts. “And then I got to work building a meth empire.”

Skyler smirks. “I know my husband,” she says. “Don’t give yourself too much credit.”

“Well, you should’ve seen his operation before I met him,” Jimmy says. His voice is dark, and proud, and his gaze is dark and proud, too. A brick wall across the table from them both. He won’t be broken on this one. It’s hard to look at him.

But Skyler stares back at him almost as coldly. “Yes. I’m sure he wasn’t waving a knife at you.” The word cracks, split with a blade—but then her expression changes, eyes narrowing, just slightly. “Or was he?”

Jimmy looks baffled. “He wasn’t.”

Skyler turns another page. “And the bulletproof vest was…”

Jimmy’s gaze cuts to Kim, and she stares back at him, not reacting, swallowing up her reaction. He exhales, and he touches his nose—less Paul Newman in The Sting and more like he’s checking it with ginger fingers. “That was a precaution,” he says. “And nothing to do with Walt.”

Skyler just nods. She does make a note now, something very tidy and careful in the margins, and then she turns to another page and asks another question. Jimmy gives another answer—and again it’s not what she’d hoped, less information than she was after.

Kim looks down at her shoes inside the white box around her stool. Her toes within the lines. She interlaces her fingers. Her jacket is dry now, the mist of the morning gone. Nothing left but the back and forth conversation between these two people who share something she doesn’t. They’re looking for clear skies, too.

When finally an officer passes their table and tells them to end it, two hours are up, Skyler doesn’t linger over anything. She snaps her journal closed and stands, looking down at Jimmy across the dull metal.

Kim waits on her stool.

Jimmy nods at Skyler. She stares back, and then she starts packing away her things in the ziplock bag again. The accounting ledger filled with its careful attempts at truth. The cheap pen and the trust deed.

His voice comes soft: “You know, my mom was a bookkeeper.”

“What?” Skyler almost flinches.

“My mom,” Jimmy repeats, and then he smiles crookedly. “She wasn’t a very good one, though. Not as good as you.”

Skyler stares down at him like she’s looking at the table itself, or a chest of drawers—something she’s never considered would or even could have a mother. And for a split second, Kim can see what piece of toughness in Skyler’s expression reminded Jimmy of Ruth McGill, who she only met once—but whose shoulders sometimes fell similarly, or whose brow considered things sharply, too.

“You’re different,” Skyler says now, simply.

The smirk comes back, and Jimmy points at her, teeth clicking. “And you’re exactly the same, sweetheart.”

Skyler exhales, low in the back of her throat. She picks up her things and holds herself straight.

Kim stands.

“Kim.” Jimmy holds her gaze. The tension in his face relaxes, softening. His eyes turn down at the edges. “Thanks for coming all this way.”

Kim just shakes her head. It sounds like a piece of an old argument. She always comes all this way. Before she goes, she almost reaches for him—but then she aborts the motion. Just a tremor in her arm. “I’ll see you, Jimmy.”

He nods, watching her.

Their goodbye is the opposite of when he came in. Now, his eyes are locked on Kim, tracking her as she heads for the door. Fixed to her as if she’s the only other person in the enormous room. She can feel his gaze on her skin, on her neck, coarse on her cheek.

When she turns back, he’s still watching her, expressionless.

The skies have drained over the prison parking lot, the low and heavy gray of morning making way for miles and miles of thin white cloud. The cement still shimmers after the mist of earlier, though—or maybe the rain, if it had rained properly while she was inside that other place. It might have done anything.

Kim crosses to her rental car. It’s dark silver, gleaming. She folds her fingers around the handle of her purse and lingers beside her door, inhaling the pale mountain air. Across the fences and fields and buildings, chalky peaks blend with the distant sky.

A few rows down, Skyler returns to her car, too. It’s an older model Civic hatchback. A line along the trunk is painted matte black, and scuff marks decorate the back bumper. She lowers herself inside. The slam of her door seems to reverberate between the building walls, between the far-off mountains.

Kim can feel the noise ringing through her, too. A heavy thump in her chest, out of beat. She hunts for her keys and then swings them jingling into her palm. Her car beeps as she unlocks it.

From across the parking lot: an engine spluttering.

Smoke coughs from the tailpipe of the Civic. The car struggles, gives up, and then struggles again, ignition clicking and almost catching.

Kim’s car beeps again as she re-locks it. White clouds reflect in the curving driver’s side window of the Civic, but there’s a glint of blonde hair visible through the glass as Kim walks over. The reflections shift with her movement, the mirrored clouds sliding upward and then finally vanishing when she’s only a few feet away.

Skyler tries the ignition again. Nothing. Her head hangs down, her hair spilling loosely. Her shoulders shift, not made of metal anymore.

Kim taps on the window and Skyler starts, jerking up, eyes piercing. Just me, Kim thinks, and she raises her palms.

“It’s fine,” Skyler says, voice muffled. She winds down the window, turning the manual handle on the door. The glass creaks as it descends. “It’s fine.”

“I can call a tow?” Kim offers.

“This just happens sometimes,” Skyler says, jaw tight. She exhales through her teeth, but her hands are trembling again now, fingers tangled in her lap. “I only need to give it a minute.”

Kim nods. She glances over to her rental car, small among the watchtowers. She always feels watched here. Always feels in someone’s sights—as the signs at the gates remind her, and will soon remind her again.

Skyler swipes a hand over her face, staring out at nothing, at the prison walls. Then she chuckles, harsh and bleak. “I came all the way up here from Albuquerque in a busted car. Left my son looking after my daughter because I don’t have—”

And then silence, her aborted words hanging in the air. Echoing like the slam of her door earlier. Kim curls her fingers tighter around the strap of her purse. “Are you driving back to Albuquerque tonight?”

Skyler just nods.

“Let’s get some food first,” Kim says simply. “I know a place.”

Skyler makes a croaking sound, almost another laugh. “No, thank you,” she says. She tries the keys in the ignition again. There’s a low groaning noise, but this time the car starts—belching and heaving but then rumbling steadily.

So Kim backs away. Skyler cranks the window up again and curls her fingers around the wheel. The whining engine shifts tones, rising higher in pitch. Her hands don’t move at all. The engine changes again, dropping lower once more.

And then the window creaks downwards.

Skyler speaks louder than earlier to carry over the hum of the engine: “You’re the Kim from the trial.” It’s not a question. She turns. “You were there.”

Kim tenses.

“I remember your name, now,” Skyler says. Her voice is still firm over the idling car. “You’re not just a paralegal.”

Kim’s hand shifts at her side. “No,” she says, “not just.”

Skyler nods. Her hands are tight on the wheel, and her expression is tight—her whole body is tight. “I’ll follow you.”

The patient whining of the Civic follows Kim as she crosses back to the rental car, keys rattling in her hand.

The nearest town is fringed on all sides by mountains. A scattering of shopfronts cling to the main intersection, and there are almost no houses among them. The houses must be elsewhere, must be lost in the hills. Here at the crossroads, it’s like being in the dried-up crater of a volcano. An enclosure of dirt and stone.

The diner is a narrow building that seems like it was designed for another purpose. When Kim first stopped here one morning for breakfast, before visiting hours began, she had entered warily, half expecting to find only empty chairs and rundown ovens.

It was bustling inside, though, and it’s even more bustling now that it’s mid-afternoon. Too busy, almost, for the narrow room: a thin stretch of warmth lined with counters and stools, expanding at the back into a wider space filled with tables and mismatched chairs. The chairs in particular seem like objects that have been collected over ten or twenty or fifty years, found all over the country and brought here, no two of them quite alike.

Even the bulbs in the ceiling each seem a slightly different wattage. The place hums with patchwork light.

Skyler looks overdressed for the diner. Her clothes are casual enough, but the black seems too dark, too unified. She stands with her hands folded before her, waiting for Kim to choose a space.

Kim sits. Her chosen chair has one leg shorter than the other, and it wobbles slightly.

When the waitress brings over a jug of coffee, they both accept. Skyler stirs creamer into hers and then drinks. Her eyes drift closed momentarily and she exhales.

It’s almost claustrophobic in here, with no windows except narrow ones along the tops of the walls, and Kim wonders what this place used to be. Not a restaurant. The floor rises with a couple of low steps on the side of the room leading back to the kitchen.

She studies her menu. It’s cheap and cheerful and protected by a plastic sleeve, and for half a second she thinks that Glenn would probably like it here—and it’s a thought so foreign in this place she almost slams her menu closed instinctively, trying to send that image back across the country on the jet stream. She hasn’t seen him since that evening at Paul’s Smokehouse. He has no place in her head.

The waitress returns, freeing a pencil from behind her ear.

“Turkey club,” Kim says simply, folding her menu closed.

But Skyler’s staring off at a family in the corner. A couple of kids are fighting with plastic straws.

“Mrs. White?” Kim prompts.

Skyler starts. Her eyes close, and then she exhales. When she opens them again, she smiles warmly at the waitress and hands her menu over too. “I’ll just have the house salad.”

The waitress tucks her pencil back behind her ear without needing to write any of it down, and she heads back towards the kitchen. Her shoes clack up the steps.

Skyler stares after her, then breathes out. “I’m changing my name,” she says. “Skyler Lambert now—or I should say again.”

Kim smiles. “That’s a nice name.”

Skyler shrugs, and she fiddles with her sleeve. “We’re only girls,” she says. “It had died out. Not anymore.”

“Will your kids change theirs?”

“I don’t know,” Skyler says. “I haven’t said anything yet. But even when Holly was born, I looked at her and I wanted…”

Kim waits. In this warm place, among the patchwork arrangement of furniture and bulbs, Skyler looks even tireder than she had in the prison.

“We were growing apart for years,” Skyler says softly. She says it to the scratched table, to the chipped mugs and cheerful fern resting between them. The rusted metal bucket filled with cutlery and napkins. She doesn’t seem to be saying any of it to Kim. “We had some good years. We had some slow years. It would have been nice to end it after the slow years.”

And now she does look up again. Her eyes are so blue they almost feel invisible; they almost feel like mirrors.

“But instead I’m holding my baby in a hospital and my husband is off—who knows what?” Skyler says. “At the time, lying to me. Now I suppose he was cooking meth.” She chuckles scornfully, and she hunts for her red accounting book in her bag. It emerges from the dark leather and it seems even smaller now, even more incomplete. “Another missing piece, the day my daughter was born! Not like I’m going to forget that one.”

Kim tilts her head, softening her expression. She tries to say the next words softly, too: “Some people might ask why you don’t just move on.”

“This is moving on,” Skyler says firmly. She shakes her hair clear of her cheeks, proud. “When it’s in here, I’m in control of it.”

But nestled on the cluttered table, the accounting book doesn’t seem much to be in control of at all. It’s small and curling at the edges. And all the calculations within it don’t add up to the right figures yet.

Kim tries to reconcile this precise woman with the man in the reports, the mythic kingpin whose likeness people are spray-painting on walls. Everybody is real on the evening news.

Or everybody is real here, in a diner in a nameless town in Colorado, imprisoned by mountains.

Their food arrives, generous and fresh, but Kim’s appetite vanishes after a couple of bites of her sandwich. The red ledger hangs in her vision. A book filled with more questions than answers—but some answers, still, she thinks.

More than nothing.

Kim’s next mouthful sticks in her throat. She forces it down. “You should know…” she starts, and then the words dry up like her turkey club. She swallows again. Finally, she opts for transparent simplicity. “I’m working to get Jimmy’s sentence reduced.”

Skyler’s knife slips through lettuce and she jolts. She sets her cutlery down and shakes her head, but she doesn’t look surprised. She seems almost thoughtful, and then she says, “You called him that a few times.”

Kim pushes her plate forward. “When I knew him, he was Jimmy,” she says. There’s a bustle from the kitchen, oil hissing, and then the diner quietens again. “That’s another name that had died. Jimmy McGill.” She can feel the softening of her tone with the name, unavoidable. “And he had a brother and a mother who loved him.”

It’s clear that Skyler can’t reconcile any of it. Her eyes narrow, just like they had at the end of the visitation itself, faced with these incompatible pieces. Her words come low: “When you knew him.”

“Yes,” Kim says shortly.

Skyler’s brow turns. “You don’t know him anymore?”

A new face watches her from the shadows, cuffs jingling as they’re released. New eyes watch her and wait for her to move, and familiar warmth holds her hands steady. Kim curls her fingers around the handle of her chipped mug. The mug is warm, too. “I’m getting to know him.”

“His lawyer—paralegal, whatever.” Skyler’s lips quirk.

Kim is silent. She straightens her mug slightly, then pulls her hand back. Across the diner: another spit of a griddle, of oil fizzing, and the clatter of plates or dishes. The conversation could end here, the hiss of something extinguished in cold water, but instead Kim says her next words firmly, as if saying them firmly makes them more true: “He has a good heart.”

Skyler watches, unmoving, for a second, two seconds—and then derisive laughter spills from her. She shakes her head, hair loose, and then holds up a hand. “Right,” she says. “Saul Goodman. Okay.” Another chuckle—the first genuine one Kim’s heard since she met the woman. Skyler’s real smile changes her face. “Saul Goodman has a good heart,” she repeats. “So what happened to it?”

Everything and nothing. A numbing agent, Kim thinks—but the question turns inside her. It turns and turns like water heating and then boiling, and, like a pot with a rattling lid, the churning feeling has to express itself in some part of her body, trembling out and emerging in her ankle or knee or her fingers.

(She didn’t tell him. She didn’t tell him and she thought she could stop the monster at their door, and she couldn’t she couldn’t she couldn’t—)

Kim stills her foot, trying to break her thoughts out of the rhythm, out of moving in time with the rattling tension.

But Skyler is the one to really splinter the moment. She makes a soft noise, low and almost apologetic. “You’re right,” she says. “I look at Holly every day and I remember… everyone’s born with a good heart.” She picks up her cutlery and spears a crouton but doesn’t lift it to her mouth. She stares at it there on the fork. “I still loved Walt for the longest time.”

It’s the first time Kim’s heard Skyler use the name. It lingers like something that should mean more to Kim than it does, instead of being little more than the name of a stranger.

“Even through it all,” Skyler says, meeting her eyes again, “part of me still felt that love. But I never knew if it was just… muscle memory.”

Kim holds her hands still on her thighs.

“It’s gone now,” Skyler says simply, stabbing lettuce onto the fork, too, and this time she eats the mouthful. The crouton crunches between her teeth. “So, as for what happens to Saul Goodman?” She fills the name with disgust, and then she swallows that through clenched teeth, too. “I just don’t really care.”

Kim nods slightly, not giving enough, still waiting for more.

And more words do come. “I was involved, too, you know,” Skyler says, and then she smiles bitterly. “I laundered millions. I almost destroyed the reputation of my brother-in-law. My sister might never forgive me for that.”

The light shifts, as if the high clouds are descending, obscuring the sun outside.

“And I saw the news reports,” Skyler continues. “I knew how many people Walt had killed.” Her knife rattles on her plate and she lets it go, shaking her head rapidly instead. “So then I started wanting people gone, too. I wanted Jesse Pinkman dead. I wanted Saul dead, I wanted those men who broke into my home dead. I wanted—I wanted my husband dead.”

Skyler pushes her plate forward, a harsh scraping noise, the metal cutlery trembling with the movement. She exhales. “So, no, I don’t think I can believe in justice anymore,” she says. Her pale eyes glitter. “No offense to your noble profession.”

Kim just inclines her head. She curls her fingers around her knees.

“The only difference is that Walt gave me something to trade. Another gift.” Skyler’s expression darkens, and she looks away. Her jaw is tense again. “Where the bodies were buried. Just that. And now I get to live my life freely.”

Her cheeks seem sharper than ever, her face hollow and empty as she gazes at something across the diner—or at nothing, maybe. At everything and nothing.

A clatter of someone dropping a plate, and Skyler jerks back into the present moment. She runs a hand through her hair, drawing herself inward again, back into that iron-shouldered woman who arrived in the prison this morning.

The iron shoulders shrug. “Saul’s only in there because he didn’t,” she says, and then she clarifies: “Have anything to trade.”

“Yes, he did,” Kim says. Her voice is firm after so much silence. “He traded it for that heart we were talking about.” And she sees Jimmy there in that courtroom again, burned with white lights into the back of her eyes. He traded the armor for the wound.

A flutter of blue now—an apron. The waitress swings between them, checking if they’ve finished and then clearing their table, removing the pushed-forward plates of abandoned food. Kim watches the plates go.

Her sandwich sits like a rock in her stomach.

After a while, she turns back. She tips her head sideways, curious. “What are you going to do about the trust?”

“It’s Flynn’s money,” Skyler says. “I should let him decide.” The conversation seems a little lighter now. A return to solid ground. “Everyone will tell me that there’s no way to know, that it could just be Gray Matter taking pity on us.”

Kim can hear the ‘but’ before it arrives.

“But that trust money is from Walt,” Skyler says, letting out a long and shaky breath. “I just know it. I’ll always know it.” She draws her eyebrows together, studying Kim carefully. “Have you ever been married?”

Hot plates hiss in the kitchen. The solid ground falls away as quickly as it had arrived, vanishing under Kim’s feet. If she looked down, she thinks, she would see her shoes hanging over a dark hole, and around the dark hole a border of white paint. She picks honesty again. She says, “Once.”

Skyler’s pale eyes seem like glass—or maybe Kim is the glass, suddenly transparent. “You were married to him,” Skyler says. “Weren’t you?”

The diner seems to empty and empty around their table, vanishing and leaving only hot sun and sand. It’s almost a relief. The truth is warm on her skin. Kim exhales. “I guess it’s common knowledge. I don’t know what they wrote about the trial.”

Skyler lifts a hand from the table. “I don’t know either.” She tidies the spot in front of her, sweeping away invisible crumbs. “But I recognize that goddamn expression.” And now she weaves her fingers together, gaze cutting through Kim. “Gotta make sure it’s not just muscle memory, right?”

Kim’s chest tightens. The desert seems to find its way inside her now, all the way from New Mexico, burning her and drying her out. She thinks about how she’s always seeing younger versions of Jimmy layered on top of this new one, like she’s trying to avoid really witnessing the man now in front of her. It’s easier to see him elsewhere instead: in front of glass bricks or beneath the thin light of the basement mailroom.

Skyler stands—and her chair, not attached to the floor or the table this time, creaks and groans over old wooden floors, jolting Kim back to the diner.

(So she folds her thoughts deeper inside herself, trapping them there.)

Skyler slings her purse over her shoulder and looks down at her with flat eyes.

Kim straightens, too. “It’s on me,” she says, waving to the cluttered table, the mugs of coffee.

Skyler doesn’t argue.

“I think you should take the nine million,” Kim says. “You could do something good with it.” But even as the words leave her mouth she hears the echo of them uttered years ago in an Albuquerque hotel room, in the dark of her old condo, in the reflected lights of a Mexican restaurant. The memory of them burns her, too.

“Yeah,” Skyler says, toneless. “That’s what everyone will say.” Her lips flatten. “Even dead, he’s not gonna let me win.”

It’s an emotionless sentence, just a statement of facts. Just as it has been every other time she’s said it. Dead. He’s dead. She wanted him dead.

Kim watches as Skyler casts a final glance around the diner, and then she turns. A dark figure moving away; a dark figure passing the counter and the kitchen.

A silhouette in the doorway, lingering and then gone. All in black, like a widow in an old Western. No saloon doors to swing closed, just the turn of her last words in the air and the griddle hissing.

Kim looks down at her hands on her lap.

On the back of one of them, she remembers, is the stamp from the prison. An invisible mark on her skin. Hidden now without the piercing gaze of ultraviolet light.

She wipes her thumb over the spot. It feels normal. It feels like it always does. She doesn’t know if the stamp is still there or if it’s gone.

She folds that thought deep inside herself, too.

Chapter Text

Kim had always dreamed about a voice. The voice belonged to someone, but it didn’t have a face. It was just a sound, shapeless and strong. The voice came in with the thunderstorms but the voice wasn’t a thunderstorm. The voice was calm; the voice was clear skies.

She dreamed that the voice spoke to her mom and her dad. It spoke to her math teacher and her music teacher. It spoke to Davey who broke her butterfly hair clips, and to Tina who walked the same way to school along the railroad tracks.

You’re wrong, the voice said. You’re wrong—she was playing the piece right, you just didn’t see it. You’re wrong, the voice said—the butterflies are pretty, even if they look more like moths. The voice talked to Mrs. Braxton and Mrs. Turner and all the teachers who kept saying she should just apply herself, as if she was one of Lori’s paint pens and she just needed to press herself down harder and harder on Red Cloud until the town turned a better color.

At night, from the doorway, the voice talked to her dad. You’re wrong for not saying anything, it said. You’re wrong for never saying anything. You’re wrong for hiding from everything inside the TV shows on that stolen TV.

Later, the voice used different words. You should come back, it whispered. You should stay away forever.

When she had to, she imagined the voice came from one of the faces up on the enormous screen in Aurora. Sometimes its face was Spencer Tracy, sometimes Lauren Bacall. Often it was Gary Cooper or John Wayne, the black and white sunlight falling on them and their nickering horses, because her parents always listened to what Gary Cooper or John Wayne had to say.

As Kim got older, the voice spoke to her, too. You’re wrong, it said. You knew the answer and you didn’t say it. You’re wrong—you took that because you wanted it, not because you needed it.

And then, late in the night, so late it was dark enough it didn’t matter that it didn’t have a face, the voice spoke to her mother. It had always spoken to her mother most of all. You shouldn’t have left her alone after school, the voice said. You shouldn’t have lied to her about where you were going. You shouldn’t have spent that money on shoes instead of her birthday present.

You’re the one who made her, the voice said, and you made her like this.

The voice (magic and strong and imaginary) always knew who was to blame.

And so Kim dreamed the voice drifted through windows and windshields and school hallways. She dreamed it rattled glass and rattled doors and rattled through the prairie like the dry heads of the tall grass. She dreamed it always found its man, a gunslinger riding into town with the dawn.

The dreams never came true. Not in Red Cloud.

“He did it for you.”

Kim can see the truth of it in Jimmy’s eyes. He stares at her from across the darkened room. His gaze is usually as transparent as glass but now even the glass seems shattered. It feels like there’s a wind blowing between the shards.

“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t know anything about it,” Chuck continues, stepping closer—approaching the jury, smooth and confident.

Jimmy breaks the connection, his jaw working and gears clearly spinning in his head.

Chuck takes another step. “I believe he went off on his own and did this as some kind of twisted, romantic gesture.”

A tug in Kim’s chest. It’s anger and it’s something else, too.

The fight is leaving Jimmy now. “Chuck, I think you need to lie down with a cold washcloth on your head.”

Chuck acts as if his brother hasn’t even spoken, his eyes locked on Kim. “Now that you know, you have no choice.”

For a second, Kim sees white. It burns through her like a blast of an explosion, like an atom bomb landing in an old movie. She raises her eyebrows in disgust.

But Chuck doesn’t seem to hear the bomb go off, just as he seems not to hear Jimmy’s voice. He keeps speaking, talking about Mesa Verde, telling Kim exactly what she has to do and how she has to do it. A full disclosure. No recourse.

Kim presses her fingers tighter into her hip. Her thumb digs into the edge of her skirt. On the end of her other hand, her fingers play scales. A rattling lid from water at a boiling point.

“You can’t stand the fact that they chose her over you,” Jimmy says, loud again, cracking back in.

Chuck turns—elastic snapping—and his voice snaps too. “I can’t stand the fact that my own brother stabbed me in the back!” he shouts, cheeks reddening. “I can’t stand the fact that you’ve deceived and ruined this fine, young woman—”

“Ruined!?” Jimmy echoes, and now there’s a glint in his eyes, a joke for later, Kim thinks, even though the furious tug in her chest is getting stronger. “What is this, the eighteen-forties?” he says. “What are you talking about, she’s not ruined—”

“Jimmy,” Kim says, like a knife. No hum in his name today. She stares him down.

Jimmy closes his mouth and swallows. Behind him, sunlight cuts through the dust. It doesn’t reach him; it doesn’t reach any of them.

The silence that spreads out is heavy and viscous, it’s as if it’s been waiting the whole time, waiting to seep through the cracks.

Kim wades into it anyway. “If what you’re saying is true,” she starts, eyeballing Chuck, “Jimmy could be charged with forgery. Fraud. Falsifying evidence.” She glances back to the door, with its brand-new locks. “Even—breaking and entering.” Enough that it might not be easily shrugged off. Enough that it might mean jail time.

“Frankly, I am sick about this.” It’s the strongest Chuck’s sounded to her in almost two years. “But facts are facts.”

Kim nods slowly. “And what is your evidence?”

Chuck peels back. “My evidence?” He almost smiles, as if she’s told a joke. “My evidence is knowing my brother for his entire life.”

Kim looks between the two men. They’re both acting out this theatrical performance for her on a stage whose boards they’ve trodden every day for two years. It’s familiar to them, so familiar they don’t think to explain much of it. Not the darkness or the lanterns or the space blanket.

Normalcy has been left outside this house, out there with the metal rod she had touched. Jimmy had called it grounding yourself. She doesn’t feel very grounded.

“Chuck, I think there’s another explanation, it’s a simpler one.” Kim shrugs. She says it anyway, even though this stage is dressed for the fantastic, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is not a world for simpler explanations. “You made a mistake.”

Chuck’s eyes flash. “I did not.”

“You’re working by lantern light,” Kim says. “Squinting over ten point type for hour after hour.” Chuck shakes his head, his lips pursed, but Kim keeps going, because the words are rolling now. “Mistakenly changing 1261 to 1216 would be the most natural thing in the world. It could certainly happen to me.”

“I did not make a mistake!” Chuck’s voice is proud and echoing, almost so proud and echoing it hides the pain underneath.

Kim pulls back from him. “I believe you did.”

“Look, I understand that you have great affection for Jimmy, a great many people do—” Chuck gestures wildly across the room at his brother, like Jimmy’s evidence in a courtroom, like this is a situation from which Chuck is entirely removed. “But please open your eyes!”

Kim holds up a palm. “You made a mistake,” she repeats. “And instead of just facing up to it, you accuse your brother of plotting against you.” And Chuck sounds crazy because this theory is crazy, it’s a crazy thing, and as Kim says these words she believes that. She believes this explanation isn’t real and as long as she doesn’t look at Jimmy she can keep this up. She deserves this. You’re wrong, she says. You’re wrong and you made a mistake. “You come up with this elaborate scheme—”

Chuck cuts his hands through the air. “He’s capable of this, you know he is!”

“I know he’s not perfect.” Each word is a gunshot, echoing through town. “And I know he cuts corners.” She still doesn’t look at Jimmy. She can feel the wind of his gaze anyway, blowing into the core of her. He thinks he’s fooled her.

And even closer now, she stares Chuck down. “But you’re the one who made him this way.”

She can almost see where the bullet strikes, but Chuck ignores the wound.

“And then what?” Kim whispers.

Jimmy makes a confused little sound at the back of his throat. He’s staring up at her—or staring up at his hands on the buttons of her blouse.

Kim leans down and kisses him again, and the sofa creaks, and his hands are crushed between them. He grunts lowly, and slips his hands around to her sides and starts tugging at her blouse instead, freeing it from her skirt.

She pulls back. “And after you put it in the locker, then what?”

He grins. “Well…” he murmurs, and he runs his palms over her skin. “As soon as I looked up, I heard someone coming.” He inhales sharply, like he’s still there now, and he tightens his hold on her waist as if he’s transferring that tension inside her, too. “And then I heard Howard’s voice. Hard not to hear Howard’s voice.”

Kim peels Jimmy’s black polo over his head. Blush runs up his chest to his neck, but another kind of redness lingers, too: patchwork sunburn on his neck, his collar. Lines of bruises run around his shoulder, fading kaleidoscopically from blue to yellow.

“Keep talking,” she murmurs. “Keep telling me.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says, returning to the story, this great adventurous thing he spins from the threads of reality. Kim doesn’t know the truth, but she always prefers Jimmy’s version of things anyway. Cinematic interpretations of real life, in which she can almost see the camera movements in the telling, can almost hear the score.

Like old days hearing Huck Finn-style stories over lunch in the mailroom, where he’s always the hero, strong and brave.

As he talks, Kim mouths at his shoulder, his throat. He smells like the cologne he splashed on this morning—part of the costume, always part of the costume. She imagines him walking the well-mannered hallways of the country club, reeking of Drakkar Noir.

His voice rumbles through his throat. “… but they didn’t even have full-sized lockers, they were like, three feet tall,” he says, and he draws Kim up from his neck to kiss her again. He tastes like the red wine they’ve been drinking, and he pulls at her blouse again then huffs. “I’m sick of this thing,” he mutters, fingers tangled in the fabric.

Kim laughs softly but draws back again, lifting herself off him. Jimmy hisses as he bends down to pull his pants off—some unseen injury, or maybe one of the healing ones she still can see.

She slides her blouse off, her bra. Her arm still twinges sometimes, too, but it’s not a real pain, it’s the memory of pain. Of three months of stiffness and aching muscles, and bones stitching themselves bit by bit together again.

Kim smiles softly, watching him tug his feet through the ankles of his pants. “So how did you hide, then?”

Jimmy grins sideways at her, shaking his head.

“What?” she asks, shoving his shoulder. “What did you do?”

He hangs his head, bashful. On his feet: bright blue and yellow socks, and he unclips them from the garters. He slides everything off without looking at her.

“Jimmy.” She squeezes his shoulder now.

When he does meet her eyes, he’s grinning. “You ever hear of a Cicero overcoat?”

Kim plays along. “No, what’s a Cicero overcoat?”

Jimmy rises to his feet. Her hand falls away from him. He bends and whips his boxers off with as much of a flourish as he can manage, and he kicks them away. “This!” he says, and he throws his palms wide, Roy Scheider. “Nothing at all!”

She snorts, giggles dissolving into full laughter. “No,” she manages, and then louder: “No! And that worked?”

“Like a dream,” he says, softer now. His eyes are glittering.

“Jesus!” she says, and she reaches for him again, finding his wrist. “Come back here.”

Jimmy drops onto the sofa, air rushing out of him as he lands. Kim shimmies out of the rest of her clothes and then straddles him, her hands on his shoulders again, her fingers splayed around the faded bruising.

She feels a lot drunker than just a couple of glasses of wine. Her skin vibrates with it. When she kisses him again, her lips vibrate with it, too. Trembling. Energy with nowhere to go.

She teases him, moving too slowly, and Jimmy tips his head back against the top of the sofa. His throat bobs as he swallows.

“What’s next, again?” he croaks, and his Adam’s apple shifts. He’s staring up—up at the bottom of the painting, she realizes, as if from directly beneath it he can see what’s behind. And maybe he can see everything from there, the one angle in the apartment where it’s possible. A sight line on their colorful secrets.

But Kim shakes her head. She rises to her knees and guides him into her, and when she sinks down his hands tighten and tighten on her waist, and his hips buck upward in a shuddered movement.

His eyes drift closed and then snap open and she smiles. His gaze is wide and blue and he looks as if he’s walking through the doorway after a lost night, sinking to his knees while the bath runs in the other room.

Sometimes she still sees him like that, kneeling in her hall with those vacant eyes. She sees him like that when really he’s in a hotel room, staring at her from the end of the bed. He wore the same face, then, the same eyes. And every time she sees these eyes (over orange juice, maybe, because he likes orange juice, he thinks it’s magic) she feels like reaching inside him and pulling him back to the surface.

Viscerally, she imagines it now, her palm on his panting chest. She imagines dragging him out of the flesh there, back from the sand and sun and into her condo. Pulling him up again and again so they can live in this moment together.

And suddenly she remembers his question, the painting hiding their secrets. “Nothing next, not tonight,” she says, shaking her head, and as her hair brushes her shoulders he reaches for it, fingertips finding gold. Whatever the next part of the plan is, she knows that when she does tell him, he’ll listen. “Tonight it’s just this.”

He nods, gaze on his own hand in the threads of her hair. Kim looks down at it, too. She trails her fingers down his forearm, then moves his hand, like she’s puppeting him. He lets her; he always has.

She unclasps his gold watch and slides it over his wrist, his palm. She sits it aside.

And she works free the golden ring. The Cicero ring. He’s never told her what it means to him, but she thinks of it as that—the Cicero ring—and she knows sometimes it hurts him to look at it.

Kim sets the ring aside, too.

Jimmy swallows. He returns his naked hands to her skin, and she starts moving again, rising and slowly falling. And she thinks—for a moment it can just be them, the two of them against the world.

But it can never be only them, not anymore. Even now, his palms hot on her skin, his mouth between her breasts, she can feel it—a specter waiting outside: the truth about what they’re doing.

The truth about why they’re doing it.

But she’s been thinking, again and again, that if she just talks to this dark thing firmly enough, it’ll agree with her.

So—You’re wrong, she says. This is for the best. This is for him and for me and so we can be happy together; and we deserve to be happy together, and Howard never deserved what he got given in the first place. You’re wrong.

But the dark specter never moves back from their peephole.

It watches them, waiting.

You’re wrong, Kim thinks again. She’s okay, and Jimmy’s okay—he’s going to be okay, he’ll be okay again—and it won’t be like this forever.

The mirror seems to face all sides of her bathroom at once, impossible and omnipresent. Lights run around the edges of it. Kim’s been a year here and she’s still not used to it, to the way it hovers constantly in the corner of her vision.

Tonight, she sees a shadow in it, moving in the corner of her eye. But it’s only movement—that’s it, that’s all. The fog from the hot shower fades and now she catches the movement again and again, as she runs a brush through dark hair. The hairs that snag in the bristles still seem foreign to her, a stranger using her things.

She dries her face, rubbing her cheeks with her ashen towel until she can feel how pink they are. Unlike the hair, they’ll fade back to normal soon. But eventually, she thinks, eventually she can make this woman a different woman entirely. She can will herself into a new face and keep the old one buried.

The shape in the mirror watches her from the corner of her gaze, always, but she doesn’t watch it back.

Her bangs are getting a bit long. Kim brushes them aside, tilting her head. Her reflection copies her. She should get some clips. Soon, she’ll need to go back to the salon in Miracle City Mall, where Yvonne will ask if she wants the same, and Kim will hum for three seconds, almost as if she’s considering something different.

She angles her head the other way.

No, nothing different, she’ll say. I like this. It suits this face.

From her bedroom, the alarm blares. Yesterday, in the office, the other women had been exhausted after their long week of fluorescent lights, and Gail had asked about weekend plans.

June had run away with her answer. She was planning to do some yard work this weekend, and she was hoping the weather would hold up, but she’d left it all a bit late this year, and maybe she’s going to think about changing to something that’s less maintenance.

“Oh,” Kim had said, “there’s a landscaping company on South Hopkins. I think they use, like, rocks.”

“Well, no—that might make everyone think I’m a bit too low maintenance, if you know what I mean!” June had said, and she laughed, and the other women laughed, too.

For now, Kim shuts off her alarm. The other women had been excited about a weekend sleep in, and Kim had agreed to that as well, but here she is, awake thirty minutes before her pre-dawn alarm.

A carry-on suitcase waits at the foot of her bed. She’s stopped bothering to completely unpack it now. She finds a pale green cardigan inside and shrugs it on.

On the drive to the legal aid, she passes June’s place. She slows, a silver Prius casing the joint. The yard is almost unnaturally green, and it’s tidy, and manicured bushes with manicured flowers fringe the house itself.

She keeps driving.

Kim beats Patty to the legal aid office. She settles her things at her desk, then unwinds the blinds and props open the door. For now, in the cool of the morning, she’ll leave the door ajar. Patty says it lets people know they’re open on a Saturday. It draws the eye from the Dollar Tree on the corner.

By the time the humidity climbs, the open door has already done its job. A couple of new clients sit in the waiting area, and Patty speaks lowly to a young man at her desk. Kim has volunteered here for long enough now that she’s begun to recognize Patty’s different voices—or different personas. Patty’s got it down to a science. Whether a client would prefer her to be boisterous and jokey, or soft and understanding, or sometimes even completely uninterested, as if she’s approaching a dog without looking it in the eye.

Today, Patty is going for gentle and sympathetic. The guy’s voice trembles when he speaks.

“… or did you use a stamp?” Patty murmurs.

“No, I learned to forge it,” the guy says. He sounds almost proud of that. “I’m, uh… I have real good penmanship.”

“Well, it’s a lost art,” Patty says.

A grin flickers over the guy’s face and he sits a little straighter in his chair.

Kim returns to the grade reports before her. It’s another client—a teenaged girl and her mother, the girl expelled for a pattern of bad behavior that Kim’s trying to find a trace of in these evaluations. So far, there’s not much of anything. No real evidence of a distinct personality at all. These could be anyone’s grade reports, she thinks. They could have been forged by the young guy talking to Patty and distributed indiscriminately.

By the end of the reports, Kim can see why the girl’s mother wouldn’t have seen this coming. She wonders what’s hiding, what wasn’t written out on the page. But even the absence of information is enough to bring to Patty—though she’ll wait until tomorrow morning, when they go over the current caseload together.

For now, Kim just moves on to the next case. A drunk driver, not much to it. She reads the arrest report and starts typing up the summary judgment motion to save Patty time—until she finishes that, too, and sets it again to one side. A tidy stack growing taller and tidier as the day wears on.

Evening approaches, and her computer pings with a new email from Robles and Goto Partners. Kim looks at the subject line but doesn’t open it. She’s having a catch-up call with Viola on Monday, anyway. Bracing for the first round of negotiations with Cheryl Hamlin.

But Kim doesn’t have time to think about that. She turns to the last couple of cases in her stack. They’re the easiest yet, the easiest for last. Nothing much for her to read though, and the words fall through her like water, cleansing and pure.

She yawns, and as she lowers her hand, she smiles.

There’s a feeling in her chest like a plane ascending, its engine groaning and propellers spinning on the wings. She feels like she’s surrounded by clear skies. They get clearer with every case.

Later, as the minute hand makes another round, Patty rises. Her chair makes a leathery groan and as Patty stretches she makes a leathery groan, too. She traipses over to the coffee pot and tests it with the back of her hand, and she then fills two cups.

She carries them over to Kim’s desk, fingers of her right hand woven between both handles, even though her left is free.

Kim rubs her thumb over her eyes, but shakes her head. “It’s almost eight.”

“Is that a no?” Patty says, settling in the cracked chair near Kim’s desk.

Kim chuckles, relenting. She accepts the mug, the black coffee brimming through the chips in the rim. She nestles it into a free space.

“It comes with a catch,” Patty says, and then she smiles apologetically. “Things might be changing here in a few months. You know, Stan works out on the Cape—or I should say worked, I guess. He builds the SRBs for the space shuttles.”

Kim’s playing catch up, trying to recall if she’s heard the name and the relationship before. A husband? She checks Patty’s left hand, nothing.

“Solid rocket boosters,” Patty clarifies, catching and misattributing the confusion. “Well, after Atlantis there won’t be much use for SRBs anymore, so he’s taking a contractor job down in Fort Lauderdale.”

Another email pings on Kim’s computer—a legal newsletter—and she closes her browser then returns her attention to Patty.

Patty smiles kindly. “You’re welcome to volunteer at my new office down there, but I imagine it’ll be a bit of a commute.” Her lips purse, and she frowns, and then nods.

And as if that’s more than enough said, Patty clears her throat and tucks her chair closer to the table and starts studying Kim’s completed stack of work from the day. She doesn’t read anything closely, she just glances at a scattershot collection of paper, nodding as she does.

But then Patty’s exploration shifts, turning instead to the other piles of documents on this desk: to the sheets of RICO case precedents and convoluted research notes. The hard copies of emails from Robles and Goto Partners, all annotated with yellow highlighter.

Kim watches the perusal without saying anything. It feels like the papers are flicking inside her own chest. Turning over and over like a Rolodex against her lungs.

“So, then,” Patty murmurs, fingers lingering above some specific line of text. “The most infamous lawyer in North America.”

The research papers turn and catch in Kim’s throat. “Yeah,” she manages, “I guess that’s what they’re saying, huh?”

“At this point I think he’s outstripped even Robert Shapiro,” Patty says, earrings swinging and eyes glittering. She peels back another sheet of paper and her forehead creases. “And you’re trying to get him out.”

Patty must have known for a while, Kim thinks. It’s obvious enough just from her Westlaw history, and Kim hasn’t exactly bothered to hide it. So the words pass her without impact, and she doesn’t respond.

“Tell me about him,” Patty says. She says it simply, like she’s asking about a first date, like she’s already forgotten how she opened this conversation. She lets the instruction linger. Not a request. Not really a question at all.

Patty waits silently, but Kim recognizes it, of course she recognizes it. She can sit without speaking, too. She’s always been good at that. She watches Patty, and Patty watches her back. Kim doesn’t fidget.

She has an entire lifetime plus six years worth of playing this game. She sits at her desk calmly. Maybe Patty is going to try the gentle and understanding approach next.

Patty doesn’t. “Guess I should be more surprised a lowlife like him was married to you in the first place,” she says, eyebrows inching upward in disgust. She leans back in her chair and smirks. “Did he want your money? Seems like you were a hot commodity for some leading firms in Albuquerque.”

Kim’s face is a mask.

“Or did he just want someone pretty and respectable on his arm?” Patty asks. “When you came to your senses and left him, it must’ve really broken his heart—”

Kim flinches, and she hates herself for it. The reaction feels oversized on her body. She flexes her hands and she feels the rip and tear of packing tape between her fingers, the cut of cardboard edges on her palms. But her voice is steady when she talks. “You’re wrong.”

Patty softens immediately, a facade falling away. “So, tell me then,” she says. “Who is Saul Goodman?”

And Kim wonders if she’s going to be here again and again for the rest of her life: sitting across from a woman who’s asking her for answers she doesn’t know how to give. She can hear Skyler’s voice echoing from a diner halfway across the country. Saul Goodman has a good heart. So, what happened to it?

(Her skin catches on tape and when she next tears it she feels as if she’s tearing part of herself, too—ripping and ripping through flesh, dragging pieces out of her chest and packing them away in boxes and never opening them again—)

Kim’s ankle trembles beneath the desk. She folds her lips in tighter and stares off at the slatted blinds, through which the pale light of sunset doesn’t quite reach. “You’re a lot like him, actually,” she murmurs, blinking. “He used to make fun of my filing systems, too.” She stares down Patty now, voice lowering: “And once upon a time he would’ve enjoyed how you just tried to get me to speak.”

Patty just listens. Her expression is mild and curious.

“You want to know who he is? That little”—Kim gestures, encompassing the air around Patty—“performance you did.” She chuckles darkly. “That’s Saul Goodman.”

Patty’s earrings sway: little flowers today, with metal stems. She’s nodding, as if she understands, but she doesn’t understand.

Kim exhales. “Or that’s how it started, anyway. Because if you’re doing it for the right reason, it doesn’t matter if you’re cruel, right?” She smirks. “And hey, it worked. You got me talking.”

A low rumble from the air conditioning. It’s disagreement, Kim thinks. That’s not Saul Goodman, the machine says. Saul Goodman hurt the world and Saul Goodman hid from the world. Saul Goodman was a suit of armor they built together—

(—and she left him alone in there—)

Kim swallows around elastic in her throat and Patty is shaking her head.

“Talking?” Patty says. “You’ve hardly said anything.”

Kim folds her lips inward again. The setting sun slips through the branches of foreign trees and open blinds. “Well, I only ever talked about things with him.”

In bright moments, in rushes of excitement and glee, words spilling from her and falling through the air towards Jimmy. And in those times she was the kind of person she almost didn’t know she could be—after she got a new client, or did well in court, or passed another test. Words exploding out of her like fireworks in the dark.

They don’t explode from her now. They fall, painful and precious, as she stares at Patty through the dusty air. “You think it’s just some vestigial love, like a phantom limb, right?” Or muscle memory.

“That’s not what I think,” Patty says. “I think it seemed like you moved on from him a long time ago, coming here to Titusville.” She softens now. “And I think you could move on again.”

You could, this woman is saying, just never see him again.

But there’s Jimmy, in a concrete block, staring at her clear-eyed, that new way he looks at her sometimes.

She doesn’t understand him anymore—or she doesn’t always understand him. She doesn’t know everything he did and she doesn’t know what’s inside him now, this new thing that moves through him and lets him wear an old name comfortably again, and wear an old expression comfortably, too. As if he’s just looking over at her from her sofa and there’s no expanse of years and wounds between them.

Once upon a time, in a strip-mall law office, she thought he would never look like that again.

Kim closes her eyes. “I do want to move on,” she says. She wants to have a nice life. Somewhere with sunshine, she thinks—an old thought. Sunshine and palm trees. When she opens her eyes now, she almost sees it, the sunshine and the palm trees, out through the blinds.

Patty is waiting again, expectant.

And Kim tucks her hair back behind her ears. She says, “But I want to move on with him.” She wants to move on like him.

Because you’re wrong, Kim thinks, staring at Patty. I didn’t move on here in Titusville. You’re wrong—for six years, she’d been stuck back there instead, in that condo, in that car, knocking on that door. She’d buried it inside and not looked at it, too.

A creak of leather as Patty leans closer, resting her arms on the desk. “How long have you known him?”

Kim should know it instinctively but still she has to think, to double-check. “Twenty years.”

If Patty’s surprised, she doesn’t show it.

“It feels like everything,” Kim says, trying to give the word itself the weight of it, of all that enormous time. Everything. “And he’s supposed to stay in that place for eighty-six?”

The sunlight flickers. Kim gestures towards it, westward, as if she can feel the prison over there, the weight of it crushing down and down.

“He doesn’t deserve eighty-six years,” Kim says. “He doesn’t deserve to die in prison.” And if her voice is more emotional than she would’ve liked, she carries on as if it isn’t, as if she’s just as steady and un-trembling as earlier.

Patty’s nod feels genuine now, feels closer to understanding than a vapid gesture to encourage more talk. She ripples her fingers over Kim’s notes again. “Let me look at all this, then,” she says. “I’ll see if I can parse this labyrinthine organizational system.”

Kim almost smiles. “It’s alphabetized.”

Patty looks at Kim through her eyelashes. “Who’s she when she’s at home?” she asks drolly.

And Kim really does smile now. She watches as Patty begins a new silent perusal, less performative this time. Patty’s lips trace words as she reads them, and Kim wonders how this woman would speak to Jimmy McGill. What approach would get him to open up.

(—and her stomach aches for words stumbling from him, too, giddy—stumbling with stories about Chloe on the second floor, or a videotape burned with a new commercial he’s almost too nervous to show her, or another heroic adventure—)

“Who’s Jimmy?” Patty asks, fingertip flittering between appearances of the name on the notepad.

It’s almost funny that this is another conversation Kim will probably be having for the rest of her life. “That’s his name,” Kim says. “Saul Goodman’s not real.” Not at first and not anymore. “Saul Goodman is just on the TV.”

Patty’s gaze softens. “And Saul Goodman is doing eighty-six years in Montrose,” she adds, and then at something in Kim’s reaction she holds up a hand. “For now.”

But Kim is shaking her head at a different part of it. “No, not Saul,” she says. “That’s Jimmy, too.”

Patty raises her eyebrows. “You’ve been there, talked to him?”

Kim answers half the question. “I’ve seen him,” she says, and for some reason she checks her watch, even though it doesn’t have a date on it, even though she always knows exactly how long. Knows it without thinking about it. “I see him again in three weeks.”

Patty hums lowly, neither approval nor disapproval, but Kim barely hears it.

She’s thinking about old conversations, words like fireworks going off, just the two of them lighting up some dark space. It’s always been part of them, and now, she thinks—no secrets, nothing hidden behind the paintings on their walls. They can let the sunlight in.

“Three weeks,” Kim repeats. “And we’ll talk.”

Chapter Text

Albuquerque has a new courthouse. The main building rises tall and wide and pale from the desert, its narrow windows reflecting the blue sky. A circular atrium extends towards the roadside—this, too, seems only to reflect the world: mirrored doors open and close automatically, and pedestrians pass behind a circumference of pillars as if they’re moving inside the glass rather than just reflected in it.

The new courthouse is a few blocks north of the old one, away from the civic plaza and the convention center. In this location, law firms cluster like moss near the base—their names fighting for predominance on metallic signs. Schweikart, Cokely, Cokely and Diaz fending off Pierce, Wendell, Gardiner, & Acevedo as if in an alphabetically waged war.

In the courtyard out front, an enormous statue: the scales of justice, its weights balanced. Kim can’t see what the scales are weighing today, but it doesn’t matter. Here at the courthouse, the statue says, we’ll decide exactly what you deserve.

She sits back, leaning into the shade of a column beside the bench. The sun carves cleanly across the courtyard; there’s no wind today. Just the still, warm air.

Kim doesn’t see the group arrive at the corner. When she clocks them, they’re already there, emerged from one of the dozens of nearby firms. She leans a little further back, a little more obscured behind the column.

The lawyers are young, so young. Kids in Halloween costumes.

After a few minutes, Viola and Gina Robles and a couple of unfamiliar faces splinter from the group, approaching the courtyard, but Kim doesn’t track them. She’s trying to make out another figure breaking away: tall and severe, all in black, her shoulders straight. She soon vanishes around the hard corner of this hard new building, and all that remains in her place is empty walls and windows that reflect the empty blue sky.

It could have been Cheryl Hamlin. It could have been anyone at all.

And the lawyers that trail after her are young, so young.

Kim’s phone rings in her pocket, but Viola spots her almost as soon as it sounds, and the call cuts off. Kim rises, and the group of them move away from the new courthouse, too, heading in the opposite direction from Cheryl.

They end up at a restaurant tucked into the first level of a hotel, the tables filled sporadically with other men and women in suits, talking over legal pads or chatting on their cellphones.

Viola sets her water down carefully on a coaster. “Well, Mrs. Hamlin is still adamant she doesn’t want to see you, at least not any time soon.”

Kim nods. She’s not surprised.

“At the moment, the amount they’re asking for is more Enron level than a private lawsuit, but it’s somewhere to start,” Gina says. She’s the only one who’s ordered food—a bowl of chips—and she picks at them now.

“Did you make much progress?” Kim asks.

Viola and Gina share a look.

“What do you think?” Gina asks Viola, but she’s smiling a little, and she pops another chip into her mouth.

“I think Cheryl didn’t dislike the idea of the scholarship,” Viola says.

“I agree,” Gina says. “I think she’s gone away thinking about that.”

Viola nods. “Definitely.” She takes one of Gina’s chips, dipping it into the ketchup and then crunching. “We’ll keep working on them. We’ve started strong, Kim.”

Kim folds her napkin over on itself, creasing the edge. “What about a grant in his name?” she says. “Legal aid with no strings attached. Civil cases, maybe, people with nowhere else to turn. Hundreds of folks who get a lawyer on their side because of Howard.”

Viola is jotting the idea down on her own napkin, letters flowing smoothly from her branded R&G pen.

“It would reach more people than a law school scholarship,” Gina says. “Though I’d suggest keeping that in the proposal, too.” She eats another chip, more thoughtful this time. “Do you know why Alfred Nobel decided to set up the Nobel Prize?”

Viola smiles as if she’s heard this before, but Kim gestures to Gina to continue.

“He made his fortune inventing dynamite. When his brother died, some newspapers ran an obituary for the wrong Nobel,” Gina says. “Alfred saw that everyone was going to remember him as a merchant of death.” She laughs quietly. “And now because of the prize, one of the first words people associate with his name is ‘peace.’”

Kim glances between the women.

“I’m sorry,” Gina says, “when Viola told me about your idea to rehabilitate Hamlin’s name, that’s the first thing I thought of. But I guess it’s not really the same.”

“Gina’s point is, we can change his memory,” Viola says, like someone used to using that opening phrase about her law partner. “And Cheryl will see that.”

Kim makes a low noise. “Howard Hamlin didn’t invent dynamite, he—” she starts, and then she grits her teeth. That was her, she thinks. That was us.

She glances out through the windows of the restaurant, out across the street to the statue in front of the new courthouse. In her mind, she sees the figure again, the woman who could have been Cheryl Hamlin, moving through her vision like a ghost.

Kim waits in the corner of the room. From the window today, she can see into the yard. Vertical strips of dry brown grass and chain-link fences. An unused line of basketballs. Paint marks on the cement. This meeting room is further down the block than she’s been before, set all the way on the corner.

Two of the walls have windows, not just one. Windows and light.

It’s all the smaller for being on the corner: the short edge of the table is pressed against one of the exterior walls, and today three chairs wait around it—one on the first side, two on the other.

She returns to the window. As she watches, men in orange emerge onto the court, walking lazily. The basketballs—orange, too—wait in a much tidier line, but soon scatter with the men.

She thinks she can hear the game through the glass. The squeak and groan of the ball, the squeak and groan of the men’s smooth-soled shoes. The hollow thud of the backboard.

Behind her—the door opens. Kim turns. Jimmy is the first inside, as he always is. He smiles when he sees her, familiar and easy.

A little easier every time.

“Saul.” The officer’s voice is flat, and he stops Jimmy with a hand on his shoulder. The guard glances at Kim, and he’s nobody she’s seen before but she’s always glad in these moments that she’s not a blonde thirty-year-old anymore, that she doesn’t have to work as hard to exude the kind of calm boredom that makes this officer immediately feel confident she is who she says she is.

Jimmy draws his hands closer behind his back, and the guard unlocks the handcuffs, and the clink of metal is another familiar part of this routine now. Like an orchestra tuning up.

The next move: Kim thanks the guard, and he acknowledges the thanks, the hushed sounds of a crowd arriving.

And then, the door pulling closed—the lights dimming, the voices quietening—until it settles with a click.

Outside, the men play basketball, the ball thudding lowly on the court.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Kim says.

He tilts his head. “Hey.”

Kim steps closer, and the armor over his face drops even further. She hugs him slowly, but he returns it more steadily this time than the last. He exhales, and she feels the familiar press of his palm against her back.

“It’s good to see you,” he says as they draw apart, and she almost laughs—good to see you, like she’s just stopped by for lunch.

She gestures to the table, and he moves to sit. Instead of picking the side with the single chair, he walks around to the far side, next to the window. He sits in the chair closest to the glass and stares out.

His face doesn’t change at all, but his eyes flicker back and forth, tracking over the prison yard and the mountains beyond.

Kim sits in the chair beside him, rather than across from him. It bends with her arrival, a folding chair, stiff legs not accustomed to much use. The setting across from them is empty, but the posturing feels suddenly familiar, feels suddenly nostalgic. The two of them waiting for the arrival of their opponent, of a judge.

But Jimmy’s not interested in the ghosts before them. He stares out and out at the view. She doesn’t want to interrupt whatever he’s getting from the moment, so she waits, minutes slipping between them, until finally he turns to her.

Kim gives him a careful smile. “Viola’s a superhero,” she says. “She’s already filed a notice of appeal—somehow worked her magic to get it in under the deadline.”

Jimmy nods slowly.

She shifts closer, her knees almost brushing his leg. “Jimmy.” Low and focused—this matters, this isn’t just hope, it’s not just the empty sky. “Viola’s already working on stuff that’s not even admissible in the appellate court. She thinks this is headed for a retrial.”

Behind him, the light of the window fragments the chain-link-enforced glass. The lines of his face seem chain-linked, too.

“And so do I,” Kim says.

Jimmy nods again, and he returns to the window. She can’t see his expression now, but she imagines the sky in his eyes, like the windows of the new Albuquerque courthouse. A reflection of wide blue.

She knows if she wanted to they could sit here like this for the entire visit, Jimmy watching the sky, and Kim existing beside him. She glances at her briefcase where it rests against the wall near the door.

She doesn’t want to bring it out this time. Yesterday, in Albuquerque and then Santa Fe, it had swelled with weeks of case updates from Viola and Gina. She wants more than case documents and more than just existence today.

Jimmy turns, almost as if he’s heard the thought. He resumes their usual dance, his eyes crinkling along smile lines as he asks the question: “So, how’s Florida?”

Kim mirrors the expression, then sighs. “Hot and getting hotter.”

He’s setting her up for it. “And how are you?”

“Hot,” Kim says, grinning. “Getting hotter.”

And Jimmy chuckles, warm and familiar. “Damn right.”

Most visits, this would’ve been enough, a little step between them, the reassurance that she’s okay and her life is okay, but today she holds her breath. She remembers Jimmy, long ago, talking softly—in the dark, in bed, in the warm.

She withdraws her cigarettes from her pocket. These impossible things that make it through security and x-ray machines and bag checks even though they shouldn’t, as if they’re not a real object anymore, as if they’re just a sign. She lifts one to her lips and lights it as it hangs there, Jimmy’s gaze locked on her mouth.

She inhales burning smoke and exhales words with it. “I have some choices to make in Florida, too.”

His eyes cut back to hers. “Oh really?”

“Mhm,” Kim says. “I’ve been volunteering at a legal aid. Did you know that?”

Jimmy’s eyes crinkle again, and the sunlight finds his cheeks. “How long for?”

“Since—I guess just about since you first called me,” she says quietly. She can hear the crack of his voice down the line, almost lost to the distance, and maybe she should’ve wanted it to vanish along the miles between them instead of clinging to it, to the harsh words and the pain.

“Oh,” Jimmy murmurs.

Kim wonders if he’s remembering the way that felt, too. A voice against an ear—the past returning, right there, speaking. She swallows, ashing her cigarette onto the cement floor. “But the legal aid is closing down—or leaving Titusville, same thing.”

Jimmy turns his torso towards her more, resting his forearm on the table.

“The owner’s opening a new one in Fort Lauderdale,” Kim says, and she shrugs. She takes another drag on the cigarette. Exhales out over the table.

The smoke vanishes and appears through the shadows of the prison bars. “What’re you gonna do?” Jimmy asks.

“I don’t know,” Kim says, and then she laughs without really knowing why. It takes her brain a moment to catch up with the physical reaction—that it’s laughter of knowing she’s about to say something she’s thought about saying to him so many times in the last twenty years. “I’m thinking about quitting my job.”

He takes it in stride this time. “No more sprinklers, huh?”

“No more sprinklers,” she says.

Jimmy sighs lowly. “Well, you were never cut out for irrigation work,” he says. He drums his thumb on the table then quirks an eyebrow. “What’ll you do instead?”

“It’s funny,” she says. “I’ve been thinking… there’s this legal aid opening up down near Miami.”

Jimmy’s eyes twinkle. “I like the sound of that,” he says. “You know, I think they have bar review classes down there, too.” But then he lifts a palm, backing off. “I know, I know. You want to be sure.”

“I want to be sure,” Kim echoes. She holds out the cigarette, and his fingers on hers are like ghosts as he takes it. She remembers old days of long car rides and early mornings and Jimmy drawing words and history out of her with words and history of his own. She wonders if that still works for them now, if it works in reverse. “And you?” she asks. “How are you?”

Jimmy inhales deeply, eyes drifting shut. Tendrils of smoke seep from his lips before he exhales the rest of it, a slow waterfall. He ashes the cigarette then rests his hand on the table again, the glowing smoke wedged between his fingers. His brow flickers as he thinks, and then he meets her eyes. “I have some job news, too.”

She feels like she’s sinking into warm water—deep relief, coming from her bones.

“I’ve been working in the cafeteria kitchens,” Jimmy says, and then at Kim’s expression he chuckles. “Hey, it’s better than the laundries. Those guys got hands so dry from the detergent they look like the Grand Canyon.”

Kim chuckles, too, but weakly. She’s passed the prison laundry on the way here through the yards, usually vacant, but once or twice pumping metallic-smelling steam out of vents in the roof.

“I got another shift on Tuesdays,” Jimmy says. “Getting my full bill of earned time credits now, you’ll be glad to know.”

The relief of earlier presses into her muscles and she laughs again—but she’s not laughing at him. She’s just… just… She grins, and shakes her head at him, and she gestures for the cigarette and he passes it back.

Kim breathes in burning smoke , then breathes out. Her muscles exhale, too. She murmurs, soft with the warm feeling, “And how are you holding up?”

But Jimmy shakes his head. He points to her right hand. “It’s your turn again now,” he says. “You have the talking cigarette.”

Kim looks down at her own hand—the cigarette wedged in her fingers—and she remembers handing it to him right before he spoke. She laughs brightly. “Okay, then,” she says, tipping her head expectantly. “Do you want to ask a question, or should I just talk?”

His eyes soften and he murmurs, “You could just talk.”

He’s been missing it too, then, the easy flow of words, and when she takes a drag on the cigarette this time, it seems to cut through her. “Okay,” she says, low and soft. “I did look into it. You’re right. There’s plenty of bar review courses in Miami. But I don’t know if that would be enough.”

Jimmy almost laughs, lips twitching. He shakes his head in wonder.

“Jimmy, it’s been almost twenty years since I sat the bar exam,” Kim says, resting her hand and the balanced cigarette on the table. “Florida has its own constitution, and besides there’s all the stuff I never used that I’ve forgotten—Jesus, I don’t think I’ve thought about federalism since the early nineties, and I haven’t thought about any law at all since 2004—”

But Jimmy’s still smiling at her, something like recognition glittering in his eyes. As if he could listen to her talk about the bar exam for days, for weeks, for another twenty years.

She just shakes her head. It’s all too much. He can’t see that it’s all too much.

His eyes change now, darkening. “You didn’t think about the law at all?”

Kim looks down at their hands resting beside each other on the burnished table. The pale glow of the cigarette between her fingers. “I got pretty good at not thinking about it.”

Jimmy pulls his hand back, and she follows his movement. As she meets his eyes again, he leans back, settling against the wall and the window, facing her. The light from the sun glows around the edges of him. “What was a day like for Kim, then? These last few years.”

Here, in this light-striped prison, it takes her a moment. She sees her bedroom in Titusville: the metal-framed bed and the empty walls that for years she kept meaning to hang something on. “Well, I’d wake up,” Kim says. “Eight in the morning.”

“Luxurious,” Jimmy says. He’s smiling carefully, as if he didn’t expect her to answer this one.

Kim shrugs. “Work was a five-minute drive,” she says. “And this”—a brush of fingers through dark hair—“is a lot simpler than it used to be.”

His gaze rises, finding somewhere above her eyes, then returning to meet them. “I like it,” he says, and he scratches his neck and then exhales. “I really do. That day in court… I think I was half expecting that Kim from 2004 to be sitting back there.” He chuckles. “It was almost nice to see that you had changed, too—that you’d kept living.”

She closes her eyes, and in the dark, she hears him on the other end of the phone call, flinging barbed words about the pot and the kettle, as if even then he could see down the wire and into her bare-walled bedroom and her too-bright office hung with pipe-fitting diagrams and not a single window.

“Kim,” Jimmy murmurs.

She feels something warm on her knee—his hand, and when she opens her eyes he pulls it back, as if he never meant to rest it there.

He waves her on instead. “Tell me about the rest of your day, go on.”

So she keeps talking. “I’d go to work,” she says, ashing the cigarette again. “The coffee was—not great. I’d say something to someone about the weather. I’d eat lunch. Usually I’d pack a sandwich that morning.”

“Cute.”

“And then the rest of the afternoon would drift past.” Kim pauses, studying his eyes. The light from the window throws his face almost into silhouette, but she can still see it clearly. He’s waiting for her to keep speaking because he knows she’s going to say more, because he’s used to a Kim who does say more. “After work… usually I’d go straight home again. Not always.” She adds, quieter, “I was seeing somebody for a while.”

Jimmy nods like he expected it.

“So sometimes it would be date night,” Kim says. “We’d get dinner.” She feels Paul’s Smokehouse close on her skin, pressing into her pores—she exhales sharply, clearing her lungs of the river air, emptying and emptying. She holds out the cigarette to him again.

He understands. He takes it from her. The ember flares orange.

“Your turn now,” Kim murmurs. Her bangs spill into her eyes as she tilts her head, and she tucks them back. “Tell me about a day for Saul.”

Jimmy exhales smoke, shaking his head. “For me.”

Words that cut through a wall. “For you,” she agrees. He’s better at remembering that than her.

A day for Jimmy, for the man sitting here in the prison in orange, sunlight behind him. He rests his hand on the table again. There’s a burn on the side of his palm; she hasn’t noticed it until now. Wide and flat like the edge of a stove.

“Well, I’d wake up,” he finally says, echoing her earlier opening, and she wonders if she sounded like this, too. Dreamlike and half-lost. “Not always alone—but not exactly a ‘date night’ situation.” His eyebrows raise and then lower, as if he’s reacting to his own words. “Probably took me a little longer than you to do my hair, but I’d already be on the phone by then, anyway. I started taking calls right away.” He smiles flatly, and then, dry: “Over a luxurious breakfast, of course.”

“Bowl of cereal?” Kim asks.

“Oh, no, cereal bars,” Jimmy says, widening his eyes. “Much easier.” He lifts the cigarette to his mouth again, then he exhales smoke through rounded lips. “Don’t think I made a single sandwich, but I’d go into the office anyway. Comfortable ten or ten-thirty.” He scratches his cheek with the pinky finger of the hand holding the smoke, another punctuation mark of movement. “Usually there were already clients waiting.”

For all the truncated sentences, Kim can imagine it in detail, anyway. The office by the courthouse that they’d looked at together. A diamond in the rough.

Jimmy gives another bitter smile. “If I got there at ten thirty, it meant Francesca was already pissed at me, so I didn’t have to worry about how that would happen later in the day. Got it over with.” He clicks his fingers. “Saw as many clients as I could fit in an afternoon. Took their money.” Another waving gesture with his free hand, tumbling from him with the words. “Made some more calls. Didn’t go down to the courthouse if I could avoid it.”

Kim remembers Viola’s face in their very first meeting, her strange expression when she talked about seeing Jimmy around court. Public enemy number one.

“After I met Walter White… sometimes, things were different.” Jimmy turns, away from her and towards the rest of the room. He taps his forefinger on the table, erratic. “Most days they didn’t need me. So it was still the same. The same day.” His profile smiles, and glances sideways as if she should find this comforting.

She just shakes her head, and Jimmy hands the cigarette back to her, and it’s almost burned down now. Almost gone. “Thank you,” Kim says lowly, as her fingers brush his skin.

Jimmy shrugs. “It’s hard to remember most of it,” he says. “It feels like no time at all.”

Yeah. When Kim thinks back on her life in Florida, before the phone call, before any of this, it feels less like six years and more like six months. And those months of public defender work more like years. As if time is adjusting, elastic, to accommodate the amount of memories and emotions, and shrinking without them.

Jimmy clears his throat. “So, all those days when you woke up in Florida…” he starts, but his voice is still thready. Whatever he tried to clear away did not leave it. It feels like blood and hotel rooms. “Did you ever forget?”

Kim inhales roughly. The question digs into her skin like the suggestion did back then. The cold, cold horror of forgetting. She shakes her head. “No.”

Jimmy nods as if that’s what he expected.

Kim snubs out the cigarette on the metal table. The surface fogs with the warmth, then clears again. “What about you?”

Jimmy tilts his head and the bars ripple over his face. “I was very good at forgetting things,” he mutters, and he tries to clear his throat again, then he breathes out. His chest shifts with it, a deep movement behind the orange. “Actually, I guess I skipped over that earlier. The waking up part.” He gives a bleak chuckle, catching with his voice. “It was real hard to figure out how to get rid of that little window, right when I opened my eyes.” He holds his fingers about an inch apart. “One… little… window…”

And he drops his hand again. The shadows of the prison bars hide and then reveal his eyes.

Kim stares back. She wants another cigarette; she wants something warm and catching in her lungs. She wants to go back before Howard, before she turned around, before the plan, before and before and before. A thread unraveling with an unknowable origin.

“For a couple of years, I woke up every day in Albuquerque,” she says, finally. “That little window. At first I’d think it was the time before Howard’s wake, and then it was earlier and earlier, before S&C, before Mesa Verde.”

Sometimes, in her empty bed, she had felt Jimmy behind her. A warm weight that lingered in the dark. She had held onto the feeling long past realizing it was an illusion, long enough until she felt sick with it, and then she’d opened her eyes to the empty, empty room.

Jimmy stares at her now, worrying at his lower lip, as if he can feel himself dissolving.

She shifts closer. Her knee finds him again, nudging the side of his thigh. “As if… I don’t know,” she says. “As if my body was trying to undo all my choices and stop everything.”

“What do you mean, your choices?” he asks, words barbed. His gaze is barbed, too, fringed with chain-link shadows.

Kim feels it again, that same illusion of weight creeping behind her. It doesn’t feel like Jimmy now. It feels like the temperature lowering, feels like sheets wrapping around her from behind. Something that’s been waiting to be acknowledged for years.

“Jimmy,” she says, and it feels like something he should understand just from the way she says his name. “I was pushing you into that plan.”

He frowns. “You weren’t pushing me into anything.”

“You were only doing it because of us.”

His face scrunches up—confusion and something else, maybe disgust. “It made me feel good, Kim,” he says. “That’s why I was doing it.”

“I know,” Kim says, softer. “I know that.” She edges her chair closer, metal legs stiff and upset with her. “After the desert, you seemed so lost—hell, after Chuck. And it felt like I was pulling you back to me.”

“You were,” Jimmy says, like it’s self-evident, like it shouldn’t need saying. “You were, Kim. But that Howard shit… you didn’t make me do that.”

Kim just shakes her head. She feels tape tearing at her palms. “I tried to pull you free,” she says, “and then I left.” A daggering swallow. “I saved myself.”

Jimmy’s lip curls. “Jesus, Kim, is that why you’re helping me now?” His voice is bleak and low and not surprised, as if this entire time he’s been waiting to uncover a deeper reason for her presence here. “Because you feel guilty? Well, don’t,” he spits. “You shouldn’t. It was all me.”

Kim just shakes her head, over and over.

Jimmy thumps his chest with his palm and it sounds hollow in there, enclosed with steel bars. “All me. The whole Saul thing was—is nothing. I did all that,” he says. “I built Walter White, I let Lalo Salamanca into our lives, I killed Chuck—”

Words like guilt exploding out of him, filling the room, filling and filling until he’s drowning in it and drowning her, too.

“You don’t have anything to feel guilty about, okay, Kim?” Jimmy says. “Your conscience is clear.”

A sentence that rings like a verdict. He’s breathing heavily, his chest shifting like it’s still shaking with the impact of his palm. She lets the silence settle. His leg burns against her knee.

She can’t hear the men playing basketball anymore. It’s been a long time since she’s heard them.

Kim rests her hand over that meeting point between them, curling her fingers around the bend of his thigh. “That’s not why I’m here, asshole,” she murmurs. “Stop it.”

Jimmy exhales through his nose, looking at her hand. “So, why then?”

She squeezes his leg, getting him to look up at her. When he meets her eyes, she tries to hold the same emotions in her gaze as she feels in her hand, warmth and connection and everything. She tries to contain the love and the belief and all of it, all of it, so he can witness it.

Jimmy shakes his head. He looks too young again, too young for this lined face. But his next words aren’t anything young: “You said we were poison together.”

Kim’s breath hitches. She doesn’t break the connection. It feels like this whole trip coming here to see him, and all the other trips, all the plane rides over folded mountains and rental cars rumbling through twisted hills, was really just to respond to this. His name rushes out of her. “Jimmy.”

He presses the side of his forefinger to his lips, like he’s holding something in. His throat clicks and he drops his hand.

“I didn’t mean…” Kim squeezes his leg again, tighter. She didn’t mean it like that. She takes a steeling breath. “I meant… I just meant of late.”

“We didn’t kill everything, Kim. We grew things,” Jimmy says, and the words are simple and they feel like the work of years and years of little windows, an argument crafted in the moments when the mask slipped. “Wexler-McGill was good,” he whispers, and this name struggles to leave him like once his brother’s did. “It was good, Kim. Before Chuck went and… well, not just Chuck, it was me and Chuck together, it was that whole goddamn thing.” He chuckles darkly. “I know poison together, and that was poison together. Me and him.”

Kim frowns. “Do you really think that?” she asks.

“Yes,” Jimmy says sharply. “By the end? Yeah, Kim.” He grits his teeth and, jaw tight: “Nothing was growing from that. One of us was going to burn the other one down.”

Her chest aches. A corner lot, ragged ruins lifting up with ash on the wind. She murmurs, “You never told me about the insurance thing.”

Jimmy just shrugs. His leg shifts but remains beneath her palm. “What was there to say?” he asks, quiet and helpless. “I couldn’t—”

She doesn’t know how to answer.

His leg bobs again, like he needs to move something but doesn’t want to move away, and she tightens her fingers on the fabric of his pants anyway. Holding him there.

“But, us, Kim?” Jimmy says, eyes wide. “That wasn’t just poison.” His voice is so faint: “You made me better.”

So faint, and so vulnerable and exposed, and Kim’s standing in her condo again, and it’s that night, the inescapable night, because no matter how long and how dark the highways are she drives on, they always lead back here. She wants to check the heavy metal door of this room inside this impenetrable fortress of a prison and make sure that it’s really locked, that nobody’s about to appear behind Jimmy from the shadows.

Her breath is coming quicker and she tries to slow it, tries to control it. “You made me better, too.”

Jimmy shakes his head. His eyes are like glass. “I made you worse.”

“And I made you worse, too.”

“No,” Jimmy says bluntly, almost crushing the end of her sentence with it. “Kim, no.”

But Kim just stares at him. “That’s what I meant,” she says gently. “Together, we… we turned into poison, then. It would’ve been okay if we were just worse together. We wouldn’t have lasted so long.” She shakes her head. “But it wasn’t just worse.”

His throat works as he swallows. His jaw clenches and then relaxes and his gaze flicks off to something behind her.

“Hey,” she says, and she waits until he looks at her again. “Do you know what it was like for me in Albuquerque before you walked into the mailroom?”

His brows draw together.

It’s something they’ve never really spoken about, and she wonders if she’s ever told him anything at all. She’s not sure.

He asks the question lowly, “What was it like?”

Kim almost smiles. “I can’t remember,” she says, and she shrugs. “I honestly can’t, Jimmy. I’ve tried a couple of times. But I can’t even remember living in that city alone.” She brushes her thumb over his leg, thoughtful. “I remember arriving clearly, I remember the way Albuquerque first looked… and then you showed up one morning.” She nudges him. “You’re the next clear thing.”

His lips narrow in something like a smile, but it doesn’t materialize, like clouds dissipating on the horizon. His eyes darken with the storm instead. “Kim, you know we don’t have a future together,” he says, voice thick. “We don’t. I’m in here forever.”

She shakes her head.

“You deserve a life,” Jimmy says. He tries yet again to smile, but it seems to stick somewhere before it reaches his eyes. “What about you and Mr. Date Night?

Kim huffs out a breath. “Well, that wasn’t poison,” she says, and she raises her eyebrows. “It wasn’t good, either.” She quirks her head and her bangs escape again, and she tucks them back. “It was kind of like Albuquerque before you showed up.”

Jimmy’s eyes widen, pale and blue.

“And maybe that’s a different kind of poison,” Kim says.

His eyes drift closed, then open. He continues as if he didn’t catch her meaning, “Kim, there’s like a couple billion people out there who aren’t in a federal prison,” he says. “There’s got to be one of those schmucks who’s worth something.”

“So I break up with him in two years instead, once I get you out of here?” she asks. “Hardly seems fair.”

Jimmy just chuckles. “Yeah, with good behavior,” he says flatly. “Right.”

“Well, maybe not two years,” Kim says. “That might be a stretch, even for Viola.”

Jimmy doesn’t laugh this time. He’s trying, she thinks, to trap her with his gaze. “Kim,” he says, cracking, “I just want you to be happy.”

Kim holds out her hands for his. “I know you do,” she says, and she waits for his hands to rise to meet hers.

She folds his palms into her palms, folds his fingers between her fingers. As if she can carry all of him inside her hands. His skin is warm and she tries to cover it. Her thumb tangles with his pinky.

She says, “I want to be happy, too.”

Jimmy exhales, and it feels like he’s breathing for Kim, filling and emptying her lungs.

“After everything…” she starts. “I think it’s okay if we choose what we want again, sometimes.”

Jimmy’s eyes close and his hands shifts in hers. His throat rises and falls and clicks and when his eyelids snap open he’s not looking at her at all, he’s staring off at the empty wall.

She tightens her grip on his fingers. “Don’t you think?”

“Yes—” Jimmy manages, the word escaping as if he didn’t mean for it to, and his hands are like birds in hers, trembling with rapid heartbeats.

“Jimmy,” she says, softly.

Or maybe it’s just one heartbeat: a hope they’re holding between them, trapped in both of their hands. After twenty years, she thinks they both know how dangerous it is—the more—and the wanting—but for now Kim holds it steady.

Their hands flutter and the heartbeats flutter and Jimmy looks at her. In his eyes, she finally sees the more and the wanting, too. She swallows and holds him tighter, and she thinks she’s going to give it back to them both.

The space coast is bright and gleaming. The space coast is the kind of titanium they use to make golf clubs and NASA shuttles. The space coast is indestructible.

Kim’s silver Prius bleeds into Titusville along the artery of the Indian River, crawling with other silver Priuses, and the red Priuses, and dark black cars and vans and Jeeps and the kind of traffic she never sees here at all.

It’s launch day.

The river glints and glitters to her right and along the coast itself people shake out checkered blankets and rest on the banks of washed-up seagrass, waiting.

Kim had forgotten. She’d followed the freeways easterly from the airport, but for once the surrounding cars hadn’t thinned—and now she’s stuck on the fringes of this city, moving forward inch by hard-won inch.

A pickup truck peels away in front of her and rides up onto the grass verge. The people who climb out are wearing matching t-shirts emblazoned with Saturn V rockets.

She should have been at work by nine o’clock, her weekend trip unnoticed, but now it’s almost ten and she’s still at least fifteen minutes from Palm Coast Sprinklers. She’s still dressed as a paralegal on a prison visit, the only kind of clothes she packed. She’s still dressed for Jimmy.

Kim curls her palms around the steering wheel. She fiddles with the radio, clicking through unexplored channels, until she finds one that’s actually playing music. It’s nothing she knows, but it catches her in her lungs and she turns the volume up until she can feel the strings moving inside her, can feel the singer’s voice as her own voice.

When she finally arrives at Palm Coast Sprinklers, she pulls into a spot out front—one of the spaces marked for deliveries and pick-ups only, with a ten-minute limit posted.

She opens her door and steps out of her car. Her reflection in the glass doors approaches her—her suit is dark greens, almost black, with a paler blouse patterned with white flecks, like butterflies. She passes through the doors.

“Oh, Kim, you’re here,” Tammy says. “Get caught up in the crowds too, huh? Lots of people travelling out here to say goodbye.”

She frowns. “Sorry?”

Tammy leans in, like she’s sharing gossip. “Didn’t you know? It’s the last shuttle.” She shakes her head. “Gosh, it’s a shame. Half the staff have taken a personal day.”

“Right,” Kim says, and she smiles flatly then moves through to her office.

Her computer takes an eternity to boot up, as it always does. Once she’s logged in, her word processor seems, somehow, to take even longer to open—long enough that by the time she can type anything, she’s already composed the entire letter in her head. She dashes it off in thirty seconds and hits print, and leaves her office.

The printer is running slowly, too, not even lighting up until after she’s walked all the way over there. The rollers shift and rumble, giving these words more than Kim’s own thirty seconds of thought.

A light tap on her shoulder.

“Hi, June,” Kim says. An error message now, and she taps it away.

“How did you know it was me, silly?” June’s voice is bubbly and bright, and she doesn’t wait for an answer. “How are you? You look all rested up!”

Kim turns. She wonders if June saw her leaving town, if someone saw her at the airport.

“I love your jacket,” June says. “Very chic.”

The printer finally kicks into gear. It spits out Kim’s resignation letter in a single fluid movement, and Kim takes it. She folds it in half cleanly, sharpening the edge. “Thank you, June,” she says. “Your front yard is looking really lovely, by the way.”

“Oh, pshh!” June waves a hand. “It’s a mess.”

Kim just nods. “Well, it’s nice,” she says softly. “You should be really proud, in this weather.”

June blinks, and then she pokes Kim’s shoulder with the round, yellow end of her Minion-shaped pen—as if that’s the only way she can accept the compliment.

“Is Tiffany here yet?” Kim asks, gesturing with the paper. “I’m handing in my notice today.”

June’s jaw drops. She leans closer, and, hushed: “Did something happen? Was it because of your annual review?”

“What? No!” Kim says, and she almost laughs. “June, no, I’m just…” She looks off, over the heads of the workers, over the cubicles. Along the front wall, sprinklers water a field of rainbows, as if desperate to prove to anyone who enters this place that good irrigation and the right kind of rust-proof fitting is the solution to all of life’s problems.

Sprinklers or a pot of gold.

“Kim?” June prompts.

“How long have you worked here, June?” Kim murmurs, and then at the other woman’s scrunched brow, she waves a hand. “It’s okay,” she says. “It was just time for me to make a change.”

June nods, her gaze drifting over in the direction Kim was looking, then returning to Kim.

Kim smiles genuinely. She pats June’s arm, and moves away, down along the row of doors. The office at the end is empty, just a wide desk and a row of sprinkler fittings laid out for a demonstration. A nameplate and an out tray and a white computer. Kim tucks her resignation letter beneath one end of the keyboard and then leaves again.

On her way back past the cubicles, Kim sees June still standing near the printer, leaning over a pile of documents with her Minion pen tucked behind her ear.

Kim slows again. “Hey, June?” she asks. “When Tiff gets in, could you tell her I’ve had to take the rest of the day off? Just tell her I decided to watch the shuttle launch.”

June nods. She looks down at her work and then back up again. She makes a low noise as if she was going to speak.

Kim raises an eyebrow.

And June straightens her spine. “You know, Kim, some of us are perfectly happy here,” she says. “It’s a nice place with good people.”

“I know,” Kim murmurs, and she softens, smiling again. She tucks her hair back, away from her face. “I’ll see you tomorrow, June.”

“Yes, of course,” June says, and she smiles, too, and turns away, heading back to her desk. Her hair swings above her shoulders, buoyant.

Kim folds her lips inward. She turns, making her way back to the door. Tammy is on the phone when she passes, so Kim just lifts a hand. She returns to her car, settling in the driver’s seat.

The traffic is just as bad between the office and her house, turning a five-minute drive into twenty. The streets, not designed for tens of thousands of visitors, burst at the seams, overstuffed. Kim never learned the city well enough to take any back routes, tracing only the same two roads on her commute every day. She’s at the mercy of the deadlocked traffic, the pedestrians walking from wherever they’ve abandoned their cars towards the river’s edge.

It’s only when Kim turns into her own street that things quieten a little. She rounds the corner and the world seems to drain—now just her, and all the familiar driveways are empty, and the curbsides empty, because the people of Titusville are all heading for the river, too.

She clicks her garage remote and pulls into the dim interior, then shuts off her engine. She collects her carry-on from the passenger seat and heads through into the house, dumping her bags on the carpet.

The front door is closed—still deadlocked, untouched. She checks it again, anyway.

In the living room, she picks up the remote and goes to turn on the TV. Here, in this house, she was the kind of person who had the TV on for no particular reason. It kept her company, she would have said, if anybody ever asked—but nobody did.

Kim doesn’t turn it on tonight.

She digs a laptop out of her carry-on instead. It’s brand new, still in the packaging. She rips open the box, then frees the laptop. She peels the plastic off the shell and pries up the lid.

The dark screen greets her patiently.

The kind of Kim who left the TV on all evening was also the kind of Kim who would never need a laptop. That Kim had a computer at work, that Kim had nothing she needed to know after five o’clock in the evening.

Now, she boots it up. She tucks her hair behind her ears. She should get some hair clips in the shapes of little butterflies.

When the computer asks for a Wi-Fi network, Kim reaches for the router beside her landline, and finds the default password printed on the back. It connects slowly, but it’s fast enough.

Fast enough to load the homepage for Miami Law. Kim clicks through the menus, through the smiling young people who read heavy textbooks and laugh with each other. All of her UNM classmates had seemed like kids when she was only five years older than them. These students seem younger than kids, these students seem impossible.

She bookmarks a few pages: bar prep, Florida Constitutional Law. A list of which courses are already available for auditing, another page with a form to express interest in auditing any of the other courses.

She bookmarks enough that soon she’s filled the bar at the top of her browser. She pulls up a calendar and starts marking that, too. She fills it with information from different tabs.

The closest potential date to sit the bar exam—but it’s too soon, she’s definitely missed the registration. So she marks the next available registration deadline, then, and then the one after that, option after option leaving space for refresher study and bar reviews and a state with its own constitution and rusty gears turning again.

It seems simple, laid out among these numbers and dates. It seems like not much at all—the bar exam. She’s done it before. She can do it again now, she can find time between legal aid work and a civil suit instead of between mailroom mornings and elevator rides.

She can find time between an appeal and a retrial.

The next few months, stretching out before her on the bright laptop screen, look like days and days of different things: of new information and new cities and new people and new cases and surprises and knowledge and memories. Time stretching like elastic again, making room for her.

A rumble from outside, something in the street, but it feels as if the laws of physics are already shifting for her, groaning with stiff movement.

Kim keeps typing.

But then the sound rises, louder and louder. She looks up, looks out the kitchen window. Palm fronds ripple and the noise doesn’t diminish—the rumble just grows, churning until she can feel it beneath her skin.

The vibrations tremble from the floor and into her soles and up her legs, otherworldly and enormous.

Glasses tinkle in the kitchen cabinets. The TV rattles on its stand and her lungs rattle in her chest and she exhales with the sound, deep and heavy, and outside, screaming through the air: the space shuttle Atlantis leaving the planet for the very last time.

Chapter Text

Something Great Is Coming. The banner hangs from the southern side of the Albuquerque Convention Center: a swath of yellow over a wall so featureless it might as well be made from stone. The building rises like a cliff face from the opposite side of the intersection, looming flatly against the pale sky. Cars rumble past, an unending stream along the crossroads, as if they’re the ones carving this edifice from the earth.

But something great is coming, the banner promises. A newly renovated center, a hub for the city. In an artist’s interpretation on a poster below the banner itself, this new building has glass windows and towers and character. Shadowed figures blur through the doors, an endless parade of unrendered visitors.

Kim raises her hand to her mouth as if to withdraw a cigarette, but she’s not smoking. She presses her fingertips to her lips instead, exhaling through the gaps, her breath warm on her skin.

Once, years ago, she had stood outside this convention center early on a Tuesday morning, and the tension around her bones had seemed as bad as it could ever get. The banner worn by the building that morning had been less optimistic: Good Luck Examinees—because you’ll need it, you’ll all need it.

But that was a long time ago. The intensity of the feeling has vanished, and now it’s hard to believe that she felt very much fear that morning at all. Kim can’t imagine she’ll experience anything close to the same terror on entering a very different examination hall in a month’s time, far across the country. In fact, the impending bar exam is somehow the steadiest thing on the horizon. It’s controllable, she thinks. It comes with books you can study, and lectures you can listen to. It’s designed with excessive preparation in mind.

Not like today.

Kim breathes out as smoothly as she can. She rubs her mouth.

Cold wind etches letters into her skin: on her cheeks, on the back of her neck. The air feels different here, dry and mountainous. She checks her phone. Nothing.

As she stares at the lock screen, another minute passes. She should go inside. She should ride the elevator to the third floor ballroom of the Hyatt Regency and mingle with the others, chatting about everyday things as if it’s remotely normal for her to be there.

Bronze statues wait with her while she decides, here on the corner of Tijeras and 3rd Street. Figures locked in moments of innocent joy. Maybe they’re postponing something painful, too. A little boy on a skateboard who’s been skateboarding here for decades. A girl holding hands with her mother. A woman with a briefcase, striding purposefully but never arriving anywhere.

Two men stand at the edge of the bronze group. One of them points northward, as if he can change the others’ minds with the gesture—just look there, he seems to say. It’ll be okay. See?

Something great is coming.

The elevator rises. Kim tangles her fingers together, her nails digging into her skin. As the elevator climbs, she tightens her grip, like she’s the one hauling the cabin upwards, closer and closer to the third floor.

She breathes out, channeling the air through circular lips.

With a ding, the doors open. The hallway beyond is empty, but Kim doesn’t step out of the elevator yet. She withdraws her phone from her purse and checks it. Still nothing. She tenses her jaw and then shoves the phone down out of sight.

The elevator doors begin to close, and she stops them with an arm. She moves out onto the polished marble floors. She turns left, and then left again through open glass doors and into the ballroom. She’s been here before. Huge windows on the far wall reveal the civic plaza, the old courthouse. The glass is tinted with something that makes the world beyond ripple slightly, and makes everyone inside invisible.

Or invisible from out there, at least.

Here, in the ballroom, Kim’s all too tangible. She takes another step, feeling all eyes on her: blatant stares and surreptitious ones, quick glances and curious looks. Even the conversations seem to turn in her direction.

But nobody calls out, nobody shouts their objection. The hubbub resumes, and the caterers circle. One of the servers passes Kim, and she takes a champagne flute from their tray. She raises it to her lips then pauses.

She lowers the glass. She shouldn’t be drinking; she shouldn’t seem like she’s celebrating. Low music starts from a sound system, jazzy and inoffensive, barely audible over the chatter of the crowd.

A gentle voice at her shoulder: “Kim, hey.”

Kim turns. “Lynn,” she says, exhaling. “Will you take this?” She offers Lynn the glass of champagne. “I don’t want it.”

Lynn accepts the flute, the smile lines around her eyes crinkling in acknowledgement. The lines seem even deeper than normal, etched in skin glowing red with recent sun. The tall woman always seems to catch more sun than anyone else Kim knows in the city, as if it’s her height that’s responsible for the proximity to the sun’s rays and not the frequent hiking trips with Viola. Her cheeks are freckled even in winter.

“Thank you,” Kim says, brushing her hands over her thighs as if she can wipe the memory of the flute from them.

“You look worse than Viola did this morning,” Lynn says, shaking her head. “I almost offered to drive her to the courthouse just so she didn’t get T-boned on the I-25.”

Kim’s throat tightens. “That bad?”

“She nearly threw up her breakfast,” Lynn says, but then she smiles and rests her palm on Kim’s arm. “Don’t worry, she always gets like that before an important hearing. At this point, I think she would say it’s good luck.”

Kim swallows around the tightness. “Right.”

“I should’ve told her you’d be stressing enough for the both of you,” Lynn says. “Maybe she would’ve come to bed for more than two hours. Did you sleep much on the flight?” Her cheeks crinkle again. “You look like hell.”

Kim has to remind herself to breathe, and she nods. “I’m okay, really,” she says, and she tilts her head. “Thank you for coming.”

“Of course,” Lynn says. She sips the champagne, surveying the ballroom. “And you know Viola wanted to be here for this, too.”

“I do.”

Lynn studies her gently. “And you probably want to be there in that courtroom, huh?”

The thought grips Kim like a vise, tightening around her rib cage. The courthouse is only a few blocks north of here. Outside of it, she remembers, wait the scales of justice, forged from stainless steel.

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything at all, hon,” Lynn says, and she touches Kim’s arm again. A glance across the room and a grimace. “I need to go check on the speeches. I’ll be around.” She squeezes Kim’s forearm then leaves, weaving through the crowd.

The space around Kim swells, bringing with it an awareness of the wider room that had briefly vanished during the conversation with Lynn. Kim feels small again, a tiny figure in the marble ballroom.

A chandelier hangs from the ceiling, its golden bulbs like raindrops inside pearlescent bubbles. Even sober, the fixture seems more fitting for hazy memories—more fitting for bourbon burning her throat at a bar association mixer here, years ago. That night, she’d hidden from whatever small problems she thought she’d had back then, alone in the ballroom with these golden raindrops forever falling above her.

Now, she tears her gaze away and ignores the glitter of the ever-circling champagne. Trays of canapés pass: goats-cheese balls and crab cakes. Kim wishes she had one just to occupy her hands. But she shouldn’t eat here today, she shouldn’t drink.

Give them as little to gossip about as possible.

Though already the room seems to be adjusting to her presence. A veil of professionalism has overtaken reality, as if the whole scandal has been dressed in black tie for the occasion, too. In black tie, even her affidavit—for personal gain, we faked his cocaine addiction… shot in the head, Howard died instantly—must be made palatable.

Everyone here is going to pretend that this is as normal as it needs to be for them to carry on. They’re going to do what they need to do to drink their champagne and eat their shrimp mousse crackers like at any other event.

They’re going to greet Kim warmly, and ask how she’s doing, and ask where she’s based now. And when she says Florida, they’ll react with surprise, and then it’ll be over, and the conversation will move on again without her. They won’t ask her about the law, and Kim won’t volunteer anything.

Like food and drink, tonight the law is something she no longer imbibes.

Kim drifts between groups, staying for a couple of minutes and then glancing off again like a skipping stone. Between conversations, she opens her purse and lights up her phone screen—to see nothing, always nothing.

The vise presses tighter around her chest with every minute. The glass doors wait, open, across the room. Taunting her.

But she just adjusts her purse on her shoulder, locking her fingers around the strap as she finds the next group.

Gina Robles chats with a couple of younger associates from R&G, people with whom Kim is passingly familiar from a year and a half of Santa Fe visits—but Kim’s not looking at them.

Instead, she gives a flat smile to the man at the edge of the group: Rich Schweikart, who looks exactly the same as he always did, and actually seems to be wearing the same suit he wore every day as her boss a decade ago. His only gesture towards the passage of time is the whitening of his hair and goatee.

Kim settles into the same exchange as she’s been having since she got here.

But Rich is the first to crack a joke. “Florida, huh?” he says. “You sure? You look like you haven’t seen the sun in years.”

Kim chuckles. “Well, an office is still an office, even in Miami,” she says. “More desks and notepads than sun and sand.”

“Oh, Kim—live a little,” Rich says, waving a hand. “Pick up surfing next summer.”

Kim almost smiles.

So Rich does it for her, as warm and genial as ever. He rubs at his goatee, staring around the room. “I have to say, I’m surprised. I didn’t expect this to settle so quickly.”

“What do you mean?” Kim asks.

Rich shrugs. “These civil cases—I mean, jeez, Kim, you remember what it’s like.” He has the way of an old man who is totally comfortable being frank with anyone with whom he speaks. “Glaciers move faster than civil litigation.”

Kim shrugs. “I guess she didn’t want to wait.”

“Cheryl Hamlin? Really?” Rich says, and he scoffs. “That woman’s got an iron will.”

Gina cuts in now. “The longer our negotiations went on, the longer this money wasn’t getting out into the community,” she says. “I think Cheryl really understood that. It’s for the best.”

The words are such patter, and Rich barely acknowledges them. He’s just studying Kim. He’s the first person who seems to want to say more, who might interrogate why she’s here at all—why she thinks she can mingle with the up-and-up of the Albuquerque legal community.

She knows the others are thinking it. Wondering if she was really invited, wondering if her attendance was part of some peace agreement. Wondering, like Rich, why Cheryl settled so suddenly.

Kim has no answer for any of it. She hadn’t expected it either; nobody on her side had expected it. Cheryl accepting the proposal, the Hamlin Grant and the scholarship signed into action with hardly any quibbling in the margins. Ever since Gina had called her with the good news, Kim’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop—Mrs. Hamlin’s changed her mind; Mrs. Hamlin wants more; Mrs. Hamlin will see you in court.

But the shoe never dropped, and now, Kim continually tells herself, it’s too late. They’ve settled. The grant has a board of directors. The money is already being spent: out in the community, and here, today, at this launch event.

And yet it feels lacking. Cheryl shouldn’t have agreed yet. Cheryl was going to drag it out, she was going to make this hurt, she was going to make Kim bleed.

And instead… Kim shakes her head, and it’s obviously not in response to any of the conversation now drifting between Gina and the R&G associates.

Rich casts her a questioning little look, but Kim just smiles at him and withdraws. She feels like she’s eaten the canapés after all. Something sits like a rock in her stomach.

She glances upwards, squeezes her eyes shut, then keeps walking.

In the corner of the room, half hidden by floor-to-ceiling curtains, there’s a table with glossy handouts. Viola’s touch. It’s the first sign of Howard so far: a regal depiction of his face above text laying out the nuts and bolts of how to apply for the legal aid grant.

On a wall nearby, there’s a display of black-framed photographs: more traces of the man himself. Kim approaches them. Every year, Howard seems younger in these pictures, young in a way that he had never looked young to her in life. In one image, Howard sits with George Hamlin, the two men on either side of a heavy, wooden desk. The light hits them so perfectly the photo seems staged, but she’s sure it was a candid shot.

Sunlight just fell flawlessly on the Hamlins—until it didn’t.

Behind her, the energy in the room shifts. Conversations quieten and then rise again, if slightly louder to compensate for the sudden hush.

Kim twists slowly. She’s not surprised to see Cheryl Hamlin in the doorway. Cheryl: head high, shoulders straight, dressed in black. Her simple jewelry glitters with the lights from the chandelier, as if she’s marked by hundreds of tiny spotlights.

And Kim returns to the photo display. She feels the burning scrutiny of dozens of eyes on her again, like firebrands on the back of her neck. You’re being surveilled, she thinks, reading the words in screaming text. You’re always being surveilled.

She moves away from these golden Howards, slipping through groups of chattering lawyers as if she has some place deliberate to go. There’s nowhere, of course, nowhere free from the eyes, but she slows in an empty space, as hidden as she can be by the suited figures.

Kim clasps her hands in front of her and looks down at her watch. The minute hand is rounding the top of the hour. A few blocks north of here, they should be finished by now, the appellate judges moving on to the next case on the docket.

And the vise around her rib cage tightens again, another turn of the crank. She needs to catch her breath.

A presence at her hip: a shorter woman. “Kim, it’s so good to see you again,” the woman says. Her eyes are warm and familiar in a round face.

It takes Kim a moment, but she finds the name. “Clara, hi,” she says, and she shakes Clara’s hand firmly. Clara seems relieved that Kim has recognized her, or maybe proud, her chest rising a little. Kim releases her hand and asks, “Are you still with HHM?”

“Brookner Partners,” Clara corrects, and she waves away Kim’s apology. “Soon to be Brookner and Scheff Partners, believe it or not.”

Kim raises her eyebrows. “Francis finally made the grade, huh?”

Clara leans closer. “Between you and me, we had a bit of a pool going on whether he would make name partner first or retire.”

Kim nods. “Nice to hear the HHM betting pool is alive and well,” she says. “Even if not in name.” She adjusts her purse on her shoulder and glances down. It’s dark, no new messages lighting up her phone. She feels herself biting her lip only after she’s done it, and she looks back at Clara. “What about throwing yours on the end of the firm, too?”

Clara shrugs. “Oh, Kim, you remember how things are there,” she says. “I’ll happily wait in line.” She opens her mouth, then shuts it again. She leans closer still, shooting a glance at the next group over. Peter Reeves’s back doesn’t react under the scrutiny. Right now, for once, nobody seems to be looking at them at all.

“What is it?” Kim asks, frowning.

“It’s so good to see you,” Clara says. Even lower: “You know, I—when I heard about everything, it was so hard to picture it. You and Jimmy—”

That name shouldn’t be said here in the ballroom, and it catches Kim from behind, like a hand pressed against her spine. She inhales and holds her breath. Her phone waits darkly in her purse.

But Clara glances away, staring vacantly at the middle distance, as if she’s seeing another place. “I guess I still just remember him being silly in the mailroom.”

Kim breathes out. Her chest unfolds a little, as if Clara is reaching inside there, reaching through time.

“I hear his appeal hearing was postponed again,” Clara says, widening her eyes. Her voice trembles a little, as if she’s asking something illegal. “When’s the new date?”

“It’s pretty soon,” Kim says lightly. Her heart thuds.

“Have you heard from him much?” The question spills from Clara as if she’s been holding it back this whole time, as if she’s been desperate to ask it. When Kim nods, her gaze darkens with morbid curiosity. “How is he?”

Kim smiles softly. “He’s doing okay,” she says. “I’ll tell him you say hello, if you want. He’d be glad to hear it.”

Clara’s cheeks redden. “Oh—yes, okay. Thank you.”

Kim imagines delivering the news on her next visit, sitting across the metal table in the cold room. Clara from HHM says hello, and guess what? She still has a crush on you after twenty years.

“I’m glad—” Clara starts, and then she drops her head downwards, as if she hadn’t meant to say that either, and now she has to elaborate. “I’m glad you’re still speaking, I guess. I always thought you two seemed nice together, back then.”

The sentiment hits Kim low in her stomach.

They seemed nice together, back then. It’s the first time Kim can remember hearing anything close to that. And for someone to say it here, at the launch event for a grant founded in the name of the man murdered in front of them—You’re perfect for each other—shot in the head, Howard died instantly… shot in the head—

And then there’s a low whine of feedback over the PA system, and she doesn’t have to think about it at all.

One of the lead attorneys for Cheryl climbs onto a low stage, mic in hand. Ribbons adorn the wall behind him in a color that, to someone less familiar, might pass for Hamlindigo blue.

Kim checks her watch. It’s ten minutes after the hour. Still nothing, just radio silence. As Cheryl’s lawyer begins speaking, Kim switches her phone to silent, her gaze clinging to the screen until the last possible moment—nothing, nothing, so much nothing—

Cheryl’s lawyer addresses the crowd as flatly as if he’s standing before a judge on a Monday morning, thanking them all for coming. A kind of solemnity settles over the audience, like the event has unintentionally become a second wake for Howard Hamlin. As if this emotionless lawyer is going to lift incense instead of champagne, as if he’s going to deliver Howard’s latest eulogy.

When he finishes speaking, Kim joins in with the applause. She feels eyes on her again, the tickle of a dozen gazes on the back of her neck. She should have stayed at the back of the room and not here, in the middle of it. The chandelier hangs above her like a spotlight, or like a dangling sword. Something great is going to happen.

She stops clapping and grips her hands together.

A member of the Hamlin Grant’s newly appointed board of directors climbs to the stage next—Lily Preston, one of Cheryl’s oldest friends, an ally forged over years of country club fundraisers. Lily Preston talks a little about Howard, but focuses more on Cheryl, gushing kindly up there in her heavy jewelry, as ornate as the chandelier. She gestures to a spot beside her that Kim can’t see clearly through the crowd, but where Cheryl must stand.

Kim shouldn’t have come. She remembers Cheryl at the top of the balcony at HHM years ago. Cheryl was all in black then, too. Waiting without knowing it for Kim to ascend the last few steps and dig in a final knife blade.

With the memory: the same disgust running down her skin, unblunted by time. It prickles her like poisonous spines, like something that can’t be pulled from her body without killing her.

She’d tried to remove the spines then anyway. She’d pulled out the needles: her public defender work, her law degree, her home—Jimmy. And the spines had released their venom, as she’d known they would, and she’d taken the swelling poison with her to Florida and tried to grow a new skin.

She swallows acid now as Cheryl ascends the low stage.

Cheryl Hamlin, unlike the others, seems to make a twelve-foot platform of it. She towers over the crowd as she takes the mic from Lily and settles it near lips pursed with dark lipstick.

Kim can feel her heart in her chest like a bird.

There’s another whistle of feedback, and then silence. Cheryl clears her throat before speaking. “Most of you here knew my husband.”

A murmur passes through the crowd, a wave rolling over sand.

“You were Howard’s coworkers, his employees,” she says. “He mentored you; he debated you in court; he was your co-counsel.” Her gaze casts over the group, focusing on everybody and nobody. “You remember him from fundraisers and charity lunches and mixers.”

Cheryl’s voice is emotionless and level. Not cold, Kim thinks, anything but cold. Just simple and bare, as if she’s laying out facts.

“Howard was a good man,” Cheryl continues. “He was happy when his people were happy. So he always tried to keep his people happy.” A burble of recognition at that, and beside Kim, Clara is nodding, her hair rustling against her shoulders.

And then Kim notices it: a low humming from inside her purse, her phone vibrating. She stops hearing the words from the stage.

She just hears the phone.

Buzzing like electric wire.

Cheryl’s mouth is moving, dark lipstick tracing Howard’s name. It seems, in the haze, to be the only thing she’s saying: Howard Hamlin, Howard Hamlin, Howard Hamlin, and everything to Kim becomes her phone trembling in her purse, the enormous hum of it.

Kim tightens her hold on the purse, trapping it between her arm and the side of her ribs. The vibrations spread out through her, along each rib and around to her heart. Running through her like blades.

Cheryl’s voice rises, creeping back into Kim’s perception: “… legal fees to help the people who need it most,” she says. “So this grant means that people will remember Howard as someone who truly helped them.”

The vibrating phone digs into Kim’s side, rattling in her throat, and then it stops. Her breathing is too loud now. She tries to swallow the sound of it, trapping the noise in her lungs with the lingering buzz of the missed call.

“So, thank you for coming out here today,” Cheryl says. She raises her glass, and the room mirrors her, moving with a ripple like another wave breaking.

Kim has nothing to raise. She keeps her arm trapped against her side. The phone doesn’t buzz again. She feels the pull of the glass doors behind her, open to the world, to the elevators, and to the road leading north.

“To Howard!” Cheryl says. “Who cared about the law, and who helped people, and who made them happy.”

To Howard, the room murmurs. Kim traces the words with her lips. Her pulse sends heartbeats through her like charged wires.

Cheryl sips her champagne. She casts one last turning gaze over the crowd, and then she nods.

“Most of you here knew my husband,” Cheryl says again, but so much darker than the first time. She lowers the mic, and these last words are daggers—are shards of glass thrown into the black suited figures.

There’s a hush, enduring longer than it should, before being broken by scattered applause.

Kim claps with the others. The sound is piercing. The mic joins in this time, screeching as Cheryl returns it to one of the venue staff. The applause climbs to compensate and then dies down, and as it dwindles, Kim slinks back through the crowd—nodding to Clara, passing Rich, who narrows his eyes at her. Gina Robles, who’s frowning up at the stage, doesn’t look in Kim’s direction at all, and Kim slips between the catering tables and out into the marble hallway again.

Her footsteps ring. She thumbs the button for the lift. It’s way up on one of the top floors, and the numbers slowly creep downwards as it approaches.

Kim jiggles her hand at her side. Her heel rattles on marble.

She has to get out of here, out of this building and this ballroom and its ever-turning eyes. The doors open and she steps inside then mashes the first floor button. The elevator creeps downwards, sinking like her stomach, falling deeper and deeper. She tightens her grip on her cellphone, the hard edges digging into her palm and the soft pads of her fingers.

The Hyatt atrium has a windowed ceiling, a pyramid of glass that catches the sunlight and glows golden above everything. Kim heads for the exit, thumbing Viola’s number, lifting the phone to her ear.

The call rings.

She steps outside into the humming street. Cars pass with a low drone, blurring into one long creature.

Kim keeps walking and the call keeps ringing. The wind is cold, even colder than earlier. It whittles pieces from her as she pushes headlong into it, and by the time she reaches the first street corner she feels like half of herself—just a shadow of Kim ducking around the edge of the building, hidden now by the steep walls, breathing heavily.

She slumps against the smooth bricks and the call rings and rings. She presses it harder to her ear, painful. The ringing stops and Viola’s voicemail starts.

Kim cuts the message off.

The warm smell of coffee curls from a shop inside the nearby plaza doors. On the corner, the statues seem to watch her now, frozen in motion, still postponing their own pain. The bronze woman stares at Kim with bronze eyes.

And Kim brings up Viola’s number again, hitting the call button.

This time, Viola answers right away. “Kim?”

A breath like a jolt. “What happened?”

“We did it—”

Like a whitecap breaking over her head, Kim doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence. There’s just rushing water churning around her, whipping her jacket against her skin, pressing her blouse coldly to her back, sticking to her, filling her lungs until she can break the surface and breathe again. She stares at the pale sky, so blue it’s almost white, like the world has been bleached, and she hears the rush of surf and water clearing.

“Kim—” Viola’s voice cuts back through.

“We did it?” Kim repeats.

“You ready to hear your new favorite words? Reversed and remanded for a new trial.” Viola’s voice is quick and giddy, and she sounds like the woman Kim hired all those years ago, so passionate and eager. “You were right from the start, Kim. The aggravated departure—”

Viola rattles through her speech as if she’s still in the courtroom giving oral arguments. The mess of that trial, the lack of any bias disclosures—and the cherry on top, maybe the only thing that truly mattered: the gaps they discovered in the trial transcript, enough missed by the stenographer during all the commotion.

“Ultimately, the appellate judges decided they couldn’t rule on it,” Viola says now. “Enough to question procedure but not enough to arrive at their own answers.”

Kim nods, tipping her head back against the building. The stone is cold through her scalp. “Does Jimmy know yet?”

“I got through to him right before I called you,” Viola says. “He knows.”

“Good,” Kim says, grinning. She half laughs, pressing her palm to her chest. “Good, good.” She imagines him, finally, after trying not to imagine him all day: sitting somewhere inside echoing concrete walls, surrounded by snow.

She wants to see him.

“What did he say?” Kim asks.

“He was pretty quiet, but he seemed happy,” Viola says.

“A retrial…” Kim echoes, hushed. “A second chance.” It doesn’t sound right. After everything, it’s not a second chance—it’s a third, or a fifth, or a tenth, and deep down inside somewhere she thinks they shouldn’t be given it.

But Viola makes a humming noise of agreement. “You ready for a fight, Kim?”

Kim laughs again, rolling the back of her head against the wall, the rough surface almost too much. She’s never wanted a fight more. Her hands itch at her sides—wanting to be done with bar study already, wanting her license back, wanting to step into the ring again.

“Are you at the grant thing?” Viola asks.

Kim tips her head forward. “Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’ll be a bit easier, now,” Kim murmurs. “A lot easier.”

“Good,” Viola says. A voice rises on the other end of the line, rapid chattering, and Viola clears her throat. “I have to go,” she says. “But, Kim? We did it.”

Kim swallows and nods. It feels—unreal, it feels as frozen as these bronze figures, like the boy stuck halfway through his skateboard trick.

He and Kim both, waiting for gravity to return.

Viola says goodbye, and the call ends before Kim can find the words to echo it, even to say thank you. She clutches her phone even tighter, pressing it to her chest now, too. She breathes against it.

But it’s no easier to breathe now than it was inside. She feels like she’s run miles, like she’s run here from the airport—from Miami—from a federal prison. She closes her eyes and blue specks swell against the darkness.

A low voice: “Kim?”

Kim starts—spinning around.

It’s Lynn, standing in the shade of the building. Has Viola texted her already, too? But Lynn’s expression twists, the tanned lines around her eyes scrunched with worry, with uncertainty.

Kim exhales, shaking her head in wonder. “We got the retrial.”

Lynn’s shoulders sink and she grins, stepping closer. “Really?”

Kim nods. “Really,” she says. “Viola did it.”

“‘Course she did,” Lynn says simply. “Duh.” She tilts her head, and her gaze flickers down to the phone trapped in Kim’s fingers, and then back to her eyes.

Kim realizes her hands are shaking now, there against her chest—as if this whole time she’s been holding up some great weight and now she’s released it. Her muscles, exhausted, tremble.

Lynn holds out her arms. “Here,” she says. “C’mere.”

So Kim steps forward into the hug. Lynn rubs her palm on Kim’s back, firm and steady. She’s massaging out eighteen months of hopelessness and hope, of preparation and chance and late night phone calls. Postponed dates and court transcripts and arguments with clerks and all of it for this, just for a chance to try again.

Kim sends up a shapeless thank you to the three appellate court judges who decided there was enough wrong with Jimmy’s trial to warrant this. She needs to see Jimmy and she needs to congratulate him, and she wants to add, even though she shouldn’t—this is still because of you, you lunatic, you made it enough of a circus, they lost their grip on the reins.

Only Jimmy McGill, she thinks, her heart filling.

Lynn’s hand slows, but Kim can tell she’s not going to step back until Kim does. They stand there, locked as if in bronze, hidden around the corner from the Hyatt Regency ballroom.

Up there, above them: a room of people who might slowly be hearing the news, too. Jimmy’s appeal, another thing they were all thinking about the entire time—or deliberately not thinking about, in order to go on with their black tie lives and their black-and-white arguments.

Kim can’t go back in there now. She’d look too damned happy.

The banner hangs on the convention center across the street, yellow and optimistic, draped across the empty facade like an enormous smile.

Kim laughs, tucking her face into Lynn’s shoulder.

Kim waits for the hotel internet to slowly load the next video. She’ll try to fit in one more lecture tonight, she thinks, rubbing her fingers into her forehead. She waits for the progress bar to buffer a little more before hitting play, and one of the three familiarly droll Barbri speakers appears on her screen. Today, he’s talking about wills and trusts.

Kim rolls her head on her neck, stretching stiff muscles. The content tonight is reasonably familiar to her, at least. She shoots a message off to Patty, simple and emotionless—We did it. Retrial.—then rests her chin on her palm and watches the screen. She taps her fingers on her lips.

The flow of words from the lecture prods her memory, igniting old mnemonics and memory aids. She jots some down. It all seems to come easier, now, and she’s surprised. She thinks after so many years it should be harder.

But she’s not feeling the same crush of time and pressure as when she was younger. She can recall those days: just another month left to learn every single thing she needs to know, to make sure that she passes the bar exam on her first try and gets the right job at the right law firm, and gets onto the right track to climb the ladder higher and higher.

She’d seen that same pressure in the eyes of the kids at Miami Law, rushing in and out of lectures that Kim was only half attending. Auditing them—just there to listen and learn, not there to sit any exams. She still has her hard won degree.

The Barbri lecture drones on. She stands, leaving it going on her laptop as she changes into pajamas, as she brushes her teeth. Maybe she’s finding it easier now that she’s not looking to the law for answers anymore. It’s no longer a system of belief to finally solve the world, to solve her and her broken life.

She spits into the sink, then washes her face. She pats her skin dry with the fresh hotel towel. Sometimes, she remembers Chuck McGill in a dark hearing room. The law is sacred.

The law was never sacred.

From the other room: her cellphone, ringing lowly. She hangs the towel back on the rack and wanders over. She flips her phone around, expecting to see Viola’s name, but she doesn’t.

It’s a random cellphone number instead. Long, scrolling over the screen.

She answers. “Kim Wexler.”

A flicker of silence, before: “Hey, there.”

She’s not used to hearing him on a call without the robotic preamble of the prison phone system to give her a moment to prepare. His voice is unmistakable, but his name emerges from her lips as a question, anyway: “Jimmy?”

“Big day, huh?” Jimmy says, dumb and carefree, as if he thinks she’s not going to be able to see through him.

Her laptop is still going and she mutes it. The lecturer in his old-fashioned leisure suit mimes silently about living trusts. She closes her eyes and presses her fingertips into her eyes. Standing there.

“Kim?” Jimmy asks, softer now. A rustle, as if he’s moving the phone away from his head and then returning it. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

She laughs weakly. “I can hear you.”

It’s his turn to be silent. He’s just breathing.

She presses the phone tighter against her cheek. In the lamplight of her hotel room—on a clear line, with no clicks of sporadic monitoring, it feels like the old days. It feels like she’s fallen asleep, feels like he’s woken her up in the middle of the night.

“How are you calling me?” she asks, worried that she doesn’t actually want to know the answer.

“I traded with a guy for fifteen minutes on his cellphone,” Jimmy says, and there’s a hint of his old self in the tone, wily and familiar. “Damn burners always end up in here, can’t imagine how…”

Kim sits on the edge of the bed, the mattress sinking. “Traded with a guy?”

Jimmy hums, and unlike the erratic prison payphones, this cellphone is sensitive enough to pick up the low sounds, the rumble of his throat. “Just food from the kitchen. Couple of onions and some tomato paste.”

Kim almost laughs. “Onions?”

“Pretty tough to smuggle out, trust me,” Jimmy says. “Hey, it’s a whole different economy in here.”

“A couple of onions for a contraband phone call,” Kim murmurs. “Some exchange rate.” She knows he’s still picking and choosing what he shares with her: always just these carefully neutral glimpses of prison life. A kitchen job. Smuggled onions. He still doesn’t want her to worry.

There’s a loud metallic noise in the background, and then Jimmy speaks softer: “Sorry that I couldn’t manage more than fifteen minutes.”

“Jimmy…” she starts.

“It’s just—” He inhales. “It’s two weeks until you’re here again and I had to—” His words stop so suddenly it’s as if the line has cut out, but then she hears him breathing again, steady and low.

Maybe he feels the same as her: terrified of voicing this new reality, as if as soon as he mentions the appeal hearing, the result will change. She feels a knot in her throat.

The man on her laptop mouths silently, gesturing to a blackboard. Behind the desk, a cord snakes from an outlet up to a wall-mounted television. The screen is dark, and she can see her reflection in it: a brown-haired figure on the end of a paisley bedspread, somehow curling her whole body around a cellphone. A question mark.

Jimmy clears his throat. His voice is tentative: “Thank you, Kim.”

Her chest hurts. “For what?” She tightens her fingers into a fist on her knee. “Today was all Viola.”

“It wasn’t,” Jimmy says, but he doesn’t elaborate.

Kim just shakes her head, as if he can see the gesture. “We don’t know how the retrial will go. You might not get a shorter sentence.”

“What, with you in that courtroom?” he says. “Come on.” His tone shifts, lighter again. “So, how goes the studying?”

The Barbri lecture continues, muted, on her laptop screen. She’ll have to start again from the beginning later, or tomorrow. “It’s going well.”

“Really?” Jimmy asks, sounding doubtful. Another rustle from his end of the call. “‘Cause I remember what you were like last time. Talking in your sleep.”

She wants to say—stop this, stop reaching for soft moments in the past when it’s so, so far from the present. Or maybe she wants to ask him to keep going, to remind her of memories that are lost to her, to give her these old things as if they’re new again.

“I could test you,” Jimmy murmurs.

Kim grins. “Yeah?”

“Bring your old flashcards,” he says. “We can do a pop quiz. Real property and family law.”

Kim chuckles. “I think I lent those to you in the mid-nineties.”

Jimmy clicks his teeth. “Feds probably have them, then,” he says. “Can’t really blame ‘em, your study notes always looked like state secrets.”

Her laugh is weaker this time. She can feel the minutes vanishing. When she closes her eyes again, his breath is so close against her ear, she can almost feel the weight of him on the bed beside her, can feel it like he’s in the room.

Even the thought of having him here feels like a dangerous excess—she should be thankful just for the call, for his voice in her ears, for him making it out of Albuquerque.

“You were careful, right?” she says, her breath hitching.

In the long silence before he answers, she knows he’s understood the question. There’s a scratching sound, then another distant clatter. “Nobody saw me, Kim. No riskier than an expired bar card.”

“I don’t need to use that anymore,” she whispers.

A breath down the line. “And I won’t steal anything else,” he says. “I just… I wanted to call you.”

She shakes her head helplessly. Her nails dig into her palm and she loosens her fist. “Well, I still am, you know.”

He hums questioningly. “What?”

The word tumble like last time, their meaning almost too much to bear: “Glad you’re alive.”

Another breath, sharper. His words crack a little. “More alive today.”

Her reflection in the wall-mounted television slumps, curling tighter. Dark hair covers her face and she tucks it back then brushes her hand over her eyes.

She shouldn’t need more than this.

Somewhere, up the interstate in Santa Fe, she can picture Viola and Lynn celebrating: a successful hearing, a risky civil suit settled. Kim imagines Lynn last night, giving up on Viola making it to bed at a reasonable hour. She imagines the low conversation over breakfast, Lynn’s jokes about Viola’s nerves. Lynn waking, probably, to the sound of Viola already working in there—making coffee, pouring cereal.

The knot in her throat tightens. Hearing Jimmy moving around in the kitchen every morning feels like an unforgivable luxury, almost disgusting in its ease and joy. Right now, alone in this hotel room, she can’t believe she got to have it for a couple of years. She can’t believe she only got to have it properly for a couple of years. His footsteps in their bathroom, in the kitchen. The opening and closing of the fridge.

She remembers a house at the end of a cul-de-sac, laughing and spraying water at each other in a shower enclosed with glass bricks. They both pretended it meant more to him than her.

Jimmy breathes, the sound traveling to her through the snow and the mountains. “Y’know, the nuns at St. Mary’s always said that hope is a virtue,” he says softly.

She curls her hand around the edge of the bedspread, staring at her reflection as if she’s speaking to herself. “Did you believe them?”

He doesn’t reply. It hasn’t been fifteen minutes, she thinks, not yet. She can still hear the hum of the call, the connection.

But while she waits for his answer, she hopes. Her mirrored self sits in a different room, in a different place, with blue countertops. She can’t see much of the rest of the house, but she knows it’s smaller than that one they visited. No long hallways or twisting stairs.

She needs to be able to hear him no matter where he is, moving around before she wakes.

Chapter Text

Kim can still hear the applause. The ripple of the parents clapping at the end of the recital. The noise doesn’t even seem like it’s coming from the auditorium behind her. It sounds like it’s on the prairie—the wind making the entire world bring its hands together in pity.

She clenches her jaw. The sun warms the dust in the air and the entire parking lot smells like fire.

But Kim’s glad, actually, that her mom didn’t show. She didn’t want anyone there anyway. This way nobody was watching her. She didn’t have a solo and she didn’t know anyone in the audience. She was just part of the group, one of the orchestra up there on the stage in the nice clothes.

Until she wasn’t anymore. The rest of the group are gone now. They’ve already left the parking lot with their parents. Stampeding over the ground like a herd of wild animals. Like wildebeests in the savanna, maybe, she thinks, seeing a photo from a library book. That’s what they looked like.

She stoops to tie her shoe. Her laces curl at the end. Behind her, the auditorium door closes. She hears a bar clicking into place. She straightens, and the sun bakes the air.

Next week, Mrs. Turner will grade them on their performances. She’ll go through the class one by one and tell them how much they still need to improve. Sometimes, Mrs. Turner won’t tell Kim exactly where she messed up. Sometimes, she’ll ask instead. What did you do wrong, Kim? And then it’s a new kind of quiz.

Usually, Kim will just say she doesn’t know.

Kim lifts her cello case onto her back, settling the straps around her shoulders. It’s a familiar weight. As she walks out across the parking lot, she imagines that the paint marks over the cement are an enormous musical staff. This staff has more than five lines, and as she crosses them she’s a note rising higher and higher until it’s so high she can’t hear it anymore.

By the time she leaves the lot, she’s so high-pitched she’s invisible. Maybe only dogs can hear her, now. One of the yards along this street has a sandy Labrador sleeping in it some days, and she thinks today his ears will prick up before she turns the corner.

The dog’s not in the yard. The shade from a lone tree seems dark and hungry. Hungry and dark enough to swallow a dog who wants to keep cool. Dust and sand drifts around the fraying edges, like someone is blowing the top layer off the Earth.

She leaves Webster Street. She passes the backs of stores that only look like proper buildings from the front. From behind, these stores just seem like black squares. Empty and peeling. Blank paper waiting to be filled in with something real.

Her lungs hurt a little with the burning dust and she stops. She takes off her cello bag and she leans against the wall in the shade. She closes her eyes for a second.

(She knows what she did wrong today. Mrs. Turner doesn’t need to tell her.)

Kim opens her eyes and stares at the cello. She wants to leave it here, hidden in these black squares. Mrs. Turner will ask what happened to it next week and Kim will say she doesn’t know. It must have vanished. This cello with the name of the middle school written on the body and some unknown kid’s initials etched into the back of the fingerboard.

It’s quiet here behind the buildings. She can’t hear the audience’s applause at all anymore, or even the rustle of the prairie. The wind keeps blowing and the whole world seems to beat with it, dead and hollow like a slackened drum.

The courtroom is heavy and dim, hiding from Miami’s morning rain. A judge shuffles papers and sniffs and the sound of it comes echoing from his mic, amplified tenfold.

“Our next case this morning is United States v. Clarke, number thirteen dash 41667,” the judge mutters, his gravelly voice absurdly amplified, too. Glasses slide down his nose, and he pushes them back up, then nods. “Mrs. Lyon, you may proceed.”

Patty rises. “Thank you, your honor, and may it please the court,” she murmurs. “Patty Lyon on behalf of Deborah Clarke. I’d like to reserve two minutes for rebuttal.” She wets her forefinger and flicks through her papers, then settles.

Kim clocks the moment Patty really relaxes, right before she resumes speaking. Her earrings today—little discs patterned with half moons—stop swinging.

“I usually take these things in order.” Patty’s voice is much more suited to these booming mics, and it fills the room confidently. “But I’d like to jump ahead to the fourth issue we raised on appeal, because I have a couple of simple but important points to make, and then I’ll back up and start with the first issue. The fourth issue—this is the thirty-nine month variance based on obstruction…”

Kim smiles. She’s glad she came. She almost didn’t—and she probably shouldn’t have. Back at her apartment, bar study waits like a couple of dozen ticking clocks, but she’s ahead of schedule, and Patty had a full docket today, and Kim needed it.

The courtroom is historic in a slightly oppressive way: the walls too close and the ceilings too low. Dark wooden beams rise around the judge’s bench, so dark they’re almost black. An iron fence separates the public gallery from the hallway beyond. Along the western wall, the windows are tall and ornate, the glass a little warped. The curtains that fall on either side of the windows are thick and historic, too, each missing half a dozen rings.

In the end, Patty doesn’t even need her entire time for rebuttal. As they leave the courtroom, she hands off her notes to Kim, asking, “What do you think?”

“I think that went well,” Kim says. “Really well.”

“Don’t tempt fate, girl, honestly,” Patty says, but she’s smiling. She thumbs the button for the elevator, her lips pursed, staring at the etched brass doors. “They have ninety days and then I’ll be knocking. Deb’s been in that cell long enough.”

Kim smiles. “Well, I think you saved her the extra thirty-nine months.”

The elevator doors open. Patty steps inside. “Look at you,” she says, eyes twinkling, “an appeal goes your way once, and suddenly you’re Atticus Finch.”

Kim chuckles, stashing Patty’s papers inside her briefcase, then leaning against the elevator rail. She tucks her hair behind her ear. Someone’s abandoned their umbrella in here. It’s propped against a corner, spreading a small pool of water across the floor.

The cabin climbs two levels and then she and Patty emerge into hallways with a polished, checkerboard floor. The ceilings seem too high for the narrowness of the passages, barely enough room for the ornate benches that line the walls. One of the district prosecutors waits on one of the benches, coffee balanced on his knee, and Patty slows.

Kim hands over the next case without asking, and Patty nods a thanks. She approaches the sleepy prosecutor, and Kim watches the conversation play out in their body language alone. By the time the three of them enter Courtroom 6-b, Patty’s face is a mask, the kind of expressionless canvas that must mark something significant.

This courtroom is even closer and darker, though someone here has painted over the dark wooden beams in the ceiling with white paint as if to give the illusion of depth.

When their case is called, the prosecutor rises. “Your honor, I’m happy to say we’ve reached an agreement with the defense. Ten months probation.”

The judge’s eyebrows climb in surprise and Kim’s heart climbs, too. It’s as good of a deal as they could’ve hoped for. She holds back her smile and exhales with relief. Everything seems to be breaking their way, the balls sinking into all the right pockets.

Back outside, in the hallway, she takes Patty’s case notes from her again.

“For God’s sake, don’t say anything,” Patty says, shaking her head.

So Kim swallows her congratulations this time.

“And you’re supposed to be living and breathing bar study, Ms. Wexler,” Patty says sternly, her earrings swaying.

“Am I?” Kim asks, and she thinks—this is the living and breathing. Footsteps ring around them and the old brass doors of the elevators creak and groan as if they’re breathing harder today, too.

“How long? Two weeks?”

“Two and a half,” Kim says, shifting her briefcase from one hand to the other. She chuckles. “You know I’ve passed it before, right?”

“You weren’t this cocky last year,” Patty says wryly, raising her eyebrows as if with a single look she can recall the day Kim had told her about these new plans of hers—working for her for real, a lawyer again, helping people, pieces of a nervous speech Kim had delivered to the nonplussed but patient Patty. Who’d had the decency that day to not ask about Jimmy, to pretend not to see that piece of this choice.

“Yeah, well…” Kim half smiles. “I’m feeling good today.”

“We did have a good day, didn’t we?” Patty says, and she smiles back then throws a dismissive hand in Kim’s direction. “Now enough help from you. Angelo will sort tomorrow’s caseload.” Her newest aid: young and fresh-faced and a little slower than Kim likes.

Kim nods, relenting.

Patty pats her arm, warm and firm, and gestures to the elevators. “But let’s go tell Carla right away. She’s going to be so relieved.”

Kim follows after, crossing the checkerboard floor of the courthouse. Whatever bar study she could have crammed into the three hours she’s been here today was worth this soft feeling that’s settling around her like a blanket.

She carries the blanket with her, out into the rain. She feels waterproof.

Back at her apartment, her upstairs neighbors are moving around more than normal. Heavy footsteps pass back and forth above her, and low voices chatter and laugh.

Kim opens her desk drawer and finds her headphones. She settles them over her head. They bring a kind of soft silence even before she picks any music. Kristin Hersh sings right through Kim’s skin, and her study notes seem to grow clearer with every song, as if the pen she used to ink them was bolder and more permanent than a cheap ballpoint.

She hums under her breath and flicks to the next sheet. She taps the end of her pen in time with the bass line, and everything around her vanishes: no more rain, no more footsteps, just her and the impending bar exam, slowly approaching each other.

Kim can see the convention center from her hotel room window. Behind it, Tampa Bay glows under the sun, the water so blue it looks like a silk dress shirt spread over the land.

It’s early evening but it feels like the middle of the night already, the world bright and the sea glittering. A sunlit midnight, and she’s wide awake.

Her bar outlines spread over her hotel bed. There are a lot fewer pages than last time. The content of the outlines is different, too. Where once she had struggled to anchor every piece of information about criminal acts onto one sheet of paper, grasping desperately for shortcuts and hoping just the words “status v. act” would bring into her mind all the complexities of Robinson v. California, now she finds her pages are mostly filled with names. Under criminal acts, she writes Kenny Davenport, and when she reads his name she remembers the man in his fraying coat, and she remembers the entire argument she’d prepared for the judge.

The old cases float around her, like boring legal versions of Scrooge’s ghosts. She imagines them coming to her in the exam itself: three visitors, one for each essay question.

And Kim finds herself, bizarrely, looking forward to it. Three essays tomorrow morning, three new cases on her desk. And then one hundred questions, rapid fire as if she’s been caught by a prosecutor in a rising elevator—and then returning the next day for two hundred more.

Kim feels like some days she got through half that many during a single meeting with Kevin Watchtell. A question stem in a big belt buckle sitting sideways over the table from her, rambling his way to the actual issue.

She covers a yawn and closes her notes. Somewhere, Jimmy’s voice tells her that if she doesn’t know a subject by the night before, she doesn’t know it. Somewhere he’s dragging her out for burgers to take her mind off the next day, in a world where she needs to have her mind taken off it. Elsewhere in the hotel, she knows, other examinees will be poring over their notes, desperately trying to fill every remaining minute, reeking of flop sweat.

Kim makes a tidy stack of her outlines and her Barbri books and then opens her laptop. She checks her emails one last time—nothing new—and then closes it again.

That night, in the shower, the hot water seems to run inside her, filling her with a warmth that she carries even after she’s dry. She feels it still running through her, hopeful and sure, as she moves on bare feet over the bedroom carpet—so new it still springs back with every step.

The next morning, a brisk wind blows in off the bay. Kim’s avoided coffee, but she feels as alert as the breeze. The convention center climbs out of the flat cement of the marina, the whole plaza claiming space back from the sea. The center sits atop a raised area, and Kim climbs the steps to the main entrance, the sun reflected at her from dozens of windows. The railings and the walkways are blue, because even half a country away she can’t escape sky blue accents.

She joins a group of trembling kids who huddle outside the convention center doors like they’re being held at gunpoint. She feels ridiculous laughter bubbling at the back of her throat—and it feels safe, halfway across the country in this sun-strewn Tampa morning, to think it for once: She knows gunpoint, and this isn’t gunpoint.

Kim presses her fingers to her mouth, shaking the smile away. She imagines telling all these kids her ex-husband is the Saul Goodman, and she almost laughs out loud again, and all the nervous faces around her think she’s lost her mind.

But of course they’re all about to lose their minds. Sanity and reason vanishing as soon as they pass into the examination room. At the entrance, a proctor checks Kim’s driver’s license and her admission ticket, marking her off a long, long list.

And Jimmy’s federal prisoner number drifts to the top of her mind, as if she’s going to be asked for that next. As if her hand is going to be stamped with invisible ink here, too, to make sure she’s not a prisoner trying to escape. Just like in Montrose prison, the people around her carry transparent plastic bags. No watches, no food, no cellphones. Only permitted items may pass these heavy doors.

And then Kim’s seated, getting as comfortable as she can at one of the hundreds of stiff wooden desks. A solemn hush spreads through the room slowly, like silt through still water. It’s only broken by a proctor reading out the exam instructions, and the room listens quietly. The examinees float at their desks like some hundred boats on an enormous lake—and then they begin.

The first time Kim returns to shore, it’s for the morning break. She stretches her legs and gets a drink of water and then goes to the bathroom, and then it’s back into the long exam room, back to the steady ripple of pens over page after page after page. Time moves, but the clocks are patient with her today, waiting at the top of each hour as if making sure she’s ready to move on.

The lunch break is longer. Kim walks along the coastline of their allowed area, passing seagoing travelers: examinees sitting on the convention center steps, flicking through flashcards or desperately reading outlines. She eats a sandwich on a bench in the sun and breathes slowly, thinking of nothing. Years ago, on a very different lunch break, she’d sat inside her car and pressed her palms hard against her eyes, knowing she’d fucked it all up, sure she’d ruined everything.

Today, a seagull hops closer to Kim’s foot. She tosses it the crust of her sandwich even though she knows you’re not supposed to.

The afternoon bleeds past to the same rhythm, the same steady drift of boats in a current. Kim keeps time with her breathing, with her heartbeat, flicking one page then the next as the number of remaining questions dwindles. The answers rise to the surface and she marks them. It feels easier than a visitation form, it’s easier than checking boxes about her criminal convictions and her relationship to the prisoner.

It’s almost dark by the time she leaves the bright room for the final time that day. The night air comes cold off the bay, smelling of salt and gasoline. Kim rubs her palms over her cheeks as if she can return a sense of groundedness to them, instead of this floating, halfway feeling.

She heads back to her hotel room. Her cellphone waits on the nightstand, and she turns it on and checks it for the first time today. There’s a good luck message from Patty and another from Viola, and she smiles softly and plugs the phone back into the charger. She shrugs out of her jacket and drapes it over the back of the chair, then walks to the window.

Night glitters across Tampa Bay, distant buildings reflected hundredfold in the rippling water, as if the mirrored city is a hundred times more populous than the real one—a place of flickering lights and passing cars and enormous, tangled buildings. In the real city, the entire hotel feels quiet, and the convention center dims half of its outdoor lamps, only leaving the walkways and steps illuminated.

Kim keeps the blinds open. She collects her jacket again, slipping it back on and checking for her room card before heading down to the bar.

As soon as she walks in she clocks them, the other examinees. They stand out like black mold: growing in hungry groups in booths, at tables, conspicuous in their obvious performativity. They’re not nervous. They’re feeling fine. They’re just getting something to eat and one drink; they’re taking their mind off it.

Kim settles on a stool at the bar. She studies a menu, and when the bartender ambles over she orders the Thai salad and a glass of wine.

Down the bar from her, a group of others rib each other. They’re not talking about the exam—nobody’s talking about the exam—but they’re taking out the tension in jokes about other things. They laugh and rehash dorm room arguments, faces ashen, sitting here as if they’d agreed on it weeks ago but now would rather be anywhere else.

Kim’s wine arrives. One of the guys on the edge of the nearest group tracks the glass as the bartender sets it down, and his eyebrows rise as Kim sips it. He leans closer. He’s so young he looks like he shouldn’t have been allowed to order the red wine in his hand, and his hair is bleached blond except for the roots.

“You were in there today, right?” he asks, almost shouting, as if the music in here is louder than it is. “The exam?”

Kim tilts her head. “You had enough time to look around?”

He grins, and then answers seriously, as if he thinks she’s sincerely interested. “No, during the breaks,” he says. His gaze flicks down then back up again. “What’s your name?”

She sips her wine. “Kim.”

“Well, hey, Kim,” he says, actually lowering his voice a little. “How did you go?”

“I think they tell you not to talk about the exam between each day,” she says dryly, lifting her eyebrows.

“Oh, right,” he mutters, nodding. “Okay.” He taps a knuckle on the bar and then reaches for a coaster. He rolls it back and forth.

“How are you feeling?” Kim asks.

“Yeah, great,” the guy says, but his voice cracks. He swallows, setting the coaster down and looking away from her.

She smiles kindly. “You know,” she says, “a friend of mine took the exam three times.” She holds up her fingers, emphasizing it. “Three.”

“What happened?” the guy asks. “Did he give up?”

Kim shakes her head. The question feels too familiar, the same expectation as always. Even from this bleached-blond guy in a hotel bar who’s barely old enough to order a drink. “He didn’t give up.”

The guy relaxes a little. “So he passed, he’s a lawyer now?”

“Oh, no, right now he’s in prison,” Kim says lightly. “So, what did you put for the family law question?”

The guy is spluttering—he’s snorted his wine. He wipes his hand over his face then reaches for a napkin, coughing into it.

“I’m just kidding,” Kim says, and she takes a drink. The white wine is cool and dry.

He reaches for another napkin and dries the top of his shirt, then studies her again. He doesn’t run his gaze down her body this time. He clears his throat and grabs his wine again—right back on the horse—and then his friends tug on his shoulder, drawing him away to one of the booths. He waves to Kim and she lifts a hand, smirking.

On their way across the bar, she hears him asking the others what they put for the family law question, and they yell at him to shut up.

Kim’s food finally arrives, and she eats slowly. She replies to Viola and Patty’s messages from that morning, telling them she feels okay, that she thinks the first day went pretty well.

The groups of other examinees are still seeping into the furniture when she leaves. They’re wilting more than earlier, the pretense draining away, exhaustion replacing adrenaline. Upstairs again, Kim passes a guy seated in the hallway, curled around some Post-It note marked outlines with his back against a door. He’s wearing chunky headphones and doesn’t notice her, his eyes flicking back and forth over the text.

Kim unlocks her door. She drifts over the soft carpet, taking off her jacket again, showering and changing into pajamas. Little horses leap over her pajama pants, galloping as she frees her laptop from its carry case and settles cross-legged on the bed. The horses stop running.

She turns the laptop on. Her browser remembers all her tabs, and she closes them one by one. The final Barbri lecture. Her timetable. Airline deals—though she refreshes that one first, just in case, but there’s nothing cheap.

Her email client pings. There’s one from the Florida Board of Bar Examiners. Instructions for the test, maybe useful if she’d checked before eight in the morning. Something Patty’s copied her into that she’ll read through later.

And an email from Corrlinks telling her that she has a new notification. The hotel room shrinks a little and she swallows her breath.

She clicks through the link and signs in. Her inbox is still pretty empty here—a welcome email she hasn’t deleted yet, and a couple from weeks ago. The subject lines of these others are all the same, unerring in their simplicity: INMATE: MCGILL, JAMES M.

And, bold blue at the top, there’s a new one today, the time stamp just a few hours ago. Jimmy’s rec time.

She exhales and opens it.

Kim

I hope this gets to yo today. Sorry abot the missing letter, that key is broken on this keyboard, the one next to ‘y’. I know I said it before bt the machines here are even older than we are. They sent three fine yong Americans to the moon with these exact compters.

If this did find yo between exam days, I’ve prepared some argments for cross. Step onto the stand when yo’re ready. Ready?

OK. First off stop sweating that one qestion, I know yo got it right. Were yo in possession of yor faclties? Then yo didn’t forget any rles either. And if yo get stck tomorrow jst write abot that time yo arged Bill down becase of one bit of badly filed evidence. They’ll pass yo in a minte. I know it’s mltichoice bt they’d be blind not to respect that.

Fake meatloaf here tonight. Eat something nice for me. Chinese maybe. Pick some p on yor way home.

Jimmy

Kim presses her palm to her mouth and laughs softly. She re-reads the message. She can hear his voice in the words.

The laptop screen dims and she lights it up again. She starts typing. There’s a character limit, a number counting down at the bottom of the client. It seems to run too fast, skipping digits, slipping away before it should. Unlike in the exam, when time had slowed for her when she needed it, now it rushes.

But she fills the space. She’ll send him some ‘u’s for the keyboard, as many yous as she can: You were right and Do you want egg rolls? and I’ll see you again soon.

As Kim walks out through the center doors, the Albuquerque civic plaza is heavy like a comforter, pressing her down and down. It feels like a dream; she shouldn’t be here on the other side yet. She can’t be done with it. She’s just fallen asleep in the middle of the exam, and nobody has woken her up, and her time is ticking down.

The evening reaches with long fingers inside her brain, hunting for the answer to the next question. She knows that she doesn’t know it, she has no answer ready.

Someone bumps into her and she keeps walking, following the flood of examinees. The dream plaza is bright and flat with blue rails around everything, and fountains burn with the smell of chlorine.

“Kim!”

He appears like something in a dream, too, the way people in dreams materialize from nothing. She imagines describing it to someone: then somehow Jimmy was there, and he had crinkly hands—or something crinkling in his hands. A coffee cup in one and a bottle in the other, the label hidden by a paper bag.

“Couple of options,” Jimmy says, holding out the coffee, then whatever alcohol is hidden in the bag, then the coffee again. Each word he says is like a pin, fixing her a little firmer to this melting dream world.

She murmurs, “Thank you.”

“Congratulations,” he says. “Thought you might want to celebrate, you know?”

Kim nods. Somehow, she’s holding a coffee, though she doesn’t remember picking an option. The coffee is from a place near Jimmy’s apartment. She recognizes the branding on the cup.

A hand on her arm. “You okay?” Jimmy asks softly.

She tries to look inside herself for whatever emotion might be waiting in there, but there’s nothing. She folds her lips around her teeth and hunts. Maybe this is part of living in a dream, too. Her real self is gone; her real self is asleep. She says, “I think I’m just empty.”

Jimmy makes a low noise of agreement, and when he asks where she’s parked, she gestures over in the right direction. Her Taurus is somewhere in the distance on the edge of the world.

They start walking. She knows that she’s fallen asleep because she can’t remember any of the last few hours, she can’t remember the exam at all. She was supposed to answer two hundred multi choice questions today, but she can’t remember a single one. She knows that she’s fallen asleep because of the way her feet come down too slowly on the cement, like something outside of her control, something not quite moving right.

Her shoulder bumps into warmth. Jimmy is still here. A lingering guide.

She wants him to say something else, to pin her down with more words. As if he can hear her, he starts yammering, something about kids playing in the fountains. With each sentence, she feels a little more real, and with each sip of coffee she feels a little more real, too. She hasn’t had caffeine in two days.

At her car, she clicks her keys and unlocks it, then settles in the passenger seat. Her body sinks into the fabric as if she hasn’t sat down in hours, as if she’s walked a long way to get here. A long way over a windswept plain that’s blown some of her hair loose, because now it hangs down past her forehead. Threads of golden light that she doesn’t bother brushing away.

Jimmy is sitting in the driver’s seat. He tilts his head.

And then somehow Jimmy was there, she thinks again—but she’s not describing a dream now, she’s describing the real world. And then somehow Jimmy was there.

Even outside the examination room, the statement sits before her like a question waiting to be answered. Her brain is still running in that mode after all these months, automatic.

Why is he here? The big question. On the one hand, it’s inevitable. He’s working for his brother. She thinks half the Catholic boys in Chicago probably end up working for their brothers.

But he doesn’t belong in the desert. Not just because he still burns and peels after a couple of minutes in the sun. This is her place, clean and empty and patient, and it’s the wrong place for him.

In her exhaustion, she can see inside him even a little deeper than usual. She can see his desperation to fill this world, the way he’s trying to claw the right gap for himself.

“What are you thinking about?” Jimmy asks quietly.

It made more sense for him to be in that dream, conjured by her firing neural pathways, than it does for him to be patiently waiting in her car. She hums at the back of her throat and answers the question, another question: “Sleep.”

He chuckles, as if he should’ve expected the answer. “Yeah,” he says, and when he asks if she’s ready to go home, she shakes her head. He pulls his hand back from the ignition and waits again, ready for her next move.

She doesn’t want to go anywhere. She wants to get out of this city with its unanswerable questions and his patient face and her hundreds of MBE answers now sealed away and sent to some unknown examiner who gets to decide her entire fate.

Out loud, she talks about running away. Running to the coast, running to a new life.

She’d take him with her.

The wind presses against her cheek as she leaves the Tampa convention center. She can smell the water from the bay—can hear it, rolling against the marina. It sounds like blown leaves. Some people around her shout, loosing joyous cries up into the night as if they’re just regained their freedom, but mostly everyone moves with a recognizable exhaustion, shuffling and blinking out at the bay.

Kim’s brain is still firing, running three times faster than normal. Sparking with electric current as if preparing to be asked another hundred questions, another two hundred. She’s reading the world around her—everything is a question stem, everything is hiding a trap answer.

She feels like she’s run a long way, and now she’s stepping into a shower, the cool wind on her skin like water.

Someone shouts again, gleeful. Kim runs her fingers down her cheeks and breathes out and then laughs a little. She’s glad she booked that extra night, at the time thinking she’d be too exhausted to make the drive home. But she’s not exhausted this evening. She’s…

She inhales, blinking into the fading light. She wants to walk somewhere, so she walks to the edge of the marina, where the concrete platform hangs above black ink. A low fence strung with rope separates her from the drop.

As she walks along the water’s edge, the fence rope rises and falls through the posts. Up and down like a heart monitor.

The smell of coffee spills from a chain along the marina’s edge, comforting even in its slight artificiality. Kim orders a takeout cup, warming her hands around it in the night. Everything tying her to the rest of the world is back in her hotel room: her cellphone, her laptop, even her clothes. All the pieces of her everyday self.

The water flutters and lights appear and disappear across the bay. Kim drains her coffee and the caffeine hums through her skin. Boat engines groan somewhere and the air fills with the acid burn of gasoline. And as she walks she passes bars, and inside the bars she sees the groups of law students that were black mold yesterday tonight burn bright and giddy.

Even though none of them know what’s coming.

The thought should feel daunting, but it doesn’t. For once, the limbo of good news with an uncertain outcome—she got through the bar exam, but she doesn’t know if she’s passed it; Jimmy gets a retrial, but they might not be able to change his sentence—they need to work, they still need to do so much work, and they don’t even have a date yet—for once, the limbo feels comfortable.

Because that’s the wrong word, Kim thinks: limbo. She knows limbo. Limbo is a rust-proof oscillating four-inch nozzle for revolutionary backyard coverage; limbo is Miracle Whip and the stiffness of a long denim skirt and somebody else deciding what you want.

Tonight, she wants a drink. She follows the sound of cheering into a random bar. The laughing kids spread joy through the room like glowing pollen, euphoric in their limbos and their waiting.

Chapter Text

It looks like a map of the stars, a wide board of sky with push pins marking out new constellations. Colors arrive at the corners of white note cards: pink flags and yellow flags and blue flags. A galaxy of Post-It arrows decorated with tiny dates—we’re working on this today, we’re sorting out this tomorrow. Discovery came in yesterday and we’ve got a hearing again next Monday. A world of small things, these flags. Signposts of orderliness.

But zoom out again and the board is a galaxy once more. The push pins twinkle as if their light has traveled through an atmosphere to reach her; the push pins twinkle as if their light was created years before arriving here at her eyes.

“Kim? You with me?”

Kim blinks, turning to her left.

Viola smiles abashedly, adding another Post-It to the board. “It’s silly, I know. But it really helps me to lay things out like this.”

Kim glances at the wall again. Jimmy’s case almost seems tidy like this. Cards crossed off after the appeal. Many more cards still waiting. “I believe you,” Kim says, nodding to Viola. She knows how much it helps, seeing the challenge mapped to a board with Post-Its. A plan of action. A plan of—

Of course she knows.

“It’s a good board,” Kim says.

Viola smiles, ducking her head. She tucks the packet of Post-Its into a bookshelf then wanders over to her desk. “So, the federal prosecutors have filed a motion for a rehearing en banc, but we expected that,” she says. “Of course they’re not happy. But we’ll bat it away, nothing to worry about.”

Kim sits in the chair opposite the desk. Viola’s office is a little tidier than usual today, as if the board has cleared clutter from physical space as well as her mind. The window behind her seems emptier than usual, too. It’s gray outside, a blank and unlit sky. A board with no cards on it yet.

On the desk: the first arrival of discovery, all the evidence the government has on Jimmy McGill laid out on the reclaimed wood between the two of them. This case is reclaimed, too.

Viola adjusts her glasses then flicks a page. “Parts of this thing are held together with duct tape, Kim,” she mutters. “They’ve put almost every charge they wanted to pin on a dead Heisenberg in here.” She turns another page, humming under her breath. “I mean—” She looks up, and chuckles. “It’s a lot. But I’m starting to see why Jimmy got them down to seven years in just a few hours, y’know?”

Kim smiles softly. “That’s Jimmy,” she murmurs, and she draws a piece of paper closer to herself. It’s a summary of the indictments from the federal prosecutors. Accessory-after-the-fact in up to fifteen murders, it says, and the words rise from the page coldly.

Her eyes only lock on one name, though. Gustavo Fring. The letters are dark highways and steel against her palm.

She swallows, and turns to the next sheet. The RICO charges are easier to read through. A sedate list of predicate violations. Across from her, Viola scribbles something on her notepad, and the gray sky above Santa Fe twists with slow-moving clouds. This morning, Kim’s plane had dipped through this same cloud layer, the city emerging all at once from a blanket of glowing white.

At one point, Viola leaves and returns with two cups of tea. She always makes Kim’s the same as her own, milky and just a little sweet. Unlike coffee, Kim hardly drinks tea beyond this office, so the taste has become synonymous with her days spent here. It tastes like her heart in her throat, it tastes like an impending Montrose visit. Like a drive through the Colorado mountains in the early morning, the sun rising through the windows of a rental car.

Viola sips hers without seeming to taste any of that. She sets it down on a coaster and focuses on Kim. “I know it’s better not to ask, but how are you feeling?” A little chuckle. “About the bar exam, I mean.”

Kim smiles. “Good,” she says. “I feel good.” And she still does, even in the light of day, even beyond the bubble of that Tampa evening along the marina.

Viola nods. “And how are things otherwise? Like, with the legal aid?”

“It’s busy,” Kim says, warmth filling her chest. It’s busier than it’s ever been. It feels like the start of something, as if Titusville had been what was holding the practice back the whole time. “Patty’s working hard. Lots of immigration cases—more every day. The governor’s openly opposing the Dream Act, promising an Arizona-style immigration law.”

Viola sighs a familiar, weary sigh.

“It’s good work. And it beats writing about sprinklers,” Kim says, and then at Viola’s expression she chuckles. “You didn’t know. That’s what happens when you hire a part-time paralegal without checking her resume.”

“Sprinklers?” Viola repeats.

Kim shrugs. “Sprinklers, irrigation. You’d think it already rains enough in Florida, but wait for the dry season.”

“Oh, uh—” Viola starts. “Okay.” And then she nods encouragingly, as if expecting Kim to want to talk more about it.

Kim’s chest fills with fondness, and she shakes her head. As if there could be anything more to say. She drinks more of the sweetened tea and then studies Viola’s latest notes, trying to read the writing upside down. There are already a couple of new cards waiting to go up on the board with the others.

The colorful board. She’ll have to get better at thinking about it. Just another planning board, like so many others. Like her Post-It wall of bar study in an Albuquerque apartment bedroom decades ago. Like the board of bank branch expansion dates in a law office with blue walls and glass brick.

Viola shifts her mug to one side and pushes her glasses up her nose. “So,” she says, business again, “I don’t know exactly what Jimmy said to them, but I can tell you this: They still do not want this to end up in front of a jury.”

Kim raises her eyebrows.

“You should’ve seen the look in Castellano’s eyes,” Viola says. She taps a card. “I’ve actually written it down to remind us. I know it’s more of a gut feeling, but I hope that’s okay.”

“It’s great,” Kim says.

Viola grins at her approval, and then she takes her new set of notecards over to the board. She pins them up. They don’t want this to see a jury, hangs out at the top right. “Actually,” Viola says, twisting back to Kim. “They don’t want to see Jimmy at all.”

Kim, about to drink her tea, lowers the cup again.

“They’re trying to exclude him from any proceedings under 5-612.” Viola pins another card. “Disruptive conduct.”

“Disruptive conduct?” Kim almost smiles. “We can handle that. They’re just throwing things at the wall.”

“Yes, but…” Viola’s forefinger lingers on the end of a pushpin. She adjusts her glasses and then turns, standing a little straighter. “Do we want him there?”

Kim frowns. Viola seems small before the enormous board of colors and notes. She stands there waiting for an answer, eyes wide, looking more like Kim’s old paralegal than she has in a long time.

The question isn’t surprising. Not really. In her mind, Kim sees the well-publicized photo of Jimmy after that hearing, led through the courthouse doors in his metallic suit and crocodile-skin belt. Who would want him anywhere near a judge ever again?

Kim’s pretty sure of the answer, but she asks anyway. “Have you visited him at the prison?”

Viola shakes her head. “Just spoken on the phone.”

Through crackling payphone lines, the words fracturing over the ancient wires. “You should see him, then,” Kim says softly, “before you decide.”

“I—” Viola starts. She ducks her head and then looks up. Her gaze is stronger now. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s amend your visitation request.” She delivers the statement with force, simultaneously pushing a final pin into the board.

But as Viola moves back to her desk, Kim continues watching the cards and the Post-Its. She watches them as closely as if she’s expecting some change. A change in the stars themselves: some distant sun vanishing or exploding.

Nothing explodes. The board waits. Everything they need to do, all the opposition they need to tackle, laid out on black space like galaxies. Across the room now, it seems impossible: the distances between the pushpins measured not in inches but in astronomical units.

Snow turns the Montrose parking lot over in white. There’s a smell of silt and dirt that seems stronger than usual, as if it’s been unburied from somewhere cold and dark by some enormous turning motion. The complex is turning to a new, blank page.

The lot is the emptiest she’s ever seen it. Kim tucks her hands inside her jacket pockets, leading Viola with step after crunching step towards the visitation building.

Inside, there’s a wave of heat, heat that smells like dust burning and seems to vanish too quickly. New signs hang on the wall today: half a dozen additional prohibited items. The icon barring cellphone use has been updated to something that no longer looks like it was sold in the mid-nineties.

The dusty heat settles and dissolves. Kim warms her hands inside her jacket again. She finds a few coins and takes them out now, pre-empting the metal detectors, leaving thirty-five cents on the edge of the administration window counter like the world’s worst bribe.

Viola studies the verbose signs with mild curiosity. She doesn’t say anything and Kim doesn’t either. It’s just another prison visit to a client. One of hundreds. Hidden in her pockets again, Kim’s fingers press into her palms, cold points.

And then the wheels of the routine turn, and an officer leads them through heavy doors and metal detectors and x-rays, and Kim’s left the cigarettes in the car today—for once, nothing to hide, and they’re waved through. The officer guides them out onto the path between the prison buildings.

It’s snowing but not falling. The crystals hang light in the air, the world hazing beyond the prison towers. The path to the first fence has been cleared, but there’s enough fresh snow for them to leave footprints. The three of them cross with cracking steps.

Every time her foot comes down, Kim can feel it in her teeth.

Through the fence gate next, cold metal groaning. It all feels new again with Viola here. It feels like Kim is visiting this place for the very first time, her heart in her hand and her palm curling over her own pulse, trying to hold it steady as she wonders who she’s about to see and what she’s about to say to him. Her heart had trembled, there in her fingers, and her hand had trembled with it.

And then they’re inside, and the routine is turning again. They move down the corridors where their footsteps seem to make the sound of one hundred people, as if everyone in the complex is walking this route right at this moment, trapped between these narrow hallway walls. The officer’s keys jangle and jangle and the noise of that echoes, too. A metal building rattling around them like something fracturing.

He unlocks the door at the end of the hallway and guides them into the room. It’s darker in here today—or maybe the light is just colder, the yellow bulb in the ceiling struggling against the blue-hued weather that slides in from outside. He tells them to wait and the door closes and then they’re alone, standing there in their winter jackets.

All the sound that had built to a crescendo in the hallway now falls away. The snow traps them here in silence: the hanging snow that drifts behind the glass, the hanging snow that swallows the sounds of them breathing and Viola setting down her briefcase and swallows, too, the approach of a prison guard and his prisoner.

So the door opens suddenly, shattering the peace. Jimmy steps through, his head down as always, and then rising to meet Kim’s gaze.

She smiles at him, and the change in the visitation request must’ve reached him, because he doesn’t look surprised to see Viola there.

“No cuffs,” Kim says simply, as she always does, and the familiar click of the handcuff key turning is the last metallic sound in the room—and the guard backs out, and the door shuts, and the silence of the snow settles again.

“Kim,” he says, rubbing his wrists. “Hey, Viola.”

Viola nods to him. “Morning, Jimmy.” The name and the greeting sounds natural coming from her, and Kim’s almost glad it’s taken her this long to visit. Long enough that he can be Jimmy again to her now, easy and simple.

He’s wearing a gray hoodie over his orange uniform, and beneath the uniform a white, long-sleeved undershirt. These days he’s always in at least three layers, and she wonders if his cell is as cold as this room. It feels as if the barred windows are glassless, letting in the freezing mountain air.

Jimmy looks between the two of them, his forehead scrunching.

He’s worried. He’s worried Viola’s here to deliver some bad news. Kim lifts a palm a little. “Nothing’s wrong.”

His eyebrows rise. “No?”

It’s Viola’s turn to glance between them.

Kim shakes her head. “No news,” she says. “I just thought you should meet your new lawyer.”

The smile lines around Jimmy’s eyes crinkle. “I’ve met her before, actually,” he says, tilting his head, his gaze locked on Kim herself. “I’m glad she’s back.”

Kim scoffs. “I meant Viola.”

“I know,” Jimmy says.

“He’s right, though,” Viola says. “I’ve even seen him in his pajamas.”

And Kim snorts. She hadn’t connected those specific mornings in her head, the sun barely risen, the coffee only just brewing in her apartment. Viola arriving to help her with cases and to help her carry cases, and to help drive her to meetings and carry things to meetings—always above and beyond, always outside the job description.

“This is almost the same,” Jimmy says, indicating his prison uniform, but he seems distracted. He fixes Kim with one of the intense stares that live on his face in this place, studying her, and then he says, “So you really are feeling okay about the bar exam.”

Kim nearly laughs. Of course he’d want to talk about that. She shrugs. “I think it went okay.”

They’re in the corner room, the one with three chairs at the table. This time, Jimmy does claim the side with the single chair. “Can’t blame a guy for wondering,” he says, as he settles in it. “But you look calm.”

She inclines her head. Jimmy’s grinning up at her, a light in his eyes sparkling. It’s the most openly happy she’s ever seen him here. He somehow manages to make even the stiff, metal chair look comfortable. As if he could sit here for hours or days or weeks, smiling at her while she talks about the bar exam.

“Can you remember the essay question topics?” he asks.

“Believe it or not…” Kim starts. She widens her eyes in anticipation, like she’s telling a horror story: “Contract law.”

Jimmy brings a palm down gently on the table. “Damn!” he says. “Never can catch a break.”

“You would’ve loved it,” Kim says. “Uniform Commercial Code all the way down.”

“No wonder you’re feeling good,” Jimmy says. “Doubt you could forget that if you tried, you practically killed yourself trying to get that to stick in my head.”

“And it never did.”

“Nope!” Jimmy says brightly.

There’s a scrape of a chair, and Kim’s almost surprised to remember Viola’s still here with them, and they’re still in a cold visitation room in a prison. Viola sits across the table from Jimmy, and Kim moves around behind her to settle in the final spot, between Viola and the window.

Little flecks of snow grip the glass. The light that pours through the window catches the shadow of them, speckling the room with gray.

“Thanks for coming,” Jimmy says to Viola. “I know it’s a long drive.”

“Oh, I like driving,” Viola says simply. “It was no trouble.”

He nods. “Well, thanks for everything else, then.” And softer: “Really.”

Viola shrugs his words off. “It was all Kim.”

And Jimmy smiles. “And Kim says it was all you.” He looks between them both. “Someone had to do something. They don’t just remand cases back to the district court for nothing.”

Viola ducks her head. “No, just a statement of decision that referenced stuff from an incomplete court transcript, and a sentence that jumped eighty years above the federal recommendation.” Her eyes glitter. “And an Albuquerque district judge who, it turns out, ten years ago got passed over when they were considering who could fairly adjudicate a certain felony B&E at your brother’s house.”

“Really?” Jimmy asks, and at Viola’s nod he makes a low, impressed noise. “Well, when you put it like that.” He taps on the table, first slowly and then more erratic, staring off at a blank wall.

The taps seem like the noise of something falling outside. Icicles slipping from a roof into the dead, winter grass.

“I just…” Jimmy grits his teeth, then looks between them. “You both know this’ll be ceremonial, right?”

“What?” Viola glances at Kim.

“Even if you, I don’t know, manage to get it down from eighty-six to sixty-five, whatever, I’m still—” He chuckles. “I’m not exactly a kid running slip and falls anymore.”

Kim shakes her head quickly. “You wouldn’t serve sixty-five.”

“Kim,” Jimmy says lowly.

“I know you know this,” she says. “But Jimmy, federal good behavior credit will give you somewhere around fifty days a year.” She knows the exact number. “And Montrose’s earned time program is ten days a month.” She leans closer. “So it wouldn’t be sixty-five, it’d be…” Kim takes longer than she needs for the calculation, as if she hasn’t been running ones just like it over and over in her head. She’s gotten pretty good at this particular piece of napkin math. “Maybe thirty-four, thirty-five.”

“So I’ll be in my mid-eighties,” he says. “Great.”

“So?” Kim says. She tips her head sideways, smiling at him. “Y’know, the oldest living man is, like, a hundred and fifteen.”

He huffs out a breath. “You think the world’s oldest man lived on takeout food and booze?”

Kim shrugs. “You don’t know,” she says. “He might’ve.”

“But what about you?” Jimmy asks. “Would you be the oldest living woman, then?”

“You better believe it,” Kim says. “That’s always been the plan.”

Jimmy’s eyes crinkle around the edges.

“Besides—” Kim inches her chair closer to the table. “We can do better than sixty-five years.” She turns to Viola, finally, remembering her presence again. “Right, Viola?”

Viola is glancing between them, and it seems to take her a moment to realize she’s been directly addressed. She curls her hands together on the table and nods. “I believe we can,” she says. “I wouldn’t keep this case if I didn’t think there was a chance of making a major difference to your sentence.” She adjusts her glasses. “You know it’s possible, you talked them down to seven years!”

Jimmy’s lips twitch. He still looks proud of that, of course he does. His last piece of legal footwork—a legal waltz, a legal tango.

“How did you do it?” Viola asks.

The smirk falls away at the question, and he immediately seems less comfortable in the stiff chair. He shrugs. “I told them the sob story I’d give the jury.” A flat smile, and he taps his thumb on the table. “And like any good showman, it came from the truth. They woulda had a hell of a time disproving any of it beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Right,” Viola murmurs.

“I’d just need one juror,” Jimmy says. His eyes flick to meet Kim’s, and then he returns his gaze to Viola. The shadows of snow crystals drift over his cheeks, making them seem hollower than usual—though they’ve always looked a little more hollow here, in these cold rooms.

“You were representing yourself, so you must’ve looked at what they had on you,” Viola says.

Jimmy shrugs again. “I skimmed it. I know they were reaching for some of it. But I knew that as soon as they opened by offering me a thirty-year plea deal.” His lips thin and he stares at the gray window and the light in his eyes is gray now, too. “It’s all true, though.”

“Accessory-after-the-fact to fifteen murders,” Viola says.

His fingers tighten on the table. “Fifteen?” he repeats. “Sure, sounds right.”

“Could you name them all for me?” Viola’s pure business now, asking the questions as if she has a pen poised to record the answer.

Jimmy’s throat bobs. “Probably not,” he says. “But I’m sure I heard about all of them.”

“You heard about them,” Kim says.

His eyes cut to her. “Yes.”

“What did the federal prosecutors have on how you helped to cover them up?” Viola asks.

His gaze doesn’t leave Kim. “I didn’t cover them up.”

“But you heard about them,” Kim says again.

“Yeah.” The word is sharp, stubborn.

“Before they happened?” Viola asks.

Jimmy actually scoffs at that, acidic and bleak. “You think I would’ve stayed in Albuquerque if I knew Dan Wachsberger was gonna be killed? When they come for the lawyers…”

Kim presses her forearms into the hard metal edge of the table, willing him to understand. “So not Dan, but you knew about the others before they happened?”

“Listen. Walt—” Jimmy stops. He seems like he has to swallow around the name. This is something that still catches in his throat. “Walt didn’t share much with me.” Another of the bleak half-laughs. “He didn’t like me very much. I was just”—and the pockmarked shadows spill over his cheeks—“his two-bit, bus bench lawyer. Okay?”

Kim’s chest tightens. The tone dripping from his voice is so familiar. It’s the same old dance—he makes a mask for himself and then hates anyone who believes the mask.

He’s not meeting her eyes. He stares out into the gray. She thinks if he could hear her thoughts, he would remind her there were always people who believed the mask. Believed it before he ever chose to wear it at all. She doesn’t need reminding.

“I’d have to really think,” Jimmy murmurs, finally. “But, honestly, any time anyone talked about killing somebody, Walt’d be furious.”

It’s very vague language. Any time anyone. Kim tries again to make eye contact. She wants to see what’s in there.

But Viola charges ahead. “You were his attorney the entire time, you had a privileged relationship. There’s no way fifteen accessory-after-the-fact charges should stick just because you had heard about some of them after they happened, Jimmy,” she says. “They’re gonna pivot and try to use RICO instead, but this was remanded back to the district court on the same indictments. They’re trapped.”

Jimmy opens his mouth and then closes it.

“Now, everything they did pile under RICO…” Viola says. She takes her glasses off, cleaning the lenses with her sleeve as she looks to Kim. “Considering what they’ve turned over to us, they didn’t have enough to comfortably prove you were a conspirator to the unlawful agreement to violate federal drug laws, hence the RICO there. If one person in the enterprise is guilty, everyone’s guilty.”

Jimmy’s listening now, actually listening. Kim can feel it, too—the wave of hope rising as Viola speaks so calmly and clearly about it all. It means something, coming from this third party, here in the ice-locked room.

“You’re not just swimming in predicate violations, you’ve basically got the Pacific Ocean here, Jimmy,” Viola says. “Twenty-seven. Well, they only need two.”

He nods, unfazed.

“But I’m going to see if we can fracture this,” Viola continues. Her voice is getting more confident the longer she speaks, filling the echoing space. “Prove multiple conspiracies, not just one. It’s a long shot, but based on that list of fifteen names, I get the feeling there wasn’t much, uh”—she pushes her glasses up—“continuity. In Walter White’s organization.”

Another nod from Jimmy, and he mutters, “Never a dull moment.”

“Could you help us figure out when things changed behind the scenes?” Viola asks. “When did he first approach Jack Welker? Did you facilitate that?”

Jimmy shakes his head. “Like I said,” he starts, and the words are tinged with something different this time, “Walt didn’t trust me with much. Especially by the end.”

Viola nods. “We can use that, too,” she says. “Just think about it, okay? Write down what you can remember. With dates. Maybe we can lose the international distribution kicker.”

Jimmy narrows his eyes. He swallows again, and his eyes flick to Kim, and then he sits forward. “I will,” he says.

He holds out his hand to Viola. The two of them shake this time. A strange little deal in the middle of a snow shrouded Colorado prison.

“Good,” Viola says, smiling for the first time since she got here. She turns her gaze to Kim, and raises her eyebrows. But Kim doesn’t have anything else, not right now. She just nods.

Jimmy gives Kim a look—not quite a smile, but a little sideways shift of his lips that feels even softer.

Viola stands, pushing her chair back from the table, but when Kim moves to rise, too, Viola stops her with a soft hand on her arm. “I butted in on this visit,” she says. “I—I’ll wait outside the door, let you talk, okay?”

When Viola steps back, Kim rises anyway. The speckled shadows of snow drift over the concrete surrounding them. As they move to the door, the cold air seems to curl inside her jacket, and it feels as if they’re passing through the weather itself, no longer protected by four walls. She holds the door, and Viola stops in the threshold.

Kim nods her thanks, small and maybe invisible, but Viola seems to see it.

“We’ll talk after,” Viola says, nodding up at Kim. At the sound of her voice, the officer waiting at the end of the corridor stands straight, pushing off from the wall he was leaning against.

As Viola heads down to explain things, Kim closes the door again, sealing them off. The haze of snow shadows is like static, shifting slowly. Unfelt over her fingers as she draws them back from the cold, metal handle.

When she turns, Jimmy’s still sitting at the table. His hands are tucked into the pockets of his hoodie, hunched in on himself a little more than he was earlier. Surrounded by gray.

Kim hums. “So, what do you reckon, counselor?” she says, moving back to the table. “You think she’s got a case?”

His face darkens. “Kim…”

She leans against the edge of the table near him, clasping her hands together in her lap. “Because I think she’s got a case.”

“Maybe,” he relents, but his lips seem to flicker with a smile, and she smiles back. Shadows cling beneath his eyes, more noticeable now that she’s closer to him, and the lines on his face seem deep and well-etched. His expression comes from far away, traveling from somewhere beyond the gray walls and the gray sky and the gray snow.

“So, how have you been?” Kim asks lowly.

His gaze flicks to her, and his face shifts. He scratches the side of his head, then runs his fingers back through the hair there, smoothing it flat again. “Same old,” he says.

She studies him, patient.

He shrugs. “Maybe with the emphasis on the old,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about the old days.”

She just tips her head to the side, waiting for him to keep talking.

“Or maybe I was just thinking about Little Debbies,” he says, and he chuckles. “The Swiss rolls. Y’know, Pop had to move them ‘cause the school kids would steal them.” He rubs his lower lip then a smile drifts over his face. “And then Mom would give them out for free anyway. He had to put them behind the counter.”

Kim smiles, too. “Cigarettes and scratchcards and Little Debbies.”

“That’s right.” Jimmy grins, but as he meets her eyes, the expression drops slowly. His gaze flicks to her hands, then back to her face.

“What’s up?” she murmurs, feeling something building in the snow-shadowed air.

“Put a dollar in my pocket?” he asks, eyes softening.

She exhales in recognition. “We already have confidentiality, Jimmy.”

He nods, shoving his hands deeper into his hoodie. “I know. I can’t take real money in here, anyway.” His shoulders lift and then drop. “Just wanted to make sure…” His pupils track, like he’s reading something. “There was one girl,” he says. He worries at his lip. “Walt said it was an OD. I did help.”

The murders, she realizes. He’s talking about the accessory charges. “How did you help?”

“The same way I did with anything.” Jimmy gives another shrug. “I called Mike Ehrmantraut.”

Coldness blows through her, but it doesn’t feel like the snow, now. She asks it quietly, “For an overdose?”

“That’s what Walt said, but…” Jimmy’s eyes lock with hers. “But I just got a feeling.”

“There’s no one like that on the federal prosecutor’s list,” Kim says, and his shoulders drop a little, now. “Did anybody… was it reported?”

Somehow, he laughs, his eyebrows climbing. “You could say that.”

Her voice is flat. “What?”

“You remember Wayfarer, the air traffic controller?” Jimmy asks. “This was the week his daughter died.” He scratches the side of his head again, these little fidgety movements that have been spilling from him since they were left alone in here together. Almost under his breath, he adds, “How many Janes can there be in Albuquerque?”

“Probably quite a few,” Kim says lightly.

But Jimmy just looks at her. He sighs, a big breath that shifts through his whole body like steam from a valve. “I know.”

Kim’s own throat tightens. “Earlier, you said…” She folds in her lips, then continues crisply: “You said ‘any time anyone suggested killing someone’. Does that mean what I think it does?”

Clouds arrive on Jimmy’s face. He doesn’t have to answer but he does anyway. “Yes,” he says, simply. “That’s how they played the game. Someone’s gonna kill you, so you make sure you kill them first, right?” The sentence comes strongly and icily and like something he’s thought about for a long, long time.

She just shakes her head.

He seems to want to laugh again. “Anyway, that’s not how Walt wanted to play it.”

Her fingers tighten. “But you wanted him to?”

His eyes are empty. “Sometimes,” he says, and he looks out the window again, and the ice carves into his cheeks. “They’re all just names, when you’re living like that,” he says. “Just other players in the game.”

It’s so cold. So much colder than the first time he’d said that to her—the game—his hair damp and his eyes wide with whatever he’d just walked back from. She remembers the oatmeal and lavender that hadn’t dissolved properly in the cool bath. She hadn’t known how hot to make the water.

She feels like a cloth is squeezing water down her own back now. Maybe she should draw back from him, but she doesn’t move. She whispers, “Nobody knows?”

He shakes his head.

But Kim has to make sure. “Nobody on that list was hit because you suggested it to Walter White?”

Jimmy shakes his head again. “No,” he says, and then he scoffs. “He didn’t take me seriously.” The words drip, bitter—and Jimmy’s bitter this monster didn’t take his suggestions of murder seriously enough? She swallows around the taste in her mouth, and Jimmy seems to hear his own voice now, and his eyes close. His chest rises and falls.

“What about the DEA agents?” Kim murmurs. “Gomez and Schrader?”

His eyes open again. “I heard about them on the news. The amber alert on Walt’s baby, Walt the kidnapper, the APB’s on the missing agents.” His lips thin. “It wasn’t hard to connect the dots.” His knee bobs, over and over. “That was it.”

“That’s when you left?”

Jimmy stares at something far away—like he’s still looking at that news report, like he’s seeing his life flash across the bottom of the screen on a chyron. Kim feels the world narrowing, everything sliding back to her living room in Titusville. Her furniture flashing with the light of the evening news.

“How did you get out?” Kim asks, dragging them back to the present.

“Like I always did,” Jimmy murmurs. “I called someone. One of that vet’s old contacts.” He clears his throat. “Someone who could set me up with a new life.”

A new life. Somewhere cold, it turns out, somewhere with snow. “They found you in Nebraska,” Kim says. “Your new life was in Nebraska.”

Jimmy stares at her. He must realize what she’s wondering, because he shakes his head. “It just happened that way.”

She doesn’t believe him. The words brim from her, finally: “You knew I hadn’t gone back there. You knew I wasn’t in Nebraska.”

The shadows pass and his eyes are blue again. For a moment, she thinks he hasn’t even heard her, but then Jimmy says, “Yeah, you were.”

Kim inhales and Jimmy locks the words between them with his gaze. She can feel how much they mean to him in the weight of them. The idea that she was there, somehow, in whatever way. She realizes for the first time how much harder it would have been to disentangle that new world from their old one than it was for her in Titusville. Titusville, where a suited man walking along the street could never be Jimmy, no matter what her subconscious said.

But it’s been over twenty years and she still feels the wind of Nebraska on her skin some nights, and she knows the Nebraskan wind probably feels like her, too.

It’s all still there; it’s always still there.

Kim untangles her fingers and holds out a hand to him.

Jimmy reaches for her. His skin isn’t cold at all. She can feel the pulse in his thumb as it presses against the side of her wrist. His heart beats familiarly, despite it all, despite the prison and the ice and the shadows. A steady thud against her wrist.

Or maybe it’s her pulse, and her heart. Trapped there between them with his words: Yeah, you were.

The guard leads them back outside, back through the snow-coated prison yards. Their footprints remain, not yet fully buried, but now they erase their path in a different way, tracking in reverse over the traces of their steps.

Kim feels drawn thin, a rope pulled taut. Her body is craving nicotine, she thinks. These dark and heavy towers didn’t bring with them the usual smoke.

She feels empty. In the administration room, she fills up her jacket pockets again as if it will help, clearing the little locker of her cellphone and her keys. Viola taps a couple of quick responses to text messages as Kim signs them out of the prison.

And then it’s back to the parking lot, where snow dusts the roofs of the sparse cars. The sky seems to be clearing, revealing patches of not blue but a less ashen gray. The peaks of mountains are etched into the clouds. The world is coming back; the world isn’t just Montrose prison.

Viola unlocks her car and they settle inside. She turns on the engine and with it the heater, and they idle there as the wipers brush snow from the windshield. The windows fog with warmth, hazing over the world.

Kim blows into her palms.

And Viola rubs her hands together too. “You’re right,” she says, and Kim turns. “He should be there in court. And we’ll need him to testify to that stuff about the murder charges, anyway.”

Kim nods.

The engine hums lowly. Viola studies Kim. Her glasses have fogged with the temperature shift, and she takes them off, but she still seems to see Kim clearly because she says, “You’re wondering what I thought.”

Kim laughs softly. “Of course I am.”

“The two of you…” Viola starts—and Kim’s already surprised. She’d assumed Viola was going to talk about Jimmy. The opening dangles there, and Viola says, “When I first met you. I didn’t really get it.” She opens the center console and pulls out a glasses case, then grimaces. “Sorry.”

Kim shrugs with one hand.

Viola snaps the case open and cleans her glasses with the cloth inside. “I guess I still don’t super get it, but…” She settles them back on her nose. “You were your own little world in there.” Another kind smile. “It must be hard.”

Kim looks away, tucking her hair back behind her ear. The parking lot is pale and answerless. Their own little world: in cars, in apartments, in hotel rooms. Their own little world with their own little rules, the kind of world where everyone else might just be players in a game—or colorful Post-It notes, pieces to be rearranged before them. Because they’re smart enough to decide what everyone else deserves.

“He’d be good in court.” Viola pulls her back into the idling car. “He’s calm.”

Kim nods slowly. He’s calm, she thinks, and he’s tired. And he’s scared. “You never knew him before Chuck died, did you?”

“I—I don’t think so,” Viola says.

Kim hums softly. “He was closer to the surface, then.”

Sometimes, on long evenings—the same long evenings when she’d felt Nebraska on her skin, and felt the Albuquerque sun burning her neck—half-asleep, she’d thought maybe Jimmy had died that night with Lalo. She had left the apartment with her shoes on and her keys in her hand and Jimmy had died in there, sacrifice made good.

But more often, she thinks that Jimmy died a different night, the night when the house on the corner of San Cristobal Road had burned down. She knows more of it now than then. He blamed himself and so he burned himself down, too. An eye for an eye.

The car engine shudders and Viola shifts into reverse and Kim snaps back into the present. She clicks her seatbelt on and squeezes her eyes shut.

“Everything okay?” Viola asks, hands on the wheel.

Kim nods, offering a small smile. “I think you finally convinced him, you know,” she says. “He just doesn’t like to think too hard about a different future.”

“I get it,” Viola says. Her palms tap the wheel. “This RICO stuff… It’s good for us that Jimmy didn’t know more about who Walt was working for.” Yet her tone doesn’t make it sound like a good thing.

Kim knows why. “But we still need to learn more about when the people in charge changed,” she murmurs. And if Jimmy can’t give them what they need, who else is left? She sees the list of names again, black letters rising like tombstones.

Viola turns down the air con, and the heat coming from the console slows to a quiet spread. Kim’s not due back in Miami until mid-week. Boxes of discovery wait for them in the R&G office in Santa Fe. There’ll be something in one of them.

The car windows are clear, and outside the air is clear, too. Across the parking lot, Kim’s eyes land on a red hatchback. She half thinks she sees a glimpse of blonde hair in there—like sunlight on a window. It flares bright into her chest.

Then Viola reverses, and the angle changes. The red car is empty. Nobody sits in the driver’s seat.

It’s a hatchback but not a Civic. Just a random car. The Civic hatchback she’s thinking of will be somewhere in Albuquerque, sitting in traffic on the way home from work or pulling into a driveway. Or spluttering in a parking lot somewhere, still struggling to start.

“Damn it,” Kim whispers, and she props her elbow on the bottom of the window and curls her fingers over her lips. She traps the idea inside her for now, turning it over as the engine rumbles thoughtfully and the wheels crunch over the cleared prison roads.

She watches the car in the wing mirror as they leave the complex. A red speck vanishing into white.

Chapter Text

Kim doesn’t look at the houses. Not the one on the corner with the white rocking chair on the white porch. Not the one further down, where pots of purple flowers hang from hooks on either side of rain-beaten front steps. Not the one with the empty planter boxes and the little toy car in the yard, and not the one where the paint peels away from the wood like the house is shedding a green skin. A snake in the grass.

But the houses want her to look at them. The letterboxes wave to her with flags and the letterboxes have people’s names on them. All the kids who go to school with her have their name somewhere in this town. Davey Stoke’s letterbox says STOKE so big Kim can see it even from the other side of the street.

Davey Stoke’s house looks like his mom. The window shutters are as gray as her eye shadow. Lace curtains hang in the windows, sagging on wire tracks, and so Kim thinks Davey’s mom is always sleepy, her eyelids low while she pins clothes to the line outside.

Kim walks. She kicks up dust and she splinters dry grass at the root.

All the houses look like people here. The white house with moldy awnings is Mr. Clark with his bushy eyebrows. The flecked paint on the next house is the freckled face of the woman who tugs weeds from its yard. Red shutters are red cheeks. A beard of hedges grows from the bottom of Tina’s grandpa’s place, and the bowling alley man with the tattooed arms has dark blue stones winding up to his front door.

Tonight, it’s later than normal, and the houses all wear yellow. Kim doesn’t look at them but she can tell they’re glowing. Like how bugs fly to light, she thinks she could walk to the yellow windows and hit herself against the glass as if the people inside would let her in. Oh, sorry, they might say. We didn’t know this could be your home, too.

In the daytime, it’s easier not to look. In the daytime, she can see past the houses to the empty prairie and the empty farmland, where the soil is so tilled and so dry it looks purple. She can see the machines that move out there, over and over, trying to make this land something it isn’t. She can see the corn planted and dying in field after field, the ripped up stalks going brown in the sun.

She learned in school that a long time ago this whole town was underwater. Her teacher said that once, before they were born and before any humans were born, this entire state was an ocean. It was filled with huge sharks and water dinosaurs. That’s where all the dust comes from. It’s the sand from the old sea is coming up from way, way underground.

At nights sometimes she can still feel it down there, the buried ocean. The water rumbles and wants to come back.

The woman who lives in the front house looks nothing like her home. She’s tall. Her house is low with a slanted roof. She has kind eyes and the house has dark windows.

Kim kicks sand and dirt with the toes of her sneakers. She kicks the roots of the grass because it’s dead anyway. She passes down the side fence, where metal wires curl up from the ground, swaying from lopsided poles and making a strange kind of yawning music in the wind.

The back house doesn’t look like anybody. Its windows are nobody’s eyes and the dead plants in the gutters are nobody’s eyebrows.

The initials carved near the door belong to a stranger. Horizontal lines on the corner of the frame mark the heights of children who lived here before anyone can remember kids living here. The tall woman says she hasn’t even needed to rent it out to anyone in years, but times are tough, and as long as she can still use part of the bedroom as storage it’s a deal. The boxes in the bedroom take up most of the floor and are filled with a man’s clothes.

Sometimes, Kim forgets this place. She thinks she’s still in the house on Chestnut Street, even though that was two whole places ago. In the dark, half asleep, her brain fills out the wrong walls and the wrong doorways, and if she stands up, she thinks she’ll walk the wrong way, too. She’ll end up through the front door and in the yard and out with the dead grass.

Tonight, there are no yellow lights in the back house. The blinds are down already and closed, and from behind them there’s a blue and flickering glow. The TV is going.

Kim slows and her steps crunch on the yellow grass. She can’t hear what show her mom is watching. It’s a Thursday and she knows The Waltons is on right now but they don’t get CBS very clearly in this place so they don’t usually watch it.

A low voice from inside. Laughter. A man speaking.

Kim stands still. The wind curls through her hair and the cold gets under her skin. The ocean below her is filled with old and dead things and it crashes with dark waves.

She hooks her hands through the straps of her backpack. She turns around. The lights glow in the front house and the tall landlady is inside because there’s the sound of a shower running.

The door near her whips open and Kim twists back to face it.

Her mom is a silhouette. “Kimmy, what are you doing lurking out there?” she asks, gripping the door frame with long fingers. She holds out her other palm, beckoning towards herself, then sighs. “Hon, I could see you through the blinds.”

There’s something hidden in her mom’s eyes. Something bright and maybe happy.

And then hands grip her mom’s shoulders. Her mom moves aside, already smiling, the surprise over—

And there he is, and maybe she’s imagining it because he’s wearing what he wears in dreams, too, the same t-shirt and the same grin. She’s asleep, she’s not awake. But her dad hops down the front steps and when he wraps her in a hug he feels real and he smells real.

He smells like smoke.

“I got something for ya,” her dad says, pushing back to his feet. He’s got dust on his knees now. He moves back to the doorway and reaches for something inside. “Get up here in front of me.”

Kim climbs the front steps.

Her dad grins. His eyes sparkle and he adjusts her shoulders so she’s standing a little straighter and when he pulls his hand back from inside this time, he’s holding an old cowboy hat. He nestles the hat on her head. It smells like horses and cigarettes and old, old things. “A proper cowboy hat.”

“Where’d you get it?” Kim asks, touching the brim.

He winks. “From a proper cowboy.” He shoves the hat down over her eyes and the world goes dark, and then strong arms are lifting her up and carrying her inside the back house.

The world sways and spins and Kim laughs. She feels the room turning like a vortex, and then the hands vanish and she’s falling—with a thump onto the sofa. She lifts the hat above her eyes. The living room flickers with the silenced TV. It’s warm and more colorful than usual. Her dad turns the lights on and everything is bright and the t-shirt he’s wearing is a new one after all. It’s got the name of a shipping company on it and a picture of a boat.

The hair that curls from his head is more ashen than she remembers.

“How did you meet a cowboy?” Kim asks. At school, she learned that all the cowboys are dead.

Dad just grins again. He’s always grinning. “You gotta be hungry, huh?” he asks, knocking her shoulder with the side of his hand.

“Your daddy brought us pizzas from Casey’s,” her mom says. “We saved you some pepperoni. Here, hon.” She rifles on their little table for a box and hands it over, and when Kim opens it there’s still half a pizza in there.

“What was the name of that girl who was stealing your stuff?” her dad asks, dropping onto the sofa next to Kim. “Vera, like Vera Lynn?” He always remembers the names.

Kim nods, chewing pizza.

“She still here?” he asks. “Or has she been expelled yet? Arrested?”

Kim swallows. “She moved to Aurora last year.”

“Hey! Nice one, lucky break,” her dad says. “What else… what about…” He hums, then taps his lips with his fingertips. “Has Mrs. Braxton pulled that stick down out of her ass yet?”

Mom laughs. “She hasn’t, has she, Kimmy?”

And then Kim’s mom tells the story about the math quiz last week, and her dad chuckles at the idea that this bitter old lady would just fail the whole class to make herself feel better, because that’s why she did that, isn’t it? They’re just kids, after all. They’re just doing their best.

When Kim finishes the next slice of pizza, she lowers the cowboy hat over her eyes again. It smells like a horse under her palm, it smells the way running horses smell when they’re kicking up dust and dirt, smells the way all those stories and movies always smell to her, anyway, on the TV and in books.

Behind the bend of the hat, her parents are talking about something else, their voices loud and laughing.

The darkness is warm and quiet. The darkness smells like big animals and the sun. Somewhere, wind whistles and hooves gallop over a road. The TV has the sound on again and somebody is running horses and ricocheting bullets.

Kim swallows a yawn and opens her eyes. It’s a black and white movie. She’s seen the movie before. John Wayne is about to leave town.

She lifts stealthy fingertips to her head but now feels only her hair—her cowboy hat is scrunched on the sofa beside her. She reaches for it and holds it with both hands. The felt is warm and old. Kim rests her cheek on the sofa cushion again and pretends to fall back asleep.

In the armchair in the corner, her dad is watching the TV. The blue light turns him into shadows. He’s made of the corners of things where the light doesn’t reach. Kim watches him and he watches the movie, and he’s not moving at all anymore. His face is still and calm and she doesn’t know what’s behind it.

A creaking floorboard. Her mom is in the doorway. Kim doesn’t look over. Her mom creaks into the room. The darkness seems to shift.

A blanket sinks over Kim’s shoulders and Kim closes her eyes before her mom realizes she’s awake. The blanket smells like the house on Chestnut Street, somehow. Maybe the blanket has been hanging onto that place this entire time, too.

More footsteps. Kim watches through her eyelashes. The eyelashes haze over the blue living room.

“You coming back to bed soon?” Mom murmurs.

Her dad nods, but looks back to the TV instead. He’s so quiet and so still. Kim tries to be quiet, too. She’s hardly breathing. She’s pretending to be asleep, she’s pretending to be watching John Wayne. Her mom sighs and turns away and there’s no sound, now, as she walks back through the doorway and into the bedroom.

Kim wants to be still. She wants to be the kind of thing that stays in one place and never moves. The striped wallpaper in the flickering light looks like a lost signal on a TV set. Not even a room at all, just some empty place that belongs to nobody. She wants to kick it up at the root, shattering the dry pieces of it. It’s dead anyway.

She holds her jaw so tightly it hurts.

Her dad is still watching the movie. Kim holds her eyes half-open for as long as she can. Her dad’s knees are still dusty from earlier, when he knelt to hug her, out there with the dead grass.

She knows she might never see him again.

Someone has cranked up the music in the bar next door. Kim resettles her headphones against her head, but the bassy music bleeds through anyway.

She’s been to the bar for drinks often enough to know that the speakers hang on the shared wall. Heavy things fixed with huge bolts right above the bar. Sometimes, sitting in her office, the sound is so close and so immediate she thinks that she could reach right through the plaster and grab a shot of whiskey.

She could use one tonight. The overheads are so bright they turn like corkscrews in her head. Once, in another windowless office, she would flick the fluorescents off instead of bearing their endless torture, and then she would just sit with the light of her computer. Working away surrounded by archive boxes.

But she knows if she turned the lights off now, she would fall asleep. She rubs her forehead and the laptop screen burns into her eyes, or maybe her eyes burn into the laptop screen.

She checks her phone. There’s nothing yet. No new notifications.

Damn it.

Kim rubs her eyes with her fingers and returns to her browser. She should give it up. She should go home, she thinks—but if she goes home, then her phone definitely won’t ring, and then she definitely won’t find anything new. Here, in her windowless legal aid office, where the bass from the bar thuds through the thin wall, she thinks she has a chance.

The tabs waiting open in her browser stare back at her, emerging from the top of the window. Rounded edges, names carved in black.

Kim opens another link. It’s an old news report. They’ve devoted some expensive bandwidth to a tiny photo of Donald Margolis and his daughter, and Kim is discovering tonight that there are almost more articles analyzing this father’s grief than there are about the Wayfarer 515 collision itself. Everybody wants to explain a tragedy, to file it away neatly.

Not so neat, never so neat. Kim stares at the blurry eyes of the daughter, Jane. Only a few pixels on the screen. An overdose. The articles all agree it was an overdose, too. A drug habit out of control. She was an addict, another addict who died, and the bass thuds in Kim’s ears like a heartbeat—

Kim tugs her headphones over her head, wrenching the music away.

“Knock, knock?”

Kim starts, twisting back.

Patty’s standing in the threshold, and she grimaces. “Sorry,” she says, shifting her bag on her shoulder. “I did knock for real first.”

Kim indicates her headphones on the desk. “I was miles away,” she says. “You hear back yet?”

“Zilch,” Patty says, clicking her teeth. “And now it’s after seven, so I’m pretty sure the ship has sailed on the desk sergeant returning my call like he promised.” But she shrugs. “Good signs for us if they can’t get their act together.”

Kim nods, idly lighting up her phone screen.

“So, some people might say it’s time to go home,” Patty says, wandering over to the desk. There’s a stack of case files on one end, a pile of notepads next to them. A legal pad filled with curling doodles that Kim’s drawn while staring at her silent cellphone for hour after hour. “You ever think about not doing twenty things at once with your life, Kim Wexler?”

Kim chuckles. “If I wasn’t supposed to do twenty things, why was I born with twenty hands?” She holds up her palms.

Patty just shakes her head. “Well, I shudder to think what it’ll look like in here after you do get your results back and get sworn in.” She glances at Kim’s laptop screen. “What are you working on tonight?”

Kim exhales. She shakes her head, gesturing to the list of indictments waiting beside her notepad, to the copies of the federal prosecutor’s files. “Just looking at all the pieces,” she mutters. She’s hoping if she looks at them for long enough, she’ll start to see the slight differences. The subtle tonalities of color—this blue a little darker than that one, this blue a little greener.

But right now, her desk is just a mess. Patty flicks through the top sheet of the indictments. “So,” she starts, “tell me how a lawyer with attorney-client privilege gets himself charged with this many counts of accessory-after-the-fact? Was he out there digging the graves?”

Kim gives a little half laugh at the joke, her gaze flicks to the laptop screen. The open tabs wait, one after the other. Like tombstones.

Patty seems to sense the shift in the air. “Listen, Kim, if there’s something else there, you’ll find it,” she says, softer now. “I don’t hire idiots.”

Kim shakes her head.

“From the sounds of it, your man didn’t even photograph the dead bodies,” Patty says, nudging Kim slightly—and now Kim remembers that case too, of course she does. Those lawyers, who not only heard about their client’s murders, but went out and collected evidence of them, were absolved of any wrongdoing. “So, stop torturing yourself for a few hours. Go home and unwind.”

Kim almost laughs. “And where are you going?”

“Oh, I’m going to go knock on the desk sergeant’s door until he answers my questions!” Patty says brightly, shifting her bag on her shoulder again. As she heads back through the door she calls, “Turn the lights out when you leave!”

Kim smiles, tucking her hair back. She clicks her trackpad and her laptop lights up again. There’s a low ding from her email client—accompanied by the pang of anticipation she’s started to feel with every new email lately, even though it’s way too early for her bar results to be posted anywhere. Tonight, it’s just a newsletter from a paper company, and she deletes it without reading it.

The bright lights turn into her head, twisting deeper and deeper. Kim closes all the tabs she’s had open on the Wayfarer 515 crash. The dead girl’s eyes vanish from her screen and Kim’s chest twinges and she wants to apologize. She closes Dan Wachsberger’s profile on the New Mexico Law Review website. He never published much, and Kim had never met him, but there’s a quote on his page from Clifford Main. A vague and slightly subdued recommendation for Wachsberger Partners. A good lawyer, he treats all his clients with respect.

And Walter White had orchestrated for Dan to be stabbed to death in prison. So much for respect.

Kim clicks and that tab vanishes, too. Others replace it: Agents Gomez and Schrader and their wives smiling at some kind of DEA picnic, their arms around each other. News articles of their deaths, more recent, are riddled with higher resolution pictures. Triumphant arrests from their DEA tenure and press conferences and awards nights, and then at the end, always at the end, there’s a photograph just the two women. The wives at the funeral.

Kim closes those tabs as well. A couple more are easy to part with: dead end searches for more names on the list, useless news pieces, sensationalized headlines, and then—

Kim stills, finger frozen on the trackpad.

Gustavo Fring. She had never seen the real man, had never known his real name, not until the news broke. One morning, there he was: smiling in the daylight and holding a medal from the city. They’ve used the same photo for this news article, the one she first saw. There’s another of the scene at the nursing home, the smoldering ruin.

The papers didn’t know what to do with themselves for this death. They didn’t have their storybook good guys or bad guys yet. They were just confused. In the only photos they could find of Gustavo Fring, he’s smiling and shaking someone’s hand.

Kim swallows around a sour taste in her throat. She can still hear his voice on the other end of a phone line. He talked Lalo out of it… He talked Lalo out of it… A smooth question repeating in her head over and over.

Not Lalo. He talked her out of it. Jimmy had opened his mouth, even as she’d begged him not to speak, not to do this, not to carry on with this performance—but the words had spilled from his mouth anyway. The arguments, deliberate and pointed like swords, even then, like he was in a courtroom instead of their home.

She feels it again, rising and rising, panic in her throat because she knows what he’s doing and she knows what’s going to happen to him here, and she can still feel him shaking against her, can feel the rapid flutter of his pulse against her cheek as she crushes herself into his shoulder. She can always feel it.

Kim inhales. She never asked him what happened after she left. She was too caught up in her own goddamn anger and pain.

She closes her laptop and squeezes her eyes shut.

The roads are lined with trees. Dense trees, tall trees, swampland trees. Trees that smell of sitting water and crushed leaves. Kim runs, and the sidewalk rattles up through her legs, and it’s just her and the tree-lined road and the night above her, and the night is dark but still bright enough from the city lights that there are no stars.

She runs. Streetlamps carve out patches from the road, and in the gaps between the trees some people have managed to flatten yards. Buzz cut grass struggles through silt and mud, surrounded by low fences. Among the shorn grass are houses that, in the darkness, seem almost part of the flat ground, too. Slumbering animals lying on their bellies with pale, open eyes.

And always the trees. Older trees with gnarled branches and dense trees that seem to have no branches at all. As if, no matter where she goes, the land itself is always curling up around her. No matter where she goes, she can never see beyond the closest houses, and the closest trees.

The sidewalk vanishes and Kim runs on the street. Her pulse thuds with every footfall. She crosses a through-road and glances down it. More beads of lamplight vanishing into black.

On her arm, her cellphone rings—loud and shattering.

Kim stops, fumbling to free it.

“Kim Wexler,” she gasps, catching her breath. Silence from the other end. All Kim can hear is her own pulse doubled back at her. “Hello?”

“I just had to check.” A woman’s voice. “I shouldn’t have called.”

Kim closes her eyes. Even her eyelids seem to pulse with her heartbeat. “Skyler?” she asks, though she already knows it is.

Dragging quiet, and then—“I got your message,” Skyler says. “Your messages. How did you get this number?”

Kim wipes her hand over her forehead, brushing aside damp bangs. She inhales, lungs still hunting for oxygen. “It was—it was on your visitation form with the prison.”

“And you can just read that, can you?” Skyler asks flatly.

Kim huffs out air through her nose. “I’m on his legal team.”

Skyler makes a low, scoffing noise. “So that wasn’t a lie, then.”

Kim shakes her head, and the sweat on her forehead prickles with the movement. She opens her mouth, fumbles for the right words, and says, “Not completely.”

A long sigh from the other end of her phone. Kim adjusts it against her ear. Skyler speaks again, “Well, what do you want me for? His case has already been reversed, hasn’t it? That’s what everyone is saying.”

“It’s been—” Kim inhales, hand on her chest. “Sorry. He’s getting a new trial. But the charges haven’t been dropped.”

And from the cellphone there’s nothing, just humming nothing.

Kim paces, her muscles warm and impatient from the interrupted run. The road is dark and in the distance a car rumbles in a driveway, tail lights pulling away and then vanishing.

Skyler sighs again. “I said too much last time.”

Kim curls a palm over the back of her neck, shaking her head. “If we could just talk—”

“I’m not going to testify.” The line crackles with surety.

Kim takes another deep breath. “I’m not asking you to testify,” she says. Her legs are stiffening, filling with acid. “But we need to know more about what was going on in Walt’s organization and when.”

“So ask Saul.”

“He doesn’t know everything,” Kim says.

Just as low and without affect: “So ask the feds.”

Kim huffs. “They know even less.”

Skyler chuckles bitterly. “Well, I’ve told them everything I know, so…”

The night air curves coolly through Kim’s bangs. She folds her lips inward, staring off at distant streetlights until the bright points prick her eyes. She sees Skyler’s red ledger on a table in a visitation room, the same image that’s been haunting her for days. “Do they know everything in your notebook?”

Skyler’s breath comes sharp. There’s a noise in the background. A door, something slamming. A hollow thud. She says, “I have to go.”

Kim presses the phone tighter to her ear. “Wait—”

And somehow the line holds, just Skyler breathing.

“Just think about it,” Kim says. “Will you? You have my number. I only want to talk.”

But Skyler just sounds tired now. “Haven’t we talked enough?”

Kim shuts her eyes, exhaling through her nose. Her throat burns with it. “Okay,” she says. “Thanks, anyway, Ms. Lambert.”

Low voices, far away from the handset, and something that could be footsteps. A little girl’s laughter. And then Skyler’s voice comes again. “I still haven’t changed my name.”

“Oh,” Kim says. She huffs, glancing around at the darkness. “Would you rather I call you Mrs. White?”

More laughter, distant and bright. The sound of water running and then stopping, and the beeping of a microwave. “No,” Skyler murmurs, almost long with the background noise. There’s an inhale of breath, and then: “I’ll meet with you.”

Kim blinks with the whiplash. “What?”

“If it’s really so important,” Skyler says, but her voice is a little softer now. “When can you see me?”

“This weekend,” Kim says quickly. “I can be in Albuquerque this weekend.”

The microwave beeps again. “I’ll let you know the place. I really have to go.” And then the call does end, a sudden absence of humming against Kim’s ear.

Kim breathes in and out, in and out. She laughs a little, hand on her heart. Her pulse is still going hard. Her limbs don’t feel loose at all anymore. She stands there, stiff.

Around her, the trees ripple in a wind she doesn’t feel. She hears the low splash of water somewhere nearby. She curls her fingers around her phone and starts walking back to her apartment, pressing onward with tight legs.

Beneath her ribs, her heart drums and drums and drums—

—until it’s all she can hear, the drumming. Someone is beating at a slackened drum skin inside her chest, over and over.

“No, don’t, don’t, don’t—” She’s shaking, her whole body raking with shallow breaths. She’s talking to him now, not the monster in the room with them, just him. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Her mouth tastes sour. Her mouth tastes like blood on the apartment floor. Her mouth tastes like the sweet Manzano wine and like Jimmy and their victory—

She clamps her lips together and tries to hold it in.

“Come on,” Jimmy says, and then sharper, louder: “Hey.” But she can barely hear him over the drumming, this steady beat that’s rattling her lungs, rattling her entire body. “Let’s go.”

She can’t look at him. She has to look at him—and his gaze is hard and steady and certain. It’s the only thing that’s not trembling. Strong arms (no, shaking arms, shaking hands) guide her up from the sofa, push her away, push her out to sea, out and out. She can hear herself breathing, ragged gasps. Like it’s not her own breath at all but a stranger’s instead. A monster exhaling against the skin of her neck.

The real monster leans against the wall. Kim moves, step by step, around the fallen wine bottle, over the carpet. She can hear the silenced gun going off again like a bone breaking. As wide as she can—wider, closer to the side table, one more step—and she passes him and makes it to the entryway.

Her palm comes down on the door handle. Cool metal, escape—and now she does want to run, she wants to run so fast that the air screams through her lungs and burns her skin, wants to run so fast she outstrips thunderstorms and lightning flashes—

“Hold on.” The words are steel.

Kim shudders. The monster can see inside her. He can see what she just dreamed of, how she imagined tearing out through the sand and the dry grass and out past the machines and the dead fields and the dead corn and the—

She lets go of the door handle. She steps back and she faces him squarely. She can hear a silenced shot cracking.

“You’re gonna need your shoes, right?” A smooth question, a sly smile.

And when she looks down, her feet are bare. They don’t feel bare. But she can’t feel them at all, can’t feel the wooden floor or the cold or anything. She blinks, and her feet stay bare, and she doesn’t even know where her shoes are.

Her brain finds them, somehow, without her. She’s tugging them on, one foot, then the next, when she looks back across the living room.

Jimmy’s still staring at her.

He tilts his head and his eyes soften and suddenly there’s nothing else, nobody else. No blood on the floor or death in the room or monster in the hall. Jimmy seems to be saying this to her, too. He’s holding her with his gaze as if he can steady her shaking hands from across the room.

Kim wants to claw at him, rip him into pieces for doing this for her, for looking at her like that. For looking at her like he’s saying goodbye.

She holds her jaw tight and in her hands there’s a gun. She looks down. No, not yet. Not a gun yet, just the cold metal of a toothed key biting her skin.

“Clock’s ticking, Mrs. Goodman.”

Kim gasps and the name fills her like a blade. Like a real knife in her palm.

But the monster doesn’t know that name has such a sharp edge. He doesn’t know how much they’ve honed that name—Goodman—into a thing that can cut and cut without feeling any pain. She turns, and Mrs. Goodman holds sharp keys in her palm and Mrs. Goodman walks out through the door.

The air is cold on her skin and her hair whips around her face. She doesn’t run too fast. She matches the storm, this time, keeping pace with the surrounding thunder. She’s not leaving Jimmy. She’s going to save him, and it burns through her—she’s going to save him, she’s going to pull the trigger and shatter not just bones but the whole world and save him.

She looks up at the window as she climbs into the car. Black eyes seem to stare back at her from between the blinds, watching.

And Kim shuts the car door on herself. It’s dark and her hands are trembling on the wheel. Her palms stick as she turns it, and her stomach rises as she reverses—fast, faster, the clock is ticking, Mrs. Goodman.

She grits her teeth, swallowing bile.

The houses along the streets blur like yellow highlighter, spreading across the page over and over on either side of her. Marking this moment out as something to remember. And she knows that from now on, this is the only thing that will have ever happened to her. This drive and the yellow windows and the dark highways.

(His eyes are wide and shining and still alive—)

She presses her foot down. Her fingers are so tight on the wheel her knuckles seem to carve through her skin. The paper in her hand crunches like ice in a glass.

She feels something burning in the back of her throat again, like she has all night, like she has since that knock on the door. Fire rising in her, building with every word.

(A pressure on her shoulder—he’s grabbing her, she’s turning into his shoulder—his fingertips dig into her skin—his pulse on her cheek—)

She touches the shoulder of her hoodie. His hand is almost still there. She presses the spot harder but then the wheel wobbles and she has to grip it again.

She did this. It’s like she’s driving over those words, each connection a white road marking. She did this. Her anger had built a plan and her anger had turned around on the freeway and it had brought Howard that night to their home.

(You can’t help yourself, Chuck knew it, you were born that way—)

She can still feel it, flashing in her chest. As she heard someone saying those words to Jimmy again, the same old words, over and over, making sure he’ll never be free of pain—then telling her she’d made the wrong choices, trying to take her choices from her—

And that final anger had summoned a monster to their door. Her own doing, her own wish. Like a fairy tale. The white-hot flash of fury had snapped like a silenced pistol.

Kim presses her sole down and down and the highway rolls beneath her. Like stormwater, like waves, like old things coming up from somewhere black. It’s her, it’s always been her.

Kim’s not used to arriving in Albuquerque in the daylight, but her flight that Saturday touches down mid-morning, when the sun is already high above the mountains, the land transparent and bare. The city feels naked: so much empty ground, so many cut lines through the desert.

Every time she visits, it feels less and less like she’s returning to somewhere familiar. This place feels increasingly like a stranger’s city, like a city that doesn’t reflect her at all. A foreign landscape, a frontline she’s never stepped foot on before.

But she picks up her rental car like always. She settles her briefcase in the passenger seat. It’s heavy today. It doesn’t feel heavy enough.

Kim checks her watch. The numbers glow back at her. She’s early.

Skyler had texted her yesterday, a simple message in which Kim’s surname was misspelled, but of course she’s probably only heard it spoken out loud. Spoken at the end of a hopeful message on an answering machine: If there’s any chance you could meet with me… I think we could help each other…

To kill time, Kim drives. Every road is busier than she remembers, overflowing with cars. She winds her way towards the mountains. Condos give way to businesses give way to diners and restaurants, and then suburban homes. As the streets approach the Sandias, the homes get tidier. The yards become manicured and decorated: grass in lurid green patches, the work of a dozen sprinkler heads and irrigation systems with lifetime no-rust guarantees.

Pools of supernaturally blue water curve around smooth, beige houses. The pools seem to glow even in the daylight, as if they’re filled with hundreds of tiny lights that outclass the sun. Above them, windows shine with reflections, admitting nothing.

Kim drives, turning down dead end streets and looping at the end of cul-de-sacs. She passes houses with marble columns flanking their doorways, and houses waving New Mexico flags. Houses with roadrunner letterboxes and houses with yawning marble lions on either side of their gates.

She hasn’t needed to look for it on a map, the restaurant where they’re meeting today. She’s been there before, and as she pulls into the parking lot she remembers the exact trip to this particular Flying Star. She and Jimmy had ordered from the all-day breakfast menu and watched the people on the other side of the room, inventing their lives and stories.

Kim shuts off her engine. She rests a hand on the briefcase. She didn’t need to bring this much—they’re just talking, right?—but she’s got it all in there anyway, all the pieces of Jimmy’s case. Twenty-seven predicate violations and lists of shell companies and money laundering schemes, and a list of fifteen names. As she’d piled the documents in the night before, it had felt more and more daunting. Her hands touching every crime and coming away redder and redder.

But she climbs out of the rental car. She straightens her shoulders and steels her lungs. For a moment in the parking lot, she’s completely still.

And then she heads inside.

Flying Star is warm and sizzling, busy but not too loud, and Kim realizes immediately why Skyler picked it. It’s the choice of someone who’s used to protecting themselves, who’s still living on edge. The kitchen hums through nearby swinging doors, filling the place with the smell of frying food and chips. Kim slows, curling her fingers tighter around her briefcase handle. Yellow bulbs in teardrop glass hang on long wires from the ceiling.

And then Kim sees her.

Skyler’s sitting at the bar, watching the entrance. Her hair is different, shorter, and threads of gray sweep through the blonde. She’s wearing a purple cardigan today, dark purple, the sleeves half pushed up her forearms. Thin silver bracelets hang from her wrists.

Her pale eyes find Kim across the restaurant.

Kim steps forward, but Skyler stands, turning away. She moves onward without checking behind her, weaving through the tables, so Kim follows. Skyler passes booths filled with laughing families, and plates cluttered with huge piles of food, and groups of friends grinning at each other.

They reach an area of tables, mostly empty. A couple hold hands at one. At another, two women stare at half-finished drinks in silence. Around the tables, rising from the tiled floor, mosaic-studded pillars glitter in blue and white. The chairs are all blue and white, too, alternating at random.

“All right, then,” Skyler says, folding her arms. “Talk.”

Kim nods. She gestures to an empty table. “We could—”

“No,” Skyler says. She draws back a chair—but at a different table. The chair legs scrape and scream over the tiles and she sits with the two women.

The women stare up at Kim now. Their faces seem to carve into her soul from her laptop screen. Photo after photo of Marie Schrader and Blanca Gomez, dressed in black.

They’re dressed in black again today.

“Explain what you’re doing,” Skyler says, and she reaches for a glass on the table now, a third glass. It’s always been there. “But not to me. Explain it to them.”

Kim looks between the three of them. Drawn faces and hard eyes.

Skyler smiles. “Tell them how you’re trying to free Saul Goodman.”

Chapter Text

The restaurant narrows around her: the background conversations vanishing, the lights dimming. Kim tightens her grip on her briefcase. It’s heavy with the weight of everything inside it, as heavy as the eyes of the women before her.

The table is round, but the three women give the sense of sitting in a line. Skyler White, cool-faced in purple. Marie Schrader in black, her fingers stitched together on the tabletop, her knuckles pale. Blanca Gomez, the only one not meeting Kim’s eyes—her gaze cast solemnly on the two sisters instead.

Kim remains standing. She smiles, slipping into the expression like old, familiar clothes. If the smile were a suit, she thinks, it would be a mismatched one in black, bought off-the-rack and worn over a blue blouse. “Kim Wexler,” she says, holding out her hand to Marie—the center point.

Marie’s eyes narrow, studying the hand as if looking for an electric shock gag.

But Kim keeps her hand steady and keeps her smile benign.

So Marie rises to her feet, reaching over. She squeezes Kim’s fingers. As soon as their palms separate again, the other women stand, too. Kim shakes hands with first Blanca and then Skyler.

“You’re looking well,” Kim says to Skyler. “It’s good to see you in, uh”—a gesture to the humming restaurant, the glittering blue pillars—“in friendlier circumstances.” Kim holds the smile, daring anyone to contradict the description. “Thanks for making the time.”

Skyler just sits again, settling her hands on her lap. Her shoulders are proud and stiff, but some of her bluster seems gone now. Good.

So Kim nods to the others. “And it’s nice to finally meet you both.”

Blanca’s gaze runs down to Kim’s briefcase, then back to her eyes. “You were at the trial.”

“Yes, I was,” Kim says simply. She unbuttons her jacket and hangs it over the back of her chair, then finally she sits, too. Metal legs screech on amber tiles as she edges the chair back under the table.

The women just watch her, eyes cold.

Kim bends down and snaps open her case. She lifts out a legal pad and a pen, then flips to a new yellow page and settles the pad before her. She adjusts the angle of the pen beside the notepad until it’s exactly parallel. “I’ve flown quite a long way for this.” Another smile. “So let’s just begin, right?”

The women stare back at her. In an Albuquerque courtroom, months ago, Viola had given oral arguments in front of three appellate court judges—three shadowed faces behind a bench in a dark room, all in a line. Here they are again, in a bright restaurant, surrounded by colorful walls and decorative tile, with the smell of bacon drifting from the kitchen.

A rehearing en banc for Saul Goodman. The entire bench.

Blanca Gomez is the first to break the silence. Her frozen expression melts into something a little easier, a little more accommodating. She reaches for the pitcher in the center of the table and offers Kim a water, flipping around an upside-down glass and filling it before waiting for a response. “Flown here, huh, where from?” Her voice has the hint of an accent—Texan, maybe.

“Miami—well, closer to Fort Lauderdale. I work at a legal aid down there,” Kim says, accepting the glass and nodding her thanks. She holds Blanca’s gaze for a moment, hunting within it for—what? Sincere curiosity? Hatred?

But Blanca just frowns. “You’re on Saul Goodman’s legal team.”

Kim nods. “I am.”

“I thought you were based in Colorado, or whatever, Denver,” Skyler says, her silver bracelets flickering as she makes an elegant, dismissive motion.

Kim jogs her knee. “I relocated to Florida a long time ago,” she says. “Coming up on ten years, actually. I have a life there.” A life there? The words rattle and the question roots at the back of her brain, as if she should write it down in her notepad. A weak point to be exploited, a response that wasn’t good enough.

But the other women seem to accept the answer more easily than Kim does herself.

So Kim carries on. “These days I can work on a case from just about anywhere. The rest of his team is based in Santa Fe.”

“You must be flying back and forth all the time, then,” Skyler says, raising an eyebrow.

Kim nods. The conversation moves in drips, as if they’re all waiting for something. She murmurs, “Yes, as often as I can afford.”

“You didn’t do much at the trial for someone on his team.” It’s Marie, low and daggered.

Kim folds her lips inward. She barely remembers Marie and Blanca from the courtroom. She knows they were there, somewhere on the same side as her—the side of the victims. The judge had called their names, singling them out. They had worn black that day, too. Their necks had been stiff, facing the front of the courtroom, unerring.

The notepad on the table between them waits blankly. The fingers of Kim’s left hand rest on it. She can remember everything without needing to reference the sheets buried beneath, anyway. For now, she slides her hand back, sitting a little straighter in her blue chair. “You must have some questions about that hearing.”

“No, not really,” Marie says shortly.

“Yeah, I guess not,” Kim murmurs. Vibrations run up her leg, past her knee. Her ankle is rattling against the tiles. “You just want to know why I’m trying to free Saul Goodman.”

That name, spoken again, settles like a pall over their idle chatter.

“Well, he’s already free, right?” Marie says. “They reversed the conviction?”

Kim shakes her head. “I know it’s confusing,” she says. “That was just the appeals court.” And she waves in whatever direction feels like downtown, somewhere west of here. “We argued that there were some problems with the way his hearing was run and the judges agreed, so they sent it back to the district court for another trial.”

Marie’s eyes narrow. Her hair is dark and straight and it falls like shadows around her.

Somewhere behind them, a child screams with laughter, and for a moment the restaurant seems to rise in an oppressive clatter: kids and parents arguing and knifes scraping on plates and something sizzling in the kitchen—and then it all dies down again, settling like a storm-swept ocean.

“So, the same thing could just happen again,” Blanca says.

Kim shrugs. “Yes, it could,” she says. “But we’re going to approach things differently this time.”

“I don’t get it,” Marie says. Her voice is flat and emotionless. “He stood there and he said he was guilty. He owned it.” Her eyes are flat and emotionless, too. They seem much older than her face. “Are you trying to say that isn’t true?”

Through all this, Skyler has just been staring at the table—or at her hands on the table, anyway, at her thumbs pressing together. Her lips narrow and her eyes flick up to meet Kim’s and then instantly cut away again.

So Kim returns to Marie. “It’s not the whole truth, no.”

Marie pushes back from the table—chair legs screaming as she rises to her feet. “I need something to eat,” she says, chipper suddenly. “I’m starving. I’m going to get food before they kick us out.”

Marie walks towards the counter without looking back, her heels clicking on the tiles, her shoulders straight.

Blanca stands, too. She rests a hand on Skyler’s shoulder as she passes.

Skyler shakes her head. “I’m fine.”

Blanca stares at Kim next. Her thoughts run transparent over her face, and she exhales. “Would you like anything?”

Kim smiles. “I’m good,” she says. “Thank you.”

Blanca moves away. Her dark cardigan has a little cord hanging around the waist. The ends swing as she walks. When she reaches the counter, she lays a gentle hand on Marie’s arm. They study the menu like a unit. A tableau in a painting by an Old Master. Two women, their hair falling long down their black-clad backs, like nun’s habits.

Kim tears her eyes away.

Skyler has taken a napkin from the holder on the table. She folds it over on itself. A long red edge. Then she smooths the edge with her thumb and scrunches the whole thing into a ball.

“You know, I still would’ve come,” Kim says. “You didn’t need to surprise me.”

“Well.” Skyler taps a nail on the table. “I think I did.”

Kim just exhales and sips her water. It tastes like the water in this city tastes—not bad, just different. Always forgotten until she drinks it again. She settles the glass back on the table, spinning the bottom over the metal surface.

And Skyler taps her nail again. Clack.

“Is Marie your younger sister, or older?” It’s a simple question with a factual answer, the kind Kim would ask on a first visit with a reluctant client.

“Younger.”

Kim remembers, now, the threads of a conversation from a diner near Montrose prison returning to her. “It must be hard for you both,” she says gently. “Has she forgiven you?”

Skyler’s eyes snap up. “What?”

Kim softens her gaze. “It was Hank Schrader, right? The brother-in-law whose reputation you tried to destroy?” Her lips twist into an expression she can’t quite control, and the next words come lower. “That kind of thing sticks in my mind.”

“I—” Skyler starts, shaking her head.

And then the others return. Marie sets a glittery number down in the center of the table: number fourteen, lopsided on a metal stand. “That woman up there seriously tried to tell me they couldn’t make their Mediterranean chicken salad without the avocado—”

“Food sounds good, actually!” Skyler says loudly. “I will get something.” She jerks up from the table and moves off towards the counter, too.

Kim folds her lips together and curls her fingers around her pen, watching Skyler go. Skyler’s blonde hair and purple cardigan seem almost garish after the black tableau of earlier, but she stands before the menu board with just as much solemnity as the other two.

“Did you say something to her?” Marie hisses—a whisper as loud as her regular voice.

Kim turns back. “Nothing new.”

Marie just huffs. She rests her forefinger and middle finger on the base of the metal stand, pinching the upright bar between them, and she slides the thing back and forth over the table as if that’ll make the food arrive sooner. The noise it makes, metal on metal, sounds like gears turning.

Kim’s ankle trembles again, and she tucks her hair back. Her eyes trace the yellow legal pad as if there’s something written on every empty line.

“Mm,” Blanca starts, a little noise like she’s just been struck by a thought. “I caught this PBS documentary last week about the Night Stalker.”

When Kim looks up, she expects Blanca’s comment to be directed at Marie, but instead Blanca is staring straight ahead. At Kim. Kim frowns.

“More Satanism than I expected, but it’s fascinating, really,” Blanca says. “Did you see it?”

Kim just shakes her head.

“Women loved him, he got so many letters in prison—even married someone! Just goes to show, right?” Blanca tilts her head at Kim, then smiles. “There’s someone for everyone.”

It finally clicks. Kim feels the familiar burn of scrutiny. They shouldn’t know this about her. The sensation comes like hot air on her neck. “Skyler told you, then.”

“That you were married to Saul Goodman?” Marie says, lip curling. “Yeah, she might’ve mentioned that.”

Kim exhales. “Well, he’s not the Night Stalker.”

“And yet he’s still got someone in his corner.” Blanca’s smile remains, and she adjusts her sleeve then settles her hands together on the table.

And Kim thinks, of all people, of Clara—whose surname Kim has long forgotten, the old HHM employee. A strange character witness, drawn from twenty years ago into this moment. “He wasn’t always Saul Goodman,” she says. Once, he was being silly in the mailroom.

“You know they covered that in the papers, right?” Marie says. “Every gory detail: the arrests when he was younger, rap sheet about as long as the Nile. I don’t know how anyone ever made him a lawyer.”

Blanca leans in, conspiratorial. “My friend Deidre says you’re supposed to pass a character test before you get sworn in.” A knowing glance to Marie. “She says he must’ve bribed the officials.”

It’s all things people have been saying about Jimmy for years—even before everything. The same whispers had drifted through the upper halls of the HHM: that he’d cheated the system, somehow, that he hadn’t really passed the bar at all. Kim was never sure how many of them made their way to Jimmy’s ears—until the Chuck of it, anyway.

Movement across the restaurant, and Kim glance over as Skyler moves from the menu board to the food cabinet. Someone brushes past her, eager to be served, and it takes Skyler a split second to react. She steps back, hands locked at her sides.

Kim sighs, and turns back to the other women. “Stuff from the papers? If that was all you cared about, you wouldn’t still be here.”

Marie scoffs. “Are you going to tell us that, outside the news, he was such a saint he should be allowed to get away with murder?”

“No,” Kim says firmly. “Not get away with what he’s done.”

Marie frowns. “What, then?”

“Eighty-six years is disproportionate. It’s a life sentence for non-violent crimes,” Kim says, flattening her palm on her empty notepad again. “He doesn’t deserve a life sentence—or, hell, a death sentence to be played out in a cold and empty box.” A chill runs up her body from her feet, passing beneath her skin and settling somewhere in her lungs. Her next inhalation feels like breathing around ice, too cold on her throat.

Marie’s lips pinch downwards, muscles tightening. “I’ve already had to watch Saul bully them down to seven years, and now you’re doing it again?” As she shakes her head, her pearl earrings gleam in the light. “He had his chance and he threw it away.”

“Do you think he should have taken it?” Kim asks.

Marie huffs. “Of course not. It was a disgusting ploy that somehow worked on the federal government.”

Kim nods. “I know,” she says. “And I’m not doing that. I swear.”

“A lawyer who doesn’t lie, huh?” Blanca says, words lilting with her slight drawl.

No, Kim thinks, not unless she’s with him—but she realizes even that’s not true anymore. She hasn’t used the expired bar card in a long time. “I want to argue this properly and legally,” she says instead, enunciating the last words. “And that means fighting some of the charges brought against my ex-husband.”

A ripple passes between the two women, wind blowing over the surface of the sea. They hadn’t expected her to use that term.

That description of him is powerful, Kim thinks, and she edges closer. “Because not all the charges are fair. He wasn’t Walter White.”

And then—purple at her shoulder, a tall figure. Skyler returns stiffly, her hands tense around a white plate. She sets it with a clack on the table.

She’s bought a blueberry muffin. It sits there in a patterned red skirt.

“Whatever Saul says…” Kim continues, and that name has power here, too. The name they know him as. “Whatever Saul says, he’s not solely responsible for Walter White. He was his lawyer. And no matter how we feel about it morally, lawyers have an ethical obligation to protect their clients.”

“I think Saul did a little more than protect Walt,” Skyler says.

“You’re right.” Kim nods readily. “And he’s in prison for it.”

The Flying Star bursts with sudden loudness again, as if the restaurant has heard their conversation and is responding to it. Prison, it says, he’s in prison—and here are kids running past booths and coffee machines screaming and here’s the smell of something sweet cooking, muffins or pancakes, all of it happening right here, where you sat together once, long ago.

Kim reaches for her water and swallows around the noise. As the room quietens, she clears her throat. “But he shouldn’t be in there for upholding confidentiality of information rules.” And she knows how jargony this all is. “It might sound backwards, but when he didn’t report Walt’s murders, he was acting as any lawyer should.”

“This is why—” Skyler starts, straightening. Her lips tighten and she gestures sideways, silver bracelets tinkling to punctuate her derision. “Do you know these women finally had a sense of peace? Someone was paying for what happened to their husbands.”

“Six months—” Marie’s voice cracks. She swallows. “Six months we didn’t know for sure. Buried in unmarked pits in the desert—” She covers her mouth with her hand.

Blanca pulls a napkin from the holder, passing it over. Her eyes are lined and sad, dark caverns, but as she lays a gentle palm on Marie’s forearm, she’s not watching Kim at all. She’s watching Skyler White.

“I know, believe me,” Kim says lowly. She knows the empty hole that the desert can carve into a soul. So big and so unending. Anybody and everybody could be lost forever inside it. “But Saul Goodman didn’t pull that trigger.”

He had told Kim he saw the missing persons report on the news, but she wonders if he knew enough to piece it together even then. She thinks that, no matter what, Jimmy would have pictured it happening in the desert—bullets whipping into the sand, the sun burning everyone’s skin bloodred.

“By the time your husbands drove out there, Saul was already scared for his life,” Kim says. “Right, Skyler?”

It’s a hunch, another one drawn from that meeting in the prison—a bullet-proof vest, Skyler had said.

Skyler’s gaze flicks up to meet Kim’s, and her lips tighten, but she doesn’t say anything. She stares at the table again. She pries a piece off her blueberry muffin with her fingertips and then seems surprised to discover it in her grasp.

“Saul wasn’t scared of Walt,” Marie says. “That was all a lie.”

But Skyler’s words come softly: “Nobody with a pulse wouldn’t be scared of my husband by the end.”

The sentence seems to hold the table hostage, arresting all sound, all breath. Or if not the sentence itself but its tone, the emotion that rippled momentarily to the surface from beneath Skyler’s stiff shoulders. She peels another piece from the top of her blueberry muffin and frowns at it there in her hand.

Scared by the end, Kim thinks. And then he fled with a new name and a new life to Nebraska. Nebraska where he saw her everywhere—and he’s saying to her that still, the moment running on a loop inside her. Yeah, you were, he says. You were there. Like it’s the one inarguable thing.

“Jimmy won’t talk about that part of it much,” Kim says, soft. “That’s why we need you.” She swallows tightly, tipping her head back. Above them, the ceiling rises to a high, asymmetric cavity. Light falls diagonal from windows along one side, striping blue walls and dust-lined air vents.

When Kim exhales, straightening again, the other women are studying her.

“Sorry.” Until now it’s been deliberate—Kim’s talking about Saul, about the guy they’re familiar with. So she says the eternal next sentence: “You knew him as Saul Goodman. I knew him as Jimmy McGill.”

“Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?” Blanca asks. “Wow.”

“He used that name at the trial, right? McGill, or whatever,” Marie says. “Now he gets to be a new person who didn’t do anything wrong? Sure sounds nice.”

“No,” Kim murmurs. “He’s always Jimmy.”

And with his name comes the food, Marie’s Mediterranean salad minus the avocado, and a sandwich for Blanca. The plates crowd the table, out of place somehow. Marie stabs her salad and Blanca doesn’t touch her food at all.

At the end of the row, Skyler’s blueberry muffin has become a dozen smaller muffins, the pieces scattered over the unfurled paper skirt.

Kim’s yellow legal pad curls up at her as if expecting to be eaten, too. She flattens her palm over the vacant lines. “I just want him to have a fair trial—not a manipulation to get seven years,” she says, inclining her head to Marie. “And not a life sentence.”

“A fair trial.” Skyler pushes her plate forward, disassembled muffin abandoned. “Because you care more about fairness than people’s lives.”

“Because I care about him,” Kim says. She takes a breath and holds it in her lungs. It’s like diving in the shallow lake south of the railroad tracks, where the grass grew up under the water and snagged her feet every summer. She breaks the surface: “He’s a hard man not to care about.”

Marie snorts coldly.

“You came here today because you’re curious,” Kim says, realizing the truth of it as she speaks. “And maybe it doesn’t feel right to you, either.” She looks at Skyler again, at the woman’s fidgeting fingers. She laundered millions. She knew about the murders, too.

And here she is, in a Flying Star, surrounded by people.

A Flying Star—because this isn’t a real courtroom, and these women aren’t real judges. They don’t care about Rule 16-106 of the New Mexico Rules of Professional Conduct. They’re here because of emotions—to shame her, to make themselves feel better, to sooth months-old curiosities about that hearing, anything and everything.

Once, legs resting together on the coffee table of their shared office, as linked as their initials on the wall above, Jimmy had joked about the way Kim talked him up at his bar committee hearing. Call the Pope, he’d said, champagne fizzing as he filled her mug.

St. Jimmy, she’d replied. Well, if there was ever a time to build St. Jimmy.

“One of the first days I knew him, Jimmy put himself in the firing line so some assistant he barely knew wouldn’t get reamed out by her boss.” Kim smiles with the memory of it, and around her the smell of coffee brewing is not from the restaurant anymore but from that morning. “To look at his face, it was like he didn’t think he’d done anything noble at all.”

A glance at Skyler—who wears an expression a little like she’d worn at the end of the prison visit that day. Once again confronted with the thought that there might be more to the man than she knew.

“I had never really seen that,” Kim says, and she shrugs. “Growing up, either you didn’t help people at all, or you helped and you expected a medal for it, right?” She’d noticed it on enough faces, enough pitying adults who seemed to expect something more than gratefulness from her.

For now, Blanca is the only one nodding.

“It was hard to look away from him after that,” Kim says quietly. “Because he just kept doing it.” She stares down at her hand on the notepad and folds her lips inward. “I wish I was more like that. I tried to be.”

Her fingers are pale and lined, and she sighs. The breath feels tired in her chest.

“I’d look at his face and it was like he just didn’t know he was doing good things.” Kim feels her eyes grow soft, feels her expression shifting and she doesn’t even try to stop it. “Even when they were very good things.”

Marie just shakes her head. “How can he have done very good things?”

So Kim jumps ahead, skipping through time. “A little while after Jimmy got his law license, his brother got sick,” she says. “And then he got really sick. In the end he was housebound.” A dark house with high ceilings, with no lights but for the hissing lanterns and their reflections thrown from a space blanket around Chuck’s proud form. “I want to think I could do what Jimmy did, but…”

‘What did he do?” Skyler asks, her voice quieter.

“He cared for him. Brought Chuck groceries at six o’clock every morning, his favorite newspapers,” Kim says. “He took Chuck to doctors and specialists, even ones out of the state. He tried to keep things as normal as possible. I didn’t—” She gives a flat smile. “I honestly don’t know how he managed. I didn’t then and I still don’t.”

“He talked about his brother at the trial, didn’t he?” Marie asks. She looks different somehow. Lines that have been on her face since Kim arrived have vanished, replaced by new ones. A furrowed confusion between her brows.

Kim nods. Chuck’s name through the courtroom had been a hand reaching through time, something she never thought she’d hear again. Chuck’s name from Jimmy’s mouth without fake indifference or crocodile tears. Something heavy fills her throat and she swallows without clearing it, ripping her gaze away from the women.

Across the restaurant, beneath shifting lights, Kim can almost see the booth she and Jimmy had shared here years ago. She can’t remember any of it exactly. Maybe if she went and sat there, she could. More likely, the specific memories would evade her there, too, and leave only the emotions clinging to her walls.

“You know, I think I am hungry, after all,” Kim says. “I’m going to grab something.” She stands, chair rasping back as she rises. The women watch her, their expressions painted differently now. “There’s more, if you want to hear it,” she adds. “Decide if you do or not.”

And then she moves away, crossing the amber tiles in their curling patterns. She climbs the few low steps to the raised area near the counter. The cabinet waits with its neatly arranged pies and pastries, and the tall menus boast salads and burgers and sandwiches. She imagines the other women watching her from behind and wonders what kind of tableau she makes up here.

Something from a documentary on PBS, no doubt. A fool who doesn’t know she’s in too deep.

Kim closes her eyes and breathes slowly. Her eyelids are warm and familiar. She opens them. She looks down at herself and smooths her blouse. It’s dark green today, flecked with blue sparks. Her hands are steady enough now.

From the end of the cabinet, she picks out a pre-packaged sandwich on pale bread. Chicken salad. The plastic crunches beneath her fingers as she holds it. Quick Fix, the sign above the counter says.

When Kim gets back to the table, only Skyler and Marie are waiting for her. The third chair is empty.

Marie catches her gaze. “Blanca has work.”

“Did she just leave?” Kim asks. “Just this second?”

Skyler opens her mouth but says nothing; she just nods.

Kim sets the sandwich down on top of her notepad and grabs her jacket. She covers the tiles and the steps faster than earlier, skipping up them and heading for the door. Blanca’s dark figure vanishes on the other side of the glass, and Kim dodges through an indecisive family and makes it to the exit.

She pushes out into the parking lot—it’s warm, and the desert burns at the edge of her nose. “Mrs. Gomez!” she calls, trotting after the woman’s receding back, jacket swaying in her hand. “Mrs. Gomez.”

Blanca turns. She doesn’t look surprised; she doesn’t look much of anything.

“Hi,” Kim says, catching her breath. “I know you have to go. I just wanted to thank you for listening.”

Blanca shrugs. “My morning was free.” It’s a simple statement, an expression of easy facts.

“Why did you come?”

“Because Marie asked me to,” Blanca says. Her dark hair falls onto her shoulders in curls that catch the wind, ringlets that threaten to untangle.

Kim hunts for a business card in her jacket and holds it out. “Just in case.”

Blanca smirks, but she accepts the card and tucks it away. “For your sake, I hope you can get him out of there sooner.”

“For my sake?”

Another shrug. “It has been a little nice to imagine somebody suffering for what happened.” Blanca’s eyes darken, her eyebrows shifting in severe lines. “But then we’re all suffering, aren’t we?”

It’s sincere and insincere at once, a tone that slips through Kim’s fingers.

And maybe Kim was wrong. Maybe Blanca, unlike the others, didn’t come here for answers, or punishment, or curiosity. Her questions at the beginning of the meeting weren’t interest or kindness but just a blithe sort of dismissiveness that came from not caring at all.

Blanca turns to leave, and Kim stalls her. “Will you answer one more thing?” Kim asks. When Blanca doesn’t move, she carries on. “Do you think Skyler will help me?”

The wind blows with fire from beyond the city. It comes in from places where men vanish and it carries no answers with it. Blanca flattens loose hair on the top of her head, and she gives a long sigh that seems to come from somewhere out in the desert, too. “Do you know how long Skyler knew my Gomie was dead?” she asks. It hangs in the air, a question for Kim’s question. “It wasn’t minutes or hours.” A pale smile. “It was days.”

Kim’s heart rattles, the old feeling returning to her, too. The enormous and empty feeling. I thought you were dead.

“Marie found out pretty quick, too,” Blanca says. “But it took them a while to call me. They were too busy. DEA Agent Schrader and Partner Missing, Presumed Dead. That was the first headline.”

And the wind comes again, catching the power lines, whistling.

“Agent Schrader and partner,” Blanca repeats. She curls her hands around her dark cardigan as if it’s cold here. As if they’re up in the mountains.

And Kim stands still. Waiting.

“But it’s not their job to remember Gomie,” Blanca says. “It’s my job.” She sniffs, glancing off at something in the vanishing distance. “And if you thought your Saul was an easy person to care about, you should’ve met my husband.”

Kim smiles. “I wish I had.”

Blanca shakes her head, but it doesn’t seem to be in disagreement. In the parking lot, under the high sun, she looks like an actress from an old movie: sad and beautiful.

When she turns to leave this time, Kim doesn’t stop her. The dusty wind settles above the warm cement, a low kind of stillness. Kim exhales, and she folds her jacket over her arm and walks back inside the Flying Star.

It seems emptier in there than earlier, the lunch patrons bleeding away for the peace of mid-afternoon. Above the food counter, painted letters remind her that there’s a Quick Fix for everything, no matter what you need. A sandwich or a blueberry muffin.

Kim crosses the disjointed amber tiles, weaving between blue and white chairs.

Only Skyler sits at their table now. A lone figure in purple and ashen-blonde. But Marie’s things are still there—a purse on Blanca’s now-empty chair, and the barely touched Mediterranean salad. Marie’s car keys, Kim notices now, are out on the table next to her cellphone. Two purple gems wink on the corner of her cellphone case.

Kim drapes her jacket back over her chair and resettles at their table. Her sandwich waits on her notepad. She opens the plastic packet and takes out half. She chews it slowly.

And she swallows, chasing the mouthful with water. “Do you want to tell me what this was all about?”

Skyler twists a bracelet around on her wrist until the charm is above her pulse point. “Marie and I…” she starts. “We’re barely back to being sisters again.” She draws her hands back off the table and stares over the booths. “I’m not going to help you unless Marie agrees to it.”

Hope flutters in Kim’s chest with rapid wings. “We could keep your name out of it,” she says. “Nobody needs to know.”

But Skyler shakes her head. “I would know,” she says softly. “And Marie would figure it out.”

“Yeah,” Kim murmurs. She takes another bite of the sandwich, then dusts her fingers over the open packet. “If you do agree, it’d certainly make our case look a lot stronger if you were there yourself.”

“What, the villain’s wife on the witness stand?” Skyler gives a wan smile. “I think that would make things worse, don’t you?”

Kim tilts her head. “His wife or his victim?”

Skyler’s eyelids flutter, and she glances away again.

So Kim drops it for now. She finishes the first half of the sandwich and then closes the packet. A new group settles at a nearby table, two men with enormous coffees and a glittering number seventy-three on a metal stand. They continue their loud conversation, voices bouncing off the tiled floor and colorful walls. Their food, when it arrives: towering burgers and baskets piled high with chips. The men eat it easily, care free.

The silence at their own table spreads slow and heavy until Kim breaks it again. “The last time we talked, your son was getting some money.”

Skyler nods. “He figured out who it was really from pretty quick,” she says. “He hasn’t done anything with it yet, but it’s his choice. He went through this all, too.”

Kim nods.

And then Skyler’s eyebrows flick upward. “We should’ve just moved to Florida, huh?”

Kim feels that same tug on her brain as earlier, the newly-latched hook. What’s in Florida? “Yeah, well,” she says, “if you ever need a lawyer down there…”

From behind the line of booths, Marie returns. She walks with her head held as high as earlier, as if she’s oblivious to the entire restaurant. She sits, and she grimaces at her unfinished salad as if surprised to still see it there. She pushes it away.

“What did you decide?” Kim asks. “Do you want to hear more?

Marie stitches her fingers together, settling herself. “What was wrong with his brother? Cancer?”

It’s such a sudden and specific question that it takes Kim a moment. “He had a mental illness,” she says. “But he experienced it as a physical thing.”

Marie’s brow draws together. Not what she expected.

“And Chuck was a great lawyer,” Kim adds. “He went to law school when he was still a teenager. Nobody I ever met knew the ins and outs of the law better than him.” She sighs. “It’s pretty hard to argue with someone like that.”

Kim hears Jimmy at the trial. He tried. He didn’t try hard enough. Not hard enough to break that brick wall, the indestructible face of Chuck’s belief in the infallibility of his own mind. She doesn’t know if anyone ever could have broken that.

But she hears Jimmy—his voice cracking, just a little. The grief that finally emerged was not what it would have been back then. If it had emerged in those old days, instead, when he had whistled through the mornings, cheerful and piercing, as if he could trick her into forgetting what happened—and maybe forgetting that he was there before her, at all.

He was making himself some bright and transparent thing. Invisible, happy, perfect. And the whole time, every smile that didn’t reach his eyes was screaming at her louder than words could.

“How long did Saul take care of him?” Again it’s Marie, and again her expression is more solemn than Kim expects.

“A couple of years,” Kim says.

Marie’s eyebrows climb. Her interest is unmistakable on her face. “It’s hard work,” she says. “Looking after someone like that.” She smiles, nodding with it. “It’s very hard.”

Skyler’s expression changes now, too, as she stares at Marie.

So Kim keeps talking, painting this picture of a man they never met. “Jimmy cared for him until they had a falling out.” She holds Marie’s gaze steadily, deliberately not glancing between the two sisters. “The relationship never really recovered after that.” And Kim clears her throat—clearing it of ash in the air in the early morning. “And then Chuck killed himself.”

The words fall with sharp points. Skyler shrinks from them, but Marie seems to remember this from Jimmy’s hearing, too, because she just nods. She doesn’t look surprised at all. For her, this has been hanging, maybe, over the entire story.

The men at the nearby table laugh suddenly at some joke, the noise cracking through the air, jarring and discordant. The restaurant seems to shrink again, tight around Kim’s skin.

“When you knew Saul,” Kim starts, “he was doing horrible things. I’m not trying to erase the horrible things.” She shifts her chair inward, her palms down on the table, close and closer to Marie. “But you were there at the hearing. That’s why you should believe me now about Jimmy. Because you saw him.”

Marie’s eyes widen, just a little. Her pearl earrings seem to catch more light.

“I thought he was gone—” Kim starts, and she swallows the next words. She thought he was gone, or she had told herself he was gone. Either way, it ended up the same. No more Jimmy McGill.

(—but that was a lie, it was always a lie, she knows he was still inside—)

Kim curls her fingers inward, a loose fist on the table. She’s trying to grasp something. “His childhood nuns might be proud of this penitence, but I don’t want him to die in there.” The last three words—die in there—catch as they pass her lips, betraying too much, falling too softly, maybe inaudibly in the clattering room.

And Kim straightens in her chair. She wipes her palm over her face, brushing that emotion away. Her breath cycles through her lungs and the empty legal pad mocks her.

She exhales sharply. The table comes into focus. She gathers the notepad and her pen and reaches down for her briefcase, unlatching it and opening it just enough to slip the legal pad inside.

“Wait—” Marie says.

Kim pauses. “What?”

Marie sighs. “What do you need from Skyler?”

Kim straightens up in her chair, setting her hands back on the table. Skyler watches her, blue eyes pale and unreadable. “Last time we spoke, you were making a timeline,” Kim says. “Did you finish it?”

“As much as I could,” Skyler says.

Hope flaps in Kim’s lungs again. ‘It might not even come to anything,” she says. “We’ll be challenging their accessory-after-the-fact charges either way. But with what you know about Walt’s organization, and if you were working for him by the end…”

Skyler’s face pales. “I saw all the money coming in and out.” She turns to Marie, and the hopeful thing in Kim’s chest seems to flitter over Skyler’s expression now, too.

Marie huffs. Her fingers clench around each other, still interlaced. “Well, I never want to see that disgusting man again,” she says. “And frankly, Ms. Wexler, I think there’s something wrong with you.” But then Marie straightens her chin, holding herself proudly. “But the thing is, for a while I thought my own sister was going to end up in prison over this.”

Skyler is staring downward at the demolished muffin. The blueberries bleed purple through the crumb.

“And I’m glad she didn’t,” Marie continues. “So if I can sit here eating Mediterranean chicken salad with her after what she did to me and Hank?” She unfurls her hands, palms upwards. “Saul Goodman might as well come to dinner, too.”

Skyler snorts, the sound spilling into laughter, and the absurdity of it spreads to Kim—filling her chest and then falling from her own lips as laughter. It’s ridiculous and disproportionate but she can’t stop. Their laughter ripples against the tiles and settles slowly, clinging to them.

Marie tucks dark hair behind her ears. “If you want to talk, talk,” she says, and she gathers her phone and keys, and she stands. “I’ll meet you at the car.” She slings her purse over her shoulder, staring down at Kim, and then she moves away—her voice coming low as she vanishes: “God, I hate lawyers.”

The hanging lights seem to stain her shoulders yellow as she approaches the front door: the dark cardigan brightening somehow, as if the Old Master painting her departure has briefly dipped their brush into ocher paint.

“That’s the most animated I’ve seen her in a while,” Skyler says.

Kim twists back to face her.

“Did you know she had to care for Hank?” Skyler tilts her head. Her shorter hair shifts, hanging in blonde curtains, laced with silver-gray. “He was housebound, too.”

Kim shakes her head. “No.”

Skyler makes a low noise—neither disbelieving or believing, just an acknowledgement. “So how much of that was a lie, just now?”

“None of it,” Kim says.

Skyler’s eyes narrow. “It wasn’t the whole truth, though,” she says firmly. “The way you talk about him… someone can’t become a man like Saul without having pieces of that guy inside him all along.” She tidies her hair above her left ear, sweeping it back into place, and then she arches a brow. “Believe me, I know.”

The words have immense weight; the words have the feeling of something that has been thought about for a long, long time. And in the silence that settles after them, Kim can feel all the things that haunt her, too: the way she and Jimmy had made Chuck look crazy, the way they’d made Howard Hamlin look crazy, the way they’d brought these two men so close to death that death had seen the opportunity and grabbed them.

And maybe Skyler has been able to see that in her eyes this time. Kim can see similar things in Skyler’s eyes, too. I wished people dead, Skyler had said.

Shadows that hang on them all.

And of course Skyler’s right to assume there’s dozens more shadows, unseen, still lingering over Jimmy. A dead girl whose body he helped clean up.

“You could be right,” Kim says, finally. “But you can’t do what Jimmy did at that hearing without being a good man, too.”

Skyler just shakes her head. “Well, then, pity it came so late.”

Kim holds her stare. Cool blue eyes under curving brows. “Maybe so,” Kim says. “But nobody’s perfect, right?”

And Skyler laughs again, her whole face changing with it. She shakes her head and her hair loosens again.

“Think on it,” Kim says lightly. She stands with her briefcase, unslinging her jacket from the back of her chair. “But no more traps, no surprises. I’m in town for a few days. I can set up a meeting with his lead attorney, just the three of us.”

Skyler rises, too. She glances down at the mess on their table and sighs, then she tidies the remains of her muffin, consolidating it with the unfinished salad and Kim’s sandwich, all on one plate. Her hands move as she speaks, automatic. “My son’s looking after Holly. I should go give him the rest of his Saturday back,” she says. “We can’t afford a babysitter so I’ll have to check with him first, see when he’s free.”

The hope settles in Kim’s chest, no longer fluttering, warmer than before. “Bring all the information you have next time,” she says. “We’ll go through it together.”

Skyler nods. She holds out her hand again, and Kim shakes it.

It feels warmer than before, too.

The sun above the city is a flat disc that bears into her eyes—a white hole carved not just in the fabric of the sky but in her own body. The sheet of blue, usually hanging so high above Albuquerque it feels untouchable, now seems close enough that Kim thinks she could reach right up and grasp it, and hook a finger through the hole of the sun.

The rental car waits where she left it. Her morning drive feels so long ago Kim almost expects the car to have vanished with the rest of the day, rusting into the cement while she sat in the blue interior of the Flying Star. Giving oral arguments before her panel of widowed judges.

Kim brushes thin strands of dark hair away from her forehead. The white sun is warm on her cheeks, pricking her skin. She hunts for the rental car keys in her jacket. Her palm finds the heavy fob.

She opens the passenger side door first, nestling her too-heavy briefcase on the seat. In the end, she hadn’t needed the contents at all.

As she passes around to the driver’s side, she spots Skyler across the lot. A flash of blonde hair and a straight back.

A restaurant or a prison parking lot. Either way, she’s always watching this woman across a wide expanse. It feels as if the space between them is made of not just cement but time and experience and all of it—the places they can never meet. A mailroom or a strip mall office, facing off on either side of something wide and vast and maybe uncrossable.

This time, Skyler spots Kim, too.

Kim nods, her hand lingering on the roof of her car.

Skyler stares back. She’s too far away for Kim to really read her expression. Nothing travels this distance beyond the vague shape of her eyes, her cheekbones.

And then Skyler nods, too.

Kim smiles. She opens the driver’s door and settles in her seat, checking her phone. There’s a message from Viola, and Kim taps out a quick reply. Not quite as expected, she says. But setting up another meeting between us all soon.

And then she curls her hands around the wheel. The afternoon sun slides low and hot through the passenger window, cutting empty air before reaching Kim. It feels as if it’s come a very long way now, she thinks. Not a close sky at all, not a close sun, but something eternally vast and enormous and deep.

She closes her eyes.

Behind her eyelids, the three women in their dark colors still watch her. Their mouths are drawn, and their eyes are flecked with something unreadable, something hidden beneath layers and layers of paint.

I thought he was gone, Kim had said. She’d thought Jimmy was gone, but she’d got him back.

None of these women will ever know the same. Their graves in the desert will remain there, the earth baking dry under the sun, cracking yellow and brown. And it was naive to think she could ever change this for anyone—that she could ever bring anyone else back, could ever bring Cheryl her husband back. As if it were some act of charity, some deed that was possible if only Kim were noble enough and kind.

In the end, all Cheryl had done was hold up her incurable wound to the world. Look at it, look at what you’ve all done. She had tied tighter the anchor in Kim’s chest, the broken piece inside her.

Like shattered glass floating, maybe, in some deep lake. Sharp enough to cut. Glinting on vast water that runs down and down. She still doesn’t like to look at that place very often.

But the women today had thrown rocks into the deep pool, breaking the surface and revealing the depths again.

And she got Jimmy back, but of course she didn’t get Jimmy back—not the same one she watched long ago in a basement mailroom, not the one who was so bright and clear she felt as if she could reach right through him. She got him back, but she won’t get back the Jimmy who she’d stared at after he returned downstairs from taking a bullet for Clara—throwing himself in the firing line for no reason other than that it seemed to come naturally to him.

He’d looked happy and guilty, then, as if expecting her to tell him he’d done something wrong.

Kim presses her fingers to her lips. She clears her throat and shakes her head, shaking it all away. She starts the car and the car chokes for her, the engine gasping until it whirs on with its life.

Chapter Text

The door closes. Skyler remains visible on the other side of the decorated glass: lingering outside Viola’s office and chatting to one of the assistants. The assistant gestures off to the left and Skyler smiles, and then the two of them shake hands.

“So, what do you think?” Kim asks, still staring out through the door. Skyler nods at something and then moves away, heading in the direction of the exit.

“I think she had more to say than I expected,” Viola says. “And I think she’ll be an incredibly compelling witness.”

Kim turns back to face Viola’s desk. “I think so, too.”

A smile drifts over Viola’s face, and she rolls her head and rubs the nape of her neck. The evening shrinks beyond the window—the summery amber sky settling into an hours-long dusk. Trees seem outlined in gold, as if their broad leaves have fallen among hot coals and are just beginning to catch, the green curling up and glowing at the edges.

The desk between her and Viola is home to more leaves: leaves in the shape of yellow and pink Post-It notes, in the shape of photocopied pages from Skyler’s ledger, in the wide, square sheets torn from a legal pad. Viola exhales, and flattens a couple of the pages with her palm.

“Well, now we just need to get all this organized,” Viola says, resettling her glasses and peering across the room. “Gosh, and even my planning board is turning on me.”

Watching over them: the board of Post-Its and card outlines, more chaotic than Kim’s ever seen it. A couple of notes—useless or forgotten—gather at the base of the wall. The seasons are changing inside this room.

The door cracks open again, and Gina Robles ducks her head in, clocks the papers on the table and grimaces. “Sorry—” she says. Her hair is more frazzled than normal, slipping from its ponytail. “I’ll come back.”

“What’s up?” Viola asks.

Gina lingers. “You got two hours free next Thursday afternoon? Brooks is getting impatient.”

Viola slides her chair sideways and flicks through a deck planner. She frowns, and grabs a pen and scribbles something out. “I do now.”

“Lovely,” Gina says, flashing Kim a smile and then drawing the door closed behind her. Any time Kim visits these offices, Gina is a whirlwind, balancing a couple of dozen cases almost single-handedly. Twenty odd spinning plates, or whatever they need to keep the firm going strong while Viola and her team sink hour after hour into the trial of Saul Goodman.

Viola stares at the doorway for a moment longer than feels natural. She sighs, and rubs the bridge of her nose, her glasses raised onto her hand as if her knuckles are eyes.

Kim folds her lips around her teeth to hold back the words.

But Viola seems to sense what she was about to say, anyway, slipping her hand back down to the desk. “Kim, if I only cared about money and a high-rise office, I would’ve stayed at S&C.” She widens her eyes. “Okay?”

Kim exhales, nodding.

“And wait until we kick their asses on this eighty-six years.” Viola weaves her fingers together and swivels a wrist, checking her watch. “Jeez, but I better tell Lynn we’ll be later than I expected.”

As Kim flicks through a couple of her notes, Viola finds her cellphone under the sea of documents. She swivels in her chair as she types, and the light from the lamp on her desk turns over her furrowed brow. Somewhere in the offices beyond, there’s the unmistakable sound of copy machines kicking into action in unison: a low burr becoming a metallic hum.

Viola flicks her phone case closed again and sets it down. “All right, let’s start making piles,” she says, gathering up a couple of papers on her left and then holding out a couple more for Kim. “Murders over here, and Nazis over there.”

Kim snorts, taking the papers and setting them on the edge of the desk. As they work, Viola flicks on a little square radio. Low instrumental music rises: lots of contemplative strings and empty spaces for their thoughts to fill.

By the time she and Viola leave for the night, the sun is below the horizon, but not yet ready to release the sky. Low clouds are streaked with yellow and there’s a haze of violet among the deep blue. Viola’s place is only a few minutes from the office, up roads that twist over on themselves and become so narrow it feels as if they were laid here a long time ago, before SUVs and Hummers. The houses that line them are all cut from shared cloth. Two neighbors borrow the same blue-tiled windowsills, while another have mirrored Pueblo-revival roofs and stucco.

Kim trails behind Viola’s bumper in her rental car, weaving through street after street until finally pulling up to the curb. Viola’s place has a low stone wall along the sidewalk and white-shuttered windows. Flowerpots hang on either side of a green doorway. The green follows them inside, too: in houseplants whose palms turn unanimously towards the nearest window, and in drooping things spilling from sky-blue flowerpots, leaves penned with pastel pink.

It must be Viola, then, who’s responsible for the many plants inside the R&G offices. Kim wheels her carry-on around a heavy, unfired-looking vase.

Viola settles her purse on the entryway console. “We beat Lynn home after all,” she murmurs, sounding a little relieved.

Kim’s a little relieved, too. At the dinner invitation this morning, she hadn’t known what to expect, and for the last few frenzied hours around the desk, a tiny part of her had been worried that Lynn was just waiting, impatient, in a busy kitchen.

Viola leads Kim through into the living room. The room has the same sense of organized clutter as her law office. Books gather in stacks that look like they’ve remained untouched for so long they’ve become furniture. A half-empty cup of coffee balances on one. “You’re the first to use the guest room since we renovated,” Viola says. “But, well…”

Kim turns from the books to face her.

“You might have a roommate.” Viola grimaces, and then she makes a soft whistling noise.

She’s answered by a low chirrup—and then, after a moment, an orange-gray cat emerges from behind a sofa. He prowls over the patterned rug, strong shouldered.

“Jonesy likes to sleep in the guest room,” Viola says, smiling gently as the cat weaves between her legs. “But just kick him out, he’ll get over it.”

The cat, Jonesy, gives Kim a long and searching look, dead-eyed, and then he quickly decides to act as if she’s not there.

Kim smiles. A power play no matter what your species.

“Now, you want food, don’t you?” Viola coos, and Kim blinks—but then Viola hooks an arm under Jonesy’s belly and lifts him up. He knocks his forehead against her glasses and she laughs, then says, “Guest room’s the second door down!”

“Can I help with anything?” Kim says.

Viola just scoffs, and she and Jonesy vanish into the kitchen.

Kim tucks her hair behind her ear, and she picks up her bag again. As she wanders down the hallway, she can her the sound of the cat meowing, and Viola murmuring in response.

The guest bedroom smells of fresh paint. The curtains are already half drawn, obscuring a view of the neighbor’s fence. Kim peeks up at the wedge of sky—and the sun seems to have finally succumbed, now. The night is ink, and the white fence, lit from the street, seems almost unnaturally bright against it.

Kim sets her bag and briefcase on the end of the bed. There’s a painting on canvas hanging above the headboard: tall trees along a riverbank that make her feel as if she’s standing in the shade and glimpsing precious specks of white-gold sunlight through their branches when the wind moves.

She pulls out her phone. She hasn’t had a message from Jimmy in a few days, but she tells herself it’s not that strange. The computers in there break all the time, and the payphones, too.

She clicks on the Corrlinks portal anyway, just in case, but there’s nothing.

At the sound of the front door, Kim closes her emails. She glances at the painting as if her reflection could be found in it, inhales, and then shakes her head.

She’s being silly.

As she heads back into the hallway, an orange-gray shape slinks for her open door. “You done eating already?” Kim murmurs, and Jonesy pretends not to hear her, hopping onto the bed.

Kim smiles and leaves the door ajar, then heads down towards the smell of food.

Lynn is crossing to the kitchen, laden with bulging, white plastic bags. “There she is!” she cries.

“Hi, Lynn,” Kim says. “Thank you for this.”

Lynn just shushes her, balancing the bags on the counter and somehow leaning around all of them to kiss Viola hello before moving to the fridge. Over the half wall separating the table from the kitchen, the two of them dance like a pantomime: Viola rearranging the pots and pans into a smaller stack on the stovetop, Lynn making space for the takeout bags.

Eventually, Viola weaves around the half wall, carrying plates and cutlery. She moves a couple of plants off one end of the table. “Afternoon sun,” Viola explains, as she nestles the plants in the empty spaces on a drinks cart. She sets out the plates.

“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?” Kim asks again.

It’s Lynn who turns her down this time, calling out from the kitchen. When she emerges, she’s carrying an impressive number of Chinese takeout boxes with one hand. Viola frees a couple from her grasp, and the two of them strange them erratically between the plates.

“Just something I threw together,” Lynn says, glancing at Kim.

Kim sits, and she smiles again. “This is perfect.”

Lynn’s face softens with something like relief, and she returns to the kitchen. When she comes back, she’s carrying three wine glasses and a bottle of red, and these objects join the table, too—along with the plates and the cartons and the few houseplants that still remain and sit among the steaming food like another course, waiting to be eaten.

Lynn pops the cork on the Syrah. “No shop talk,” she says, pausing with the bottle angled above the first glass.

Viola laughs softly, and her eyes find Kim’s. “We agree,” she says. “Don’t we?”

“No shop talk,” Kim echoes, her palms coming up.

So Lynn pours the wine. Viola opens the lids of the boxes and starts loading her plate with food—beef and broccoli, and egg rolls, and orange chicken—and so Kim does, too. Her plate is patterned with green and pink petals, and she smothers the flowers with chow mein.

They talk about old gossip and new gossip. An associate from S&C’s new marriage to a woman twenty years younger than him. Rich’s retirement and Perry’s new hybrid car that would be over a decade old, now, if it hadn’t been stolen from her reserved parking spot, a story that lived on for months—

“Years!” Viola says. “She talked about it for years.”

“She couldn’t get another one anywhere in the state,” Kim says, and the others laugh brightly.

It’s surreal, hearing about the later days at that firm. The company retreats, the long Monday morning meetings that apparently only got longer after Kim left, the new offices rented one level below. A proud expansion.

They talk about old names Kim remembers and old names she’s forgotten. Kim even talks, briefly, about the Titusville women—or not the women themselves, but the cookouts they’d throw, and the kind of food they ate. A sideways step into some kind of revelation.

It feels like exposing a part of herself.

Because that was her, too, the woman who worried about what to bring to Cissy’s place, because she couldn’t bring macaroni salad for the third time. They would notice, and she needed to bring something they wouldn’t notice.

She and Viola and Lynn eat, and they don’t talk about Jimmy’s case, or anyone else’s case. They don’t talk about Jimmy at all. Kim reaches for another egg roll and she sips her red wine and the dining room is warm and colorful, surrounded by plants that seem to be listening, too.

When Kim turns in later, she finds Jonesy curled up on one of the pillows on the guest bed, and she doesn’t have the heart to move him.

Kim corrals her notes back into place on the tray table, pinning them down beneath her laptop. The tray table shifts and then settles again as the person in the next row tries to get comfortable.

In the seat to her right, a teenaged boy stares dully at her laptop screen, his eyes so flat she doubts he’s paying attention to anything beyond the movement of the scrolling text. Kim opens the next document, another from Viola that she’d managed to grab over the Albuquerque airport Wi-Fi before the flight had boarded.

The bald man on her left, cocooned in a neck pillow and an eye mask, makes a low, snuffling noise in his sleep.

Kim yawns, hiding the sound behind her palm as if she can also hide from her tiredness. That morning, before dawn, it had been almost impossible to drag herself from the warm bed and warm guest room. She’d splashed water on her face and dressed, zipping up her bag with the unshakable feeling that she was forgetting something. But when she tiptoed down the hallway, she’d found Viola already awake and working at the kitchen table—probably typing up the reports that Kim is now reading over.

At least the early start means she’ll make it into the legal aid clinic before noon. It seems like she’s been gone a lot longer than three days. And it seems like she’s hardly left at all.

The unshakable thing, the forgotten thing, is obvious, of course. A drive through the Colorado mountains. The security cameras gazing at her, and the x-ray machines gazing at her, and Jimmy gazing at her inside the private interview room.

She feels as if she’s left some piece of herself behind in the desert.

But Kim shakes her head, exhaling, and she tucks her hair back again. Words flow through her brain from the screen, the minutes slipping by with the steady hum of the engine—until the plane ripples with dozens of pinging noises, the seatbelt signs coming on. Time for landing.

She packs away her laptop and the documents. Every piece of paper seems to have expanded since she got it out hours ago, and she has to force her briefcase latches shut around the mess. The man on her right huffs and grumbles in his sleep. He turns onto his side and the entire row rocks.

The plane descends, and Kim’s eardrums swell with the pressure. Someone is inflating a balloon inside her head. She closes her eyes.

These days, she travels so much that her ears pop anywhere: in city streets, in law offices, her body making sure she’s not up at thirty thousand feet. Her ears pop as she brushes her teeth, as she’s lying in bed—no, still not at cruising altitude.

Still not flying to see him.

The landing today feels like it takes longer than usual, the plane leveling out and banking to the right before descending again. All Kim can see through the sleeping man’s window is the blue of an empty sky, and when they bank the blue of an empty ocean, all this empty color stretching on into nothing.

To her right, the teenager is chewing gum, loud enough that she can hear it above the engine noise and the groaning fuselage.

They land, and the brakes screech and the plane slows. The bald man sniffs and lifts his mask up. He glances at Kim first, bleary-eyed, before turning away to face the window.

The plane slows and slows. An arrival announcement crackles over the speakers. Welcome to Miami International. We hope you had a comfortable flight. You can turn on your electronics.

There’s a flurry of movement all down the plane as the passengers follow the guidance like an order. Phone back on, airplane mode off.

Kim waits for her screen to light up, rubbing the back of her neck. Notifications steadily appear. She has a couple of emails from Viola, one from Patty.

And then, appearing without ringing, a missed call. The number is familiar even though it’s different every time. A long string of digits, a Colorado area code. It floats on her screen like a serial number.

Kim shifts forward.

The missed call was only a couple of minutes ago. She doesn’t swipe the notification away. She stares at it. Beside her, the kid chews his gum, loud and getting louder, and the sound seems to chew through her skin.

—then her phone rings again.

Kim answers. The automatic voice asks if she wants to accept the prepaid call from Montrose Federal Correctional Complex, and she agrees quickly, and then the line clunks, and then there’s the low static hum that signals a connection made.

Her heart thuds. “How long do we have?” she asks, sending the question out and out into the static.

The stranger next to her huffs and glances over at the sound of her voice, but she ignores him.

The line buzzes and Jimmy’s voice arrives. “Fifteen minutes,” he says. “Not too bad.”

“Fifteen. Good.” Kim angles herself slightly away from the bald man, but there’s no going anywhere in this middle seat. The plane taxis towards the terminal and there’s another crackling announcement. Something about connecting flights.

“Where are you?” Jimmy asks, as the flight attendant’s voice dies away again.

“My plane just landed,” Kim says.

It’s hard to hear him beneath the drone, and she turns up the volume on the side of her phone. “And here I thought you were screening my calls.”

Kim chuckles softly. “Well, you could’ve been anybody.”

“Any one of your friends at Montrose.”

“That’s right,” Kim murmurs, and the teenager next to her starts rifling through the seat pocket, and the man’s elbow somehow digs into her hip as he tries to deflate his neck pillow. Kim presses the phone tighter against her ear. “I met with Skyler about your case this weekend.”

A fuzzing hiss. “No kidding?”

“She set a trap for me, actually,” Kim says. She delivers the names as if she still can’t quite believe them herself: “Marie Schrader and Blanca Gomez.”

Jimmy whistles. “Wow, no shit.”

“Yes shit,” Kim says—and the kid finally glances at her. She turns again, facing the disgruntled man.

“… got the full-court press,” Jimmy is saying, and beneath his voice there’s the rumble of something heavy, almost like gears turning. “How did it go?”

The plane slows and slows. She’s not really sure how to describe that meeting in the Flying Star. The plates of uneaten food and the heavy stares and the women and their parting words. “It went okay, actually,” she says. “I just talked about you.”

A rush of breath, and then: “Jesus.” Another long and metallic noise. She can feel his expression over the phone call without seeing it, can imagine the slow shake of his head.

There’s a loud clunk—the jet bridge attaching. They’ve reached the gate. The seatbelt signs dim, and there’s the hiss of the cabin depressurizing.

Sounds come clearer now with the relieved pressure: voices chattering loudly and groans and the seatbelts unlatching. The call against her ear feels louder, too: the connection is humming and popping and somewhere beneath it Jimmy is breathing.

Kim holds the phone tighter, trying not to lose it to the sounds. “She’s going to help us, Jimmy—Skyler is. She’ll testify.”

A hushed exhalation.

People near the front of the plane begin to queue in the aisle, opening the lockers and then standing there, trapped in a slightly different cubic foot than they were before. The man beside Kim rises, hunching beneath the low ceiling as if expecting her to move out of her seat even though there’s no space for her in the aisle.

“Listen, Kim, whatever happens…” Jimmy starts.

She scoffs. “Shut up, ‘whatever happens’.”

“I know, but…” His voice trails away, lost with the blur of the cellphone connection, lost somewhere up with the satellites.

Or maybe just lost on Earth, down among wire fences and cavernous mountains. Those mountains could lose anything, she thinks. Kim swallows, and she can feel time trailing away, too. Seconds vanishing up into dark space and Colorado valleys.

“I just mean…” Jimmy’s voice drifts in again.

It’s too loud in the cabin. Everyone wants to leave. The man on her right sighs as if it wasn’t his own damn choice to stand up early. “Listen,” Kim says, curling around her phone. “World’s second-best lawyer, right?”

A low chuckle, catching in his throat.

“And Viola’s the best,” Kim says simply. The line agrees with her, droning.

When Jimmy speaks again, his voice is stronger. “Well, do you know what I’ve been thinking about today?” he asks. “Guess.”

Kim smiles. He sounds closer than before, back before she lost him. She shakes her head and offers: “Is it Little Debbies again?”

He laughs. “Not far off, honestly.”

The airplane starts to clear: the frontmost rows emptying, the travelers shuffling forward. Still chewing his gum, the teenaged boy slips into the aisle and pops open the compartment above them and tugs a backpack free. Kim inches along the seats, trying not to separate her phone from her ear, searching her brain. “Jay’s chips?”

Another laugh. “No, something a little closer to home.” It’s a word that seems to slip through—home—and she doesn’t know what it means. Closer to home than Cicero, closer to home than his childhood.

As close as a cement-walled cell? But she knows he didn’t mean that. He meant something just as lost as the factory town of his youth.

The man behind Kim nudges her, and she glares at him.

“C’mon, Kim,” Jimmy says, threaded with laughter. “Guess.”

“I give up,” she says, and the bald man seems to think this is directed at him, because he starts sliding along the row again. Kim grits her teeth and relents, forcing herself into the aisle. She stands there, squeezed between seats and travelers.

“All right,” Jimmy says. “D’you remember that vending machine in the breakroom?”

Kim knows which vending machine and which breakroom without having to ask: beneath HHM, the high windows letting in a fragile glimpse of the day. It’s almost as far away as an old house in Cicero, or an old storefront. One step forward in time, as if, since that visit with Viola, Jimmy’s mind has traveled only the years from his childhood to the mailroom.

He’s still thinking about the old days.

Kim says, “Yeah, I remember.”

A satisfied sigh, nearly vanishing to the rustle of the call dropping in and out, to something distant clattering on his end. “I’ve forgotten something,” he says. “What did Burt always buy?”

Kim smiles. An easy one. “He’d get a 100 Grand and a Tropicana.”

“Right!” Jimmy says brightly. “Right, that’s right. Rain or shine.” A soft chuckle. “Good old Burt.”

Closer rows are emptying now, people filing from their seats, hefting bags down from the lockers. She says, “Y’know, I think he has a little practice up in Moriarty, now.”

She can hear Jimmy’s smile around the corners of his words as he says, “With a bowl of 100 Grands on his desk, I hope.”

“If I ever go there, I’ll check,” Kim says, and she feels a stab—the easy freedom of it. If she ever goes there. She folds her lips around her teeth.

The rows immediately before her begin to clear, and the bald man gives an impatient huff beside her.

“Hang on.” She tucks her phone against her ear and manages to wrestle her carry-on free from the overhead locker. It lands before her feet with a thud, and she weaves her fingers between its strap and her briefcase handle, trying to hold both at once. “Okay, back.”

“So, how was your flight, ma’am?” Jimmy asks smoothly.

“Long,” Kim says. “Cramped.” She starts moving down the aisle, dragging her bags, knocking into armrests, and the phone is tight against her ear. “And how are you?”

“Oh, keeping busy,” Jimmy says. “Boring old me.”

Kim nods, moving with shuffling steps. She doesn’t know what to say; she never quite knows what to say. Around her, people yawn and press on, heading towards the rest of their days. She readjusts her hold on the cellphone and says, “I thought you had work hours on Monday mornings.”

“Mhm, should do,” Jimmy says, and there’s another clang in the background, echoing. “Some guys were in repairing the ovens and they found a bunch of stuff stashed in there, so now they’re sweeping the whole kitchens.”

The conversation feels like water in her hands, slipping—something she can’t quite hold onto amid the jostling passengers and the loud chatter and the rumble of suitcase wheels. She knows if he’d called any earlier, she wouldn’t have been able to answer at all, but if he’d called an hour later she would have been alone.

It must be like this on his end for every phone call. Loud noises, men yelling. Her voice locked inside the shitty prison payphone.

“But you’re okay?” she asks, knowing how small it must sound.

“Oh, yeah. And, hey, the phones were free,” Jimmy says. “I practically gotta brawl to get time during rec hours.”

She stills. Her bag is a solid weight, dragging at her muscles. “Jimmy.”

“Kidding!” he says. “Kidding. I just meant…” His voice trails into the buzz of electricity. “I would call more.”

“No,” Kim says quickly, shuffling forward between the seats again. “Keep your nose clean.” Keep to yourself, she thinks. Shrink into the shadows. Make no choices of your own, and soon they’ll stop seeing you at all.

“Stay on people’s good sides, I know,” he says. “Don’t worry, Kim. Turns out, if you get a couple thousand guys off on time served and community service, some of them will eventually wind up in prison with you.” Men that seem to make themselves known now, shouting in the distance.

Kim escapes, finally, through the airplane doors, stepping out onto the jet bridge. The carpeted floor bounces beneath her feet, and she ducks around the first bend. Lingering against the wall beside a trashcan and a couple of folded-up wheelchairs. The passengers keep flowing past her: the bald man the tallest among them, striding quickly.

It’s quieter here, finally it’s quieter here. She murmurs, “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it up to see you this time.”

A crackle—“s’okay—” he says, most of the word lost. But his tone bleeds through: understanding, quiet.

The jet bridge undulates with everyone’s steps. Kim’s heart feels as if it has detached inside her, as if her whole body is moving up and down around it, the motion wearing away at her. Passing faces glance with concern, and she tries to wipe blank her own expression. Cool and professional, a business discussion.

But the water is spilling from her hands now.

She swallows, blinking up at the jet bridge lights. “I miss you.”

The noise from the other end of the call now isn’t mechanical, or a static hum—it’s Jimmy inhaling, sharp and pained.

She shouldn’t have said it. It doesn’t make any sense for her to miss him, anyway. He’s been in her life more since prison than he was in the six years before that. How could she miss him now?

Jimmy breathes in again and she feels the air running through her. “Hey,” he says, softly, steadying.

She closes her eyes. The jet bridge shifts like waves.

The call hisses and his words are carried along on the static: “I’m not going anywhere.”

Kim swallows then laughs weakly, low in her throat. Yeah. Guess not. Jimmy doesn’t say he misses her, too, and she’s glad he doesn’t. She lets her bags fall from her hand to the carpeted floor. Her forearm aches with the weight.

There’s a click down the line, and it’s a click that means the final minute of the call is here already. Sixty seconds left.

Jimmy must hear it, too. “So,” he says, voice louder again, words coming a little quicker, “Skyler and everybody. What did you tell them about Jimmy McGill?”

Kim just shakes her head. She imagines sending him a recording of that lunch, all these things that she knows were easier for her to say because he wasn’t right there in the room. “Well,” she starts, and she can feel the seconds going, “I told them he was a morally-flexible, legally-questionable son-of-a-bitch.”

Vibrant laughter through the hum of the phone.

“I told them he broke an uncountable number of laws,” Kim says. “And a lot of people got hurt…”

Just the humming now, the long-threaded humming of a phone wire that doesn’t exist anymore, not in the twenty-first century.

“And I told them how one day, for no good reason, he got in bed with the cartel,” she says. “And then, when that went wrong, he decided to just try all over again with some chemistry teacher.”

Jimmy’s words crack. “Sounds about right.”

And Kim closes her eyes. “But for some reason the women all decided to help him, anyway,” she murmurs, a little lilting, like the end of a fairy tale. A hush, a promise, a page turning. The seconds are running out. She presses the phone to her ear. “I’ll see you again soon, okay?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, “I’ll be he—”

The call ends.

A high-pitched noise rings in her ear, like a struck glass. It echoes and holds, and then that’s gone, too.

Kim tips her head against the wall. The jet bridge is almost empty now, but still it seems to move. It sways with her breath. She wishes she could walk right onto the plane again and go back.

Kim stares at her own name in the search engine window. Half the results are for another woman, a funeral director up in Jacksonville. Lots of happy client reviews.

But the search would have looked different to Marie and Blanca. It would have been impossible to miss the important results, the real ones that slip through even down here in Florida. Reports on Saul Goodman’s conviction, pulled up by a mention of her name in the fourth paragraph.

Somewhere, maybe near the bottom of the page: her New Mexico Law Review profile. Like Dan Wachsberger’s, the dead attorney’s, her page is a monument to frozen time. The newest member of our team, Rich Schweikart says, Kim Wexler is a fine and promising young attorney…

Kim scrolls. There are a couple more pages that bury her name like a secret. Saul Goodman’s Ex-Wife Complicit, says one, followed by a poorly-regurgitated version of her affidavit. It reads like something run through automatic translation software.

She doesn’t know if there’s more or less on her than she expected. Ultimately, people just weren’t interested in her, not when there were such shiny things as Walter White and Saul Goodman only a click away. She doesn’t fit into the story. Even for Marie and Blanca, Kim knows, she still doesn’t fit. Just a blip in their lives, a woman they had lunch together with once. One of Saul’s groupies, Blanca might say.

A knock on the door frame.

Kim looks up, but Patty’s already approaching her desk. “I need you to look at this,” Patty says, setting some papers down. “I’m starting to go cross-eyed.”

“Sure,” Kim says. She slides it closer. It’s a draft of a motion to compel arbitration.

There’s a line of blue along the top of the page. A printing error. Somebody needs to check the rollers and clean ink from a place it shouldn’t be. She remembers, years ago, sliding long, thin brushes in and out of the huge toner cartridges, trying to clear blockages. And when they did clear, they sometimes exploded: a fine powder of unnatural blue, yellow, or magenta—

“Kim?”

She looks up.

“You all right?” Patty asks.

Kim clears her throat. “Sure, yeah,” she says. “Sorry, let me look at this.”

But Patty props her hip on the filing cabinet, folding her arms. “How did it go this weekend?”

“It went—well, it went well,” Kim says. “Skyler’s going to help us. Heisenberg’s wife.”

“Really?” Patty’s eyebrows shoot up.

Kim nods. “She’s pieced together things about Walt’s organization. We think we can argue that by the time the meth was crossing international borders and Nazi gangs were hitting people in prison, it was a totally different deal.”

Patty rubs her mouth. “You know that even if your man didn’t want to be there anymore, he’s still guilty. That’s RICO for you.”

“Mm, we’re kind of threading a legal pinhole with this,” Kim says. “We’re going to argue that they need to prove Jimmy was a knowing member of this evolved organization.”

Patty hums thoughtfully.

“The accessory-after-the-fact stuff is strong, but… most of the indictments we can’t do much about,” Kim says, and she exhales. “The money laundering, the conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance…” She presses her fingers to her temple, massaging. There’s a knot somewhere inside her skull, trapped beneath the bone.

Patty’s voice drifts over. “I’ll get you a coffee.” Footsteps along the carpet towards the door.

Kim wipes her palm down her face. She should feel better than she does. All she feels is the severed thread of the phone call.

A cord unwinding and fraying in the wind.

She shakes her head to clear it and reads over the drafted motion Patty handed her. There’s nothing much to it, nothing to go cross-eyed over. It’s practically boilerplate. There’s no reason Patty would need Kim’s opinion on it.

Above her, a ceiling fan turns, swaying slightly. It sends coolish air down through her hair, her bangs, and it creaks with every dozen or so rotations.

When Patty returns, she nestles the coffees on Kim’s desk and drags a chair over to sit opposite her. Kim cradles her coffee (black) and Patty sips hers (one cream) and the fan turns and turns above them the ceiling.

“So, then,” Patty says, setting her cup back down. “Are the federal prosecutors coming to the table?”

Kim almost laughs. “Not so much,” she says. “After the appeal, I think they feel like the kid sent to the back of the classroom.”

“So stop waiting around, girl!” Patty says, palm coming down on the desk. “File a motion for partial summary judgment. Get this in front of a judge, get a win. Let’s scare them.”

The fan creaks and Kim folds her lips tighter.

“Who knows, courts are busy enough, you still might have your bar results in time for the hearing date, right?” Patty says, eyes twinkling.

Kim chuckles, shaking her head. She feels seen—x-rays passing over her skin. “Viola needs to lead this, anyway.”

“Well, whatever happens, your man’s got so many charges against him, a judge following sentencing minimums is never gonna give you much lower than where you’re at right now,” Patty says. “So you play the cards you do got, right?”

Kim nods. “They don’t want this to see a jury.”

“No shit they don’t want this to see a jury,” Patty says. “Americans might hate lawyers, but God help them, they love Heisenberg. A teacher with cancer sticks it to Uncle Sam and goes out in a blaze of glory?”

She stands, sliding her chair back to where she just dragged it over from, and then she picks up her coffee.

“Get the federal prosecutors to the table,” she says. “Take whatever number you can get them down to.” She holds Kim’s gaze like she’s embedding the instruction in it, and then heads off again, moving to the door.

“Wait, Patty.” Kim gestures with the drafted motion. “This motion is fine.”

Patty smirks. “Yeah, I know it is.” She taps the door frame. “Now, you’ve got some calls to make, right?” She winks, and then keeps walking, and her earrings today are shooting stars.

Kim smiles. The fan groans on the ceiling. A manifestation of Patty’s words, of the same thought that’s been hanging over Kim for days—maybe for weeks, even.

And Patty’s right. They need to play the prosecutors. But if the judge doesn’t go their way on the summary judgment, the case is dead. It’s rolling the dice, it’s letting them scatter and fall.

The fan creaks. Kim closes her eyes but she can still hear it. She doesn’t want any of this to leave her hand yet. She doesn’t want to let go.

A choice. A hearing. Jimmy’s case in a courtroom again.

And Jimmy McGill in an Albuquerque courtroom, too.

She made the wrong choice. She knows she did. The third essay, the second part. She missed a proximate cause. She’s sure of it.

She realized it this morning, and since then she hasn’t been able to stop seeing it. The incomplete answer in her own handwriting, spreading out over her finals paper. It might mean dropping a grade. And she knows if there’s one mistake there will be more, dozens and dozens of other things she’s forgotten.

She made the wrong choice. A misplaced connection. A few drinks and a phone call to his apartment and then there he was there at the bar with her, his knee warm against hers under the booth—

When she glances up from her dinner, she catches him staring at her.

And Jimmy’s eyes just hold hers. Wide and blue as if it’s totally normal for him to be sitting here across the table. His brow crinkles. He’s trying to figure her out. Like he’s hunting for the source of a paper jam, like he’s trying to read her Crim Pro notes.

Kim stares back down at her plate of half-finished fries.

Jimmy’s voice comes soft: “You okay?”

She hums questioningly.

His lips twist. “You okay?”

Kim nods. “Of course I am,” she says quietly, and she snags another fry from her plate.

(—and he’s beneath her on the sofa, his lips on her lips, finally—finally. He tastes like El Jimador and his fingers are weaving through her hair, his legs spreading wider to make room for her between them, and the room is sinking like a stone in a lake—)

“So, Memorial Day weekend, huh?” Jimmy says around a mouthful of fries. “Any big plans?”

Big plans, she thinks. Yeah, she’s going skiing.

“Right,” Jimmy says, somehow reading her mind again. He reaches for another fry, but he just plays with it for a minute, then drops it onto his plate again. “What’d you even do before I showed up here, anyway?”

Kim raises her eyebrows. “Oh, you know—”

(—the edges of the room are turning and she’s holding his face in her hands like he’s the only real thing in the world, and everything else is dust. His lips are wet and his eyes are wide and hungry—)

“I went to class,” Kim says shortly. “I studied and nobody distracted me.”

“Come on,” he says, dragging out the words. “Seriously. I mean, what about like now, between stuff?” He gestures around them, as if the restaurant is filled with her finals and her results, with the looming threat of summer school, with HHM and graduating and sitting the bar exam.

Kim just exhales, shaking her head.

Jimmy waits, ready for her words to fill the silence. He brushes his hair back from his forehead in the self-conscious way that seems to have come to him with this new haircut. She watches his hand.

And she cuts her gaze away, out to where car lights glitter along the busy road in the approaching dusk. “Just sat around,” she murmurs, “and felt like I’d forgotten something.”

(—she presses her forehead to his, and she can almost feel, through his skin: his pulse, his heart, the slow beat of burning tequila. Just this, he offers—just this night, just kissing here on your sofa, making out in your bed, falling—)

Jimmy makes a low noise in his throat.

Brake lights flash red beyond the restaurant window. Kim folds her lips inward. She looks back at him. “Like I’m missing something important,” she says, but his gaze tugs a few more words out of her, because it always seems to. She needs to fill the wide blue. “Like I’m not working hard enough.”

His face creases. “What? Kim, you work harder than anyone else I’ve ever met. Seriously.” He widens his eyes slightly, as if trying to prove it to her with his stare, and she just shakes her head.

It’s not about that, she thinks. You don’t get it. You can never work hard enough for them, not here.

Jimmy chews his lower lip. His gaze is darker now, staring down at their table. The half-finished plates of burgers and fries. His bangs slip over his forehead again and she can feel them beneath her fingers. She’s stroking his hair with his head in her lap. Words slur drunkenly from his lips as he turns into her, as if he can bury himself in her stomach, in her lungs.

Just this, she says the next morning. Just this, she says, not really knowing herself what she means. Just this night, just this weekend. Just a few hours in Two Fools Tavern with the boss’s brother, doing bar tricks for her law school classmates.

That night, in the booth, Jimmy had let her in on the play. His eyes had sparkled under the low lights and the drifting smoke. It was heady and addictive, stronger than the tequila shots: the feeling of someone settling next to her, saying—we’re on the same side. It’s us against them. Her arm had drifted from the back of the booth to his shoulders before she could help it, as if, in holding him, she could hold on to that feeling, too.

It’s us against them, he had said with his fingers, with his hands that flashed around a cigarette and a folded fifty. Hands that later wove through her hair, that stroked down her spine, that pressed against her lips as if somehow he could reach something inside her.

Jimmy turns his straw around in his soda. It creaks against the plastic lid.

Creak, creak, creak. It sounds like gears turning.

Then Jimmy sighs, and he tilts his head then nods to the door. “Wanna get out of here?”

“Sure,” she says lightly. “You done?”

But Jimmy’s gaze is locked on hers again. “No,” he says, leaning closer, “I mean, really get out of here.” There’s something bright inside him, kindling that’s just caught.

She can feel it igniting in her chest, too.

“I’m serious,” he says, his whole body nodding with the words. “We got three days ahead of us. We could just hop in your car and…”

The space spreads, waiting for her to fill it. “And?”

Jimmy’s hand settles over hers on the table. “Kim?” he says, and he grins like a kid who’s getting away with something. His fingers squeeze hers and he jerks his head towards the exit. “Let’s run away.”

Kim smiles. She feels like the sun is shining out from inside her.

Chapter Text

The door is dark wood, recessed into the courtroom wall. Carvings turn through the panels and loop around a brass handle, and the door sits heavy in its frame. She thinks that even a blast in the room beyond wouldn’t throw it off its hinges. It moves for nothing.

From Kim’s seat at the end of the defense table, white lights on the low ceiling seem to lead towards this door like a runway. The brass handle doesn’t budge. The wood absorbs the light. Her eyes on the door are the chisels used to carve the spiral patterns, sharp metal edges glinting.

From the gallery behind her, the eyes on the back of Kim’s head are like chisels, too, etching their own meaning into her skull. She can feel it there, a judgment being written, but she just stares at the door.

She wonders if he’s on the other side yet, and whether he can feel her looking.

The end of her pen rattles against her desk. A steady staccato drumbeat that fills the legal aid office. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Kim stares down at the wood. Maybe somewhere in the grain she’ll find her answers, the information she needs—as if this trial can actually be won by more information, as if they can dig really, really hard and discover Jimmy didn’t commit any crimes at all.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. Dumb.

The wood grain can’t take her back in time with it. It can’t take Kim back before she became a lawyer, or back before her long drive in a shuddering old beater from Red Cloud. Back before she started to get the kind of big ideas her mother had always warned her about.

Big ideas aren’t real, Kim remembers now. Big ideas only happen in the movies.

Her right foot is rattling, too. The carpet muffles the sound.

There’s a thud as Patty sets down a box of case files. “Hey, now, calm down,” she says. “You’re not sitting the bar again.”

Kim just shakes her head. She opens her laptop, stares at the black screen, then closes it again. Does she have her charger? She checks the bag. She has everything in there. There’s nothing else she needs.

Patty asks, “Heard anything yet?”

Kim glances at her desk calendar. It’s open to April. There’s a picture of one of the Great Lakes above the month. Birds fly in a black formation across the sky. “No,” she says. “Should be this week.”

Patty hums at the back of her throat.

But Kim says crisply, “I’m not thinking about that, anyway.”

Lines purse around Patty’s mouth. “And yet you sure look thinky.”

Kim huffs out a breath, almost a laugh. She spreads her fingers out over the textured wood of her desk. She’s forgotten something—and not just from the stuff she’s packed away for her flight tonight. She’s forgotten something much bigger than a laptop charger or a toothbrush. A missing piece, hidden somewhere in these gaps between her fingers.

A different angle to take, another proximate cause to include in her essay answer to make sure it’s complete. Another thing to study and study and then regurgitate, another piece of case law to Shepardize. A smoking gun.

A Perry Mason moment that will never exist. An unshakable feeling that, if she only worked a little harder, Jimmy would already be free.

The wood curves and turns, twisting back in time. It travels back to old growth forests in a place far from here. There are no answers in the grain.

And Kim knows the forgotten thing is just the same piece that’s been missing from her for weeks: a twisting road through the mountains, the droning rental car with its empty passenger seat. A hollow feeling in her stomach that still hasn’t been filled.

Patty sighs. “Hey,” she says lowly. “Scare them, right? Not yourself.”

Scared? Kim thinks, and she closes her fingers over the wood then spreads them apart again. She sighs as she looks up at Patty. “The judge is calling Skyler and Jimmy, too.”

“Really?” Patty frowns. “At a status conference? I thought he was hearing your MSJ.”

The motion for partial summary judgment—filed by Viola, working its way through the courthouse pipeline to the judge’s bench. Kim nods. “Both.”

“Huh—well, unorthodox might work in your favor.” Patty gives a crinkly smile, all tanned lines and glinting earrings, and she starts hunting through the archive box.

Kim folds her lips inward. “Patty…” She almost doesn’t continue. The other woman might not even remember, anyway. But Kim shakes her head, saying, “You know I’m not scared of him, right?”

Patty stills, recognition crossing her features.

“I didn’t come here to get away from him,” Kim says. “Never.” She remembers it, helpless against the feeling—the ripping of packing tape, like tearing strips from her own skin, rending her body.

Patty just sighs. Her hands slip from the edge of the box, abandoning her search. “I’ve already made my peace with not understanding this,” she says. “He’s your man, doesn’t matter what I think.” She flicks her eyebrows up, then smiles, and then she returns to her perusal.

Kim nods slowly.

Patty withdraws a file from the box and straightens. She tucks it under her arm. “Let me know how the MSJ goes, would you? I’ve got a horse in this race, now.” She pats Kim’s shoulder firmly and then leaves the room.

The door seems to trail after her, drifting half-closed in Patty’s slipstream.

Kim flexes her fingers against the desk, then moves her hand back. She’ll just check her list again. One more last-minute run-through before she has to leave.

Tomorrow afternoon, in the city where she used to live, she’ll sit in a courtroom and roll the dice.

The Sandias glide beyond the taxi windows. They seem cloudlike, today, born from the thready gray storms amassing to the northeast. Shadows pass over the foothills, but here in the city the morning sun still shines through a wide gap of blue sky.

Along the roadside, the agave is flowering, sending up impossibly tall shoots that seem too big for the plants below them. The shoots stripe the road with the shadows of the low sun. Strange curving bars that pattern the cement.

Kim catches her reflection in the taxi’s rearview mirror. Her bangs curl and she reaches up to smooth them. Her hands smell like the hotel soap: strong and floral, maybe lotus flower. Her palms are dry and she weaves her fingers together in her lap.

The fences of flowering agave end. The taxi makes a left towards the courthouse. “You from around here?” the driver grunts.

Kim shakes her head. “Florida.”

He barks a laugh. “You sound thrilled,” the driver says. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell ‘em.”

She hadn’t intended any tone. She tightens her fingers.

“Make sure you see the sights while you’re here, then,” the driver says.

“Any suggestions?” Kim asks idly.

He gives a low whistle. “Anywhere’s better than a courthouse, eh?” he says. “The BioPark should be nice this time of year. I think the tulips are in bloom.”

Kim murmurs something that could pass for vague interest, and the cab pulls up along the curbside.

“The last lady I drove here won custody in her divorce,” he says, and he drops his sunglasses down onto his eyes. “That’s Albuquerque Lucky Cabs for you.” He pats the dashboard, next to the meter, and Kim exhales and pays the fare.

The scales of justice are moving outside the courthouse today. As Kim crosses the street, they tip in one direction: a heavier weight on the left. She approaches the base of the statue. Water pours from the end of the beam and down into the left pan, filling it almost to the brim, finding the right side wanting.

But, as she watches, the water slows to a trickle. The metal scales creak and settle and and the fountain stops completely.

Until it pours again, splashing bright and metallic from the other end of the balance beam. The right pan begins to fill, and again the scales move: the right overtaking the left, the left now wanting.

The pattern continues as Kim stands in the brisk spring morning: the water pouring and then ceasing, pouring and then ceasing, and the metal sculpture groans and shifts with the ever-altering balance. Water brims from the pans and makes twin halos on the cement beneath them.

Kim’s shoulder aches with her too-heavy laptop bag, and she turns away, moving finally onward. In the mirrored doors of the circular entryway, Kim notices her bangs curling again.

She smooths them down and smells hotel soap.

Inside the foyer, she moves through the metal detectors and then pushes into the first stairwell. The door gives a reluctant hiss: it doesn’t want to break its seal. It sighs as it closes behind her. Noises that she hadn’t even noticed now vanish, and the stairwell is hollow and quiet.

Her footsteps, as she climbs, sound like a countdown.

On the first landing, an embossed sign gestures through a windowed doorway. Somewhere off the paneled hallway beyond: holding cells and a staging area. Processing and attorney-client interview rooms.

The hall is empty and quiet and ripples through the glass. At the far end, a bailiff fills a paper cup at a water cooler, his back stooped.

And Kim keeps climbing. Her laptop bag tugs at her hand, and her steps ring. She ascends to the fourth floor and emerges—and sounds come back, the humming of passing traffic, the clack of shoes and rumble of conversation. The hallway here is wide, running perpendicular to the stairwell, and windows at the end let in the kind of bright light that only seems possible this high above the city streets.

Kim pinches her watch. The hands glow simply back at her.

She’s early.

The coffee vending machine has some twenty more options than the one at the old courthouse, a stupefying array of flavors and add-ins. Kim tries to convince it to give her a plain black coffee. She doesn’t quite succeed—her coffee is hot and strong and somehow tastes of burned caramel.

But she takes the coffee with her to one of the benches, anyway, and the caffeine sinks through her, warm and slow. The holding cells are beneath them now, two levels down. She can almost feel them there.

She jiggles her knee and checks her watch again.

The hallway around her fills and then empties with morning court sessions. Elevator doors open and close and trill electronically with every arrival. A couple of young children hug a woman who might be their mother, and behind them two attorneys in slightly shabby suits try not to smile too hard.

Kim smiles for them. The kids might as well belong to one of Patty’s clients, the joy on their faces is exactly the same.

Kim’s expression slips at the edges. She looks down at her knees. Her shoes peek out: simple black heels, the right one drumming a tattoo against the marble floor.

The courthouse has changed but the city hasn’t, not really. She must know half these judges and half these bailiffs. As soon as she has the thought, she starts to find their faces: older than she’s expecting, hidden among strangers. There’s Judge Velber, shuffling to the vending machines. Or there, a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair passing one of the adjacent corridors. It could have been anyone. It could have been Suzanne Ericsen.

Maybe Kim’s own face is too far changed for them to find any recognition in it.

She drains the rest of her coffee. The burned caramel taste lingers on her tongue, and she dumps the empty cup in the trash can beside the bench.

The elevator doors open and admit Viola and her team. They enter the hallway like the bow of a ship cutting marble water.

Kim stands, picking up her laptop bag and closing the distance between them.

“Kim,” Viola says. “You made it in one piece.”

“Just about,” Kim says, tucking her hair back.

Viola’s eyes are bright and excited, and as she takes in the courthouse hallway she might as well be rubbing her hands together.

“How was the drive down?” Kim asks.

“Oh, a nightmare!” Viola says cheerfully, glancing at the others—who all nod. “Seems like everybody and their mother decided to come to Albuquerque today.”

Kim smiles. “The tulips are in bloom.”

“Oh—” Viola says. “Are they? Okay.” She glances around again, and then her eyes widen. “Hang on, look.” There, passing through double doors, are the federal prosecutors: dimly familiar to Kim from Jimmy’s sentencing hearing.

The prosecutors gather like crows with puffed chests, wrapped in black feathers. A mass of keen eyes and pride. Sharp-spurred figures with fingers twitching for a quick draw.

“They look confident,” Kim says.

“Do they?” Viola asks, glancing back. She’s distracted already, hunting for something in her briefcase.

And when Kim looks again, the prosecutors are just a group of tired people, the same as everyone else here. Shirtsleeves rumpled and suit jackets creased along the back from sitting down for too long. They move now, heading for one of the secondary hallways.

Other groups arrive to fill their place, the steady courthouse traffic continuing.

“Kim?” Viola asks.

But Kim keeps watching the flow of people. She’s seen something familiar again, another old face. The back of a head, or the shape of a silhouette. There, tucked in the corner between the double doors and a ficus—“Hang on,” Kim says, holding up a hand. “I’ll be back.”

Her heels click on the polished marble. She passes the elevators and weaves around a gaggle of loud teenagers, and there—

The woman is seated on a long bench beside the ficus. She’s wearing a coat that seems too heavy for the mild, spring weather.

“Francesca?” Kim says.

Francesca looks up. Her cheeks scrunch as she squints at Kim.

Kim gestures. “Are you going to the hearing?”

“Kim?” Francesca says, and she rises now. Her face transforms as she smiles. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Still me,” Kim says, hugging Francesca in greeting.

Francesca hugs her back tentatively, as if she’s afraid to grip too tight. Like she’s worried there’s still a broken arm between them, or maybe just all these broken years.

“How did you know this was today?” Kim asks, as they move apart. It’s not a trial, nothing that should make the news.

“His, uh—lawyer called to see if I had any information,” Francesca says. “She kept calling, actually. But I told the feds everything I know already. Everything, every single thing.”

Kim nods. “I know you did.” That was one of the last depositions she’d read, postponing and postponing it.

In the end, it had painted a bleak picture: vivid descriptions of things largely irrelevant to the case but offered by Francesca as if they could be her salvation. Stashes of money and shredded documents, a gun in a drawer and pills in a drawer and sex workers—and then all the violence: windows smashed and doors kicked down and threat after threat, all for more money, all to fill safes and ceiling cavities to which Francesca had of course given detailed directions.

Another million there, she’d said, another three hundred grand here.

Here, in the courthouse, Francesca’s eyes are dark and strong. Somewhere in them is a man Kim never really saw: days and weeks and years of him, enough for an entire person. A piece of him that she’ll never get to have, no matter how much her stomach turns at the thought of it, no matter how much she doesn’t want it—money and strip clubs and a laundry list of drugs—

Kim was in Titusville and Francesca was there.

“You know, I don’t think I’ll go in, after all,” Francesca says now, and she laughs strangely, almost guiltily. “I should go. I don’t think I can see him.”

Kim nods, watching Francesca gather her bags. “He won’t be allowed to speak to anyone in the gallery.”

“No, I can’t—” Francesca starts. “I just—I thought you might be here.” She chuckles again, bubbly and a little nervous, and Kim feels the resentment draining from her again, slipping through her fingers like sand.

“Francesca,” she says, voice soft. “Thank you.”

Francesca shakes her head. “For what?” she asks dryly.

Kim shrugs. “For taking my call that day,” she says, and she holds out her arms again. Francesca returns the hug a little more firmly this time, and as they move apart, Kim hunts for a business card in her laptop bag, and then offers it. “Ring me any time, if you want.”

Francesca holds the card with both hands. She nods. “Thank you,” she says. “You look good.”

Kim squeezes her arm. “You look good, too.”

“Hah. Well, I feel lousy,” Francesca says, but her tone drains of bitterness when she asks the next question: “What do you think’s going to happen?”

Kim just shakes her head. Her eyes tug downward. She wonders if he’s there yet, in the holding cells beneath them.

She stupidly thinks a part of her would be able to feel him down there, pulling on her like a counterbalance.

It’s not the same courtroom as the sentencing hearing. Kim’s known that all morning, but it still catches her off guard as she follows Viola through the doors at the back of the gallery.

This courtroom is smaller, with a lower ceiling and no pointed skylight above them to admit the sun. Flat panels of white fluorescents illuminate the space instead, and the low ceiling makes the judge’s bench on the far side of the room feel that much more imposing. The walls are white and clean, decorated with portraits of dead people.

She and Viola walk down the aisle between the gallery seats. The room is almost empty: just a couple of prosecutors gathering on their side, and a figure at the back of the gallery rows. The figure turns at their approach—

—dark hair cutting above sharp shoulders.

Kim slows.

Cheryl Hamlin stares at Kim with no expression on her face. She sits at the back of the courtroom like a ghost in an old story, waiting in judgment. Pointing, long-fingered, at Kim’s crimes.

And Cheryl might as well be a ghost for all the impact she makes on Viola and the rest of the team. The four of them settle at the defendant’s table, Kim sitting at the furthest end.

“How did Cheryl Hamlin know we have a hearing today?” Kim murmurs.

Viola shrugs easily. “It’s on the court docket, right?” She hands off a paper to Désirée, the associate flanking her. “Why, do you think she’s going to make trouble?”

Kim doesn’t know. She doesn’t think so. Cheryl shifts, crossing one leg over the other, still staring at Kim.

And Kim feels it again: a prickling over her skin like spines stuck in her body, itching and begging her to rip them free, to tear herself apart. Something pinches Kim’s palms and she realizes her fingers have tightened into fists. She uncurls them and rubs her hands over her knees beneath the defendant’s table.

Nothing you do will ever right the scales, Cheryl Hamlin says with her presence back there, with her eyes locked on Kim’s. The water will keep pouring into the same pan, over and over. These are scales that can’t be balanced.

The doors open again, and one of the R&G associates leads Skyler White through the court. Her arrival sends a murmur through the prosecution. She’s wearing a blue cardigan today, and a string of pearls hangs around her neck.

The associate leads Skyler to the front of the public gallery, seating her on the other side of the rail from the defendant’s table. Skyler shakes her head rapidly back and forth to tidy her hair.

Kim leans closer, forearms on the wooden fence. “Thank you for doing this,” she says quietly. “I know it’s a big choice.”

Skyler barely glances at her, but her eyebrows rise. “Nobody’s perfect, right?”

Kim’s lips twitch, and she turns back. She laces her fingers together on the table. She can feel her pulse in her thumbs, thudding against her skin.

He’s definitely here by now, here in the building. Somewhere down on the second floor in a holding cell—or making his way to the courtroom.

Across from her, recessed beside the judge’s bench, there’s a heavy wooden door. Carvings run over the dark wood. The handle doesn’t turn. Kim’s eyes drag to it, magnetic.

The bailiff passes, keys jingling from his belt, and he opens the door that leads to the judge’s chambers. “All rise for the Right Honorable Judge Brian De Luca.”

There’s a ripple through the courtroom as everyone all the way back to Cheryl Hamlin stands. Half a dozen figures scattered through the low space. Kim tangles her fingers behind her back as the judge enters.

The judge glances down at his robes and brushes something from his chest before climbing to the bench. The nameplate here is a temporary one, arranged with magnetic letters, but Judge De Luca settles in the seat as if it’s his own space. He pushes his glasses up is nose. His wide, dark eyes behind the round lenses somehow make Kim think of a turtle: blinking, hunch-shouldered. Already ready to go home.

He waves for them to sit down, and clears his throat. “Sit, please.” De Luca glances at his robes and brushes something away again, and then flicks open a file. “Court is in session. Item one, CR10-7253—remanded from the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.”

A flutter in Kim’s chest. A victory.

Judge De Luca shifts the file aside, case number dictated into the transcript. “The appellate court directed that this case must be tried by a nominated judge, and so I’ve driven here from Amarillo for this.” De Luca smiles flatly. “We’re convening today for a status conference, in which we have… quite some docket ahead of us.”

Viola sits straighter in her chair. Kim can almost feel the energy vibrating off her.

De Luca gives another cough at the back of his throat. “This case was originally litigated to judgment by the defendant acting pro se. Now, on remand, I see that the defendant is represented by… Viola Goto of Goto & Robles Partners. Is that correct?”

Viola stands. “Viola Goto on behalf of the defendant James McGill—also named as Saul Goodman in some material,” she says. “Yes, Your Honor.” Her eyes are strong and confident behind her glasses.

Kim worries for a split second she’s been mouthing the words, like a bad extra in a movie scene. On behalf of the defendant James McGill…

But it could never be her, she knows. Even if she had her license back. Not after everything.

De Luca hums, sliding his file closer again. “And the prosecution team remains the same.”

Castellano stands, buttoning his jacket. “May it please the court, yes, Your Honor,” he says. “AUSA George Castellano.” He runs down the list of names of the others beside him.

A nod from the judge, and the federal prosecutors sit. “Now, then, Ms. Goto, catch me up here,” Judge De Luca starts. “What motions I hearing from you today?”

Viola stands again. “Thank you, Your Honor. We’ve filed a motion for a no evidence summary judgment on claim three of the indictment.”

The judge sits impassively, waiting for more.

“Quite simply,” Viola starts, “we believe the elements of the accessory-after-the-fact charges are not met. The prosecution have produced no evidence that supports their claims that Mr. McGill was an accessory to these fifteen homicides.”

A nod, a mark made on a paper. “And you have another motion with the court, too,” Judge De Luca says.

“Yes, a motion to dismiss—that’s on claim eight of the indictment,” Viola says. “International distribution and sales of a controlled substance.”

De Luca nods, marking something down. “And the plaintiffs have filed a motion in limine to exclude testimony from Skyler White.”

Castellano stands. “That’s right, Your Honor,” he says. “We filed that on March 28th.” Beneath the words, the implication that he was here first.

De Luca takes his glasses off. “So it’s motion soup, isn’t it?” he says. He wipes his lenses, staring off into nothing. “Well, I’ll work backwards. Let’s hear the summary judgment last, and if we make it through all that, I’ll set a trial date.”

Castellano sits again, leaning to whisper something to a colleague.

“Though, I’d encourage you to work together on this.” Judge De Luca casts a long gaze over the room, passing between both tables, almost teacherly. “Before any of that, I’ve taken the liberty of trying to clear a couple of issues off the deck at once.”

One of the associates slides Viola a file and she takes it, nodding.

“Thank you all for your indulgence,” De Luca says, “and thank you, Mrs. White, for coming down to the courthouse today.”

Kim twists around. Skyler smiles mildly at the comment, and then at the judge’s instruction she rises to her feet. She passes through the swinging gate that divides the gallery from the lawyer’s tables, and she’s directed to the witness stand beside the bench—where she settles, stiff-backed, staring out at the room.

Skyler’s gaze lands on Kim’s. She raises her eyebrows. The expression seems loaded with some meaning Kim can’t grasp, and her heart drops half an inch—as if it’s hanging from a fraying rope, slipping.

Judge De Luca leans down, beckoning to the bailiff. “Let’s have the defendant in the courtroom now as well, shall we?”

Kim’s heart slips another inch.

She can feel it turning in there, swaying on the rope.

The bailiff leaves the room and Kim’s eyes lock on the door. The court is so small and so low-ceilinged that it doesn’t take long for the proceeding silence to fill it. A hush of breath and papers, but Kim just stares at the carved wood.

Her eyes bore into the dark panels. She imagines the darkness on the other side. A light turning on. She feels eyes on her skull.

She should be able to see through it.

And then the handle turns. The carved patterns slide as the door swings open. The bailiff steps through first, guiding Jimmy.

Jimmy arrives in the court like somebody used to entering a room in handcuffs. If she didn’t know him so well, she thinks they would seem a natural extension of his body: the hard metal locking his wrists together before him.

A hook carves into Kim’s lungs. She can feel air blowing inside her through the new hole in her chest.

The bailiff seats Jimmy in a chair between the empty jury box and a stack of ragged-edged archive boxes. He’s wearing his prison uniform, the orange faded, a gray shirt poking beneath the sleeves, and he looks tired and drawn. It feels like it’s been a very long time since she’s seen him. Years, maybe, it feels like it’s been another six years, and Jimmy seems to wear each one of them on his face.

Kim exhales, and his eyes finally meet her’s. His lips glimmer with a smile, and then his gaze slips from her, slips behind her. He stares at the back of the courtroom, gaunt and ashen—

—and of course he can see their ghost, too. His mouth falls open and he shakes his head. Cheryl Hamlin, strong and unerring. Cheryl Hamlin, who’s come here for both of them.

Jimmy’s chest rises and falls and he looks away, facing the judge, facing Skyler in the witness box. At the sight of Skyler there, he seems to flatten again, the emotions sliding from his face. He glances down and straightens his handcuffs as if he’s wearing them as an accessory. A cuff link or a tie-bar.

Judge De Luca is talking again, but Kim hears a different judge in a different courtroom. She sees Jimmy in a silver suit, preening. He wears the costume if he’s actually made of precious metal. Unfeeling and full of avarice.

But this time, as the judge speaks, Jimmy’s shoulders drop. His gaze returns to Kim’s. He tilts his head a little, as if he’s found something in her face.

Kim tilts her head back, softening her eyes.

Jimmy nods, and he looks behind her to where Cheryl sits. He stares, calmer this time. Kim wants to turn around, but she doesn’t. She feels the barbs in her skin.

Skyler is sworn in, and the federal prosecutors watch thoughtfully, focused on the witness stand—as if they can’t even see the slow seep of guilt on display between Kim, Cheryl, and Jimmy. Deep and inarguable guilt. And Cheryl Hamlin is not just some on-the-clock federal prosecutor in a rumpled suit who wants to win but who also just wants to go home, and sleep, and not think about death.

Skyler speaks, running through the same things she’s said to Kim and Viola, well-trodden. A timeline of her husband’s crimes.

“… until I saw it on the news at my sister’s house,” Skyler says. “Gus Fring dead. It didn’t seem real at first. Walt admitted he was the one responsible.”

Kim had seen these news reports eventually, too, though not until the story blew up to national importance. A piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

“Saul Goodman had arranged for Mr. White to work with Gustavo Fring, correct?” Judge De Luca asks.

“I believe so,” Skyler says, glancing at Jimmy.

Jimmy’s face is impassive.

“Before that, Walt had told me he wanted out,” Skyler says. “But instead he decided to keep going. He built another empire, bigger and better, with no middle man. Just him in charge, like he wanted.”

Kim’s eyes search Skyler’s face. There’s something new in her tone. She hadn’t spoken quite like this in their meetings.

“He started looking for new distributors, but he didn’t trust anyone,” Skyler says, and she pauses briefly. She breathes in. “I’m sorry. It was a hard time. He’d promised me he would leave the game—”

Kim feels a tug at that word.

“But, he…” Skyler swallows. “He said people in his organization had turned on him. Jesse Pinkman. Maybe others. He said he couldn’t trust Saul.” Her eyes flick to Kim’s briefly, then back to the judge. “I became responsible for laundering his money. And he hired Dan Wachsberger, a replacement lawyer.”

Kim keeps her face impassive, tightening her fingers on her knees. They hadn’t talked about this at their meeting. She tries not to look at Jimmy.

Viola briefly rises. “And Dan Wachsberger was killed after making a deal with the DEA, is that true?”

“That’s right,” Skyler says. “He wasn’t even safe in prison.”

A glance at Jimmy. He’s watching Skyler, his eyes slightly narrowed.

“Your Honor—” Castellano starts, rising.

De Luca waves him down. “We’ll move on,” he says. “Continue, Mrs. White.”

“It’s Lambert, actually,” Skyler says simply. “I filed the petition today.” She glances out at the court and smiles softly. “Walt might have killed me for that.” And here’s the tone again, an undercurrent to the words. “He made it very clear what he would do to the people who turned on him.”

Jimmy’s expression flickers. Something changing.

“He bragged about it,” Skyler says. “I’m sure you’ve all heard the recording of the phone call he made after kidnapping my daughter… the threats. Toe the line, or you’ll end up just like Hank.” She blinks rapidly and shakes her head.

The low ceiling of the courtroom seems to sink and sink, closing in.

Skyler’s eyes cut to Kim. “We were all helpless. Walt gloated and gloated.”

And even though Skyler’s shoulders hunch as she speaks, she somehow seems to be rising: as if a spotlight is landing on her and the room beyond is darkening.

“After Gus Fring,” Skyler continues, “my husband said anyone who crossed him would end up in pieces in the desert. He said he’d already dug the graves—” She presses a hand to her mouth as if to stifle a sob, but there’s nothing there, just a catch in her throat. “Sorry.”

It’s a performance, Kim realizes.

It’s an act, and she can barely see the strings.

Kim swallows, and she nods along as if this is all familiar to her.

“It’s hard—” Skyler says. Her fingers press against her lips again, white around the knuckles. She inhales, steadying herself. “Everything changed. I noticed Saul wore a bulletproof vest.”

Not strictly lying, maybe. Playing it up. Finding just enough emotional truth to draw from. It’s familiar, and it feels like tequila burning in Kim’s chest. The light that seems to shine on Skyler illuminates new parts of her.

No one alive will be able to debate any of this.

“I was so scared to talk, even after—after he died,” Skyler says. “But he would tell me things. He said as his wife I’d never be able to testify against him.” Her voice trembles, and the trembling turns into a bitter laugh. “Anyway, that’s not true anymore.”

Jimmy’s looking at Kim now; she can feel his eyes on her.

She avoids his gaze.

Viola rises. “Ms. Lambert’s full deposition is available to all parties,” she says. “It’s a difficult and emotional time for her to revisit.”

The judge nods. “Mr. Castellano, you’ve moved to exclude Ms. Lambert’s testimony, correct?” At his nod, Judge De Luca exhales. “It’s not my job to rule on testimony where the conduct of the witness is material, I’m not a jury. But I wanted to hear from you in my court, Mrs. White, before things got any further. We may as well deal with the plaintiff’s motion, then…”

The proceedings continue, snapping back onto well-worn tracks. The bailiff leads Skyler back to her place in the gallery. Castellano stands, ready to give arguments on his motion.

“Oh, bailiff,” De Luca says, quietening Castellano with a hand. “You can remove the defendant now. I wanted him in the room while we spoke to Mrs. White—sorry, Ms. Lambert.” The judge stares at Jimmy for a moment, almost unseeing, and then waves him away.

The bailiff nods. He mutters something into a walkie-talkie on his shoulder, and then helps Jimmy to his feet. Jimmy glances at Kim, but his eyes are mostly fixed to Skyler, his expression illegible. The bailiff leads him to the door, and the two of them walk through.

The door closes again, as heavy as before.

An axe falling.

Kim stares the dark wood as AUSA Castellano speaks, slipping into his prepared patter now. The engravings on the wood seems to absorb her, seem imbued with meaning, as if they’re letters that should spell out some word.

And Kim feels a pressure inside her, like a string tuning.

A bowed noted rising and rising.

She wraps her lips around her teeth, closing her mouth tight. The court procedure drones on. She looks at the door and the door does nothing. Soon, if they don’t need him again, Jimmy will be shipped back over state lines, back in the prison transport up towards Montrose for hours and hours—

Kim glances at Viola. Viola is too focused on the prosecutor’s table, and Kim jiggles her ankle. One of the associates, Désirée, glances over.

Kim mouths an apology to her and holds up a finger. One minute, she mimes.

But they don’t need her for this, anyway. She barely needs to be here. So she slides out from the end of the defense table and skirts around the edge of the gallery, moving on soft feet. Cheryl Hamlin—still there, still watching—turns her head to match Kim’s movements, tracking her towards the door.

Kim passes out through the back, breathing shallowly. She retraces her earlier route along this passage, a vein off the main artery that is the hallway. Blood still pumps through the bright hall in the form of flowing groups of clients and attorneys.

Kim heads for the stairwell, and again the same deathly quiet settles over her as soon as she’s through the door.

The hush is the hush of cement and concrete. The hush of heavy things.

She imagines she can still hear the court proceedings even now, even in the silence. The steady drum of Castellano’s voice. Kim exhales, and she sweeps her hand back through her hair, and then she descends: one floor, then another.

On the second-floor landing, she slows. Through the window in the door: the hallway lined with holding cells and interview rooms. This time, at the end near the water cooler, two guards stand close to each other, paused in idle chatter.

And Jimmy waits nearby, his head lowered—

Kim pushes through the door.

A guard looks over. “Ma’am,” he starts, lifting a hand, as the other guard freezes with a paper cup halfway to his lips.

Jimmy’s eyes widen. His gaze darts from her to the guards.

“Just put him straight in an interview room, would you?” Kim asks, nodding to Jimmy. At the guard’s scrunched face, she hunts through her laptop bag for her ID. “Lawyer visit.”

One of the guards huffs, but he leads Jimmy wordlessly away, hand curling over his shoulder. The other guard walks Kim over to the administration window. He makes his way behind the glass and taps at a keyboard, then exhales.

Kim’s hand shakes at her side. Time is slipping.

The guard brings back her ID, sliding it through the slot on the counter. “Go on, then.”

Kim smiles flatly. She moves on, heading in the same direction as the other. The corridors here are carpeted, the walls paneled along the bottom, more like a legal firm than the detention level of a courthouse. She walks as though she knows where she’s going.

After the first turn, she finds the second guard and Jimmy waiting beside a pale, wooden door.

“You want him cuffed, ma’am?” the guard asks, opening the door and guiding them through.

“No, thank you,” Kim mutters, stepping into the space. It’s bigger than she expected, nothing like the interview rooms at the old courthouse. The style is similar to the rest of this new building: wood-paneled, etched with carvings to look older than it really is—almost as if this room was designed as a judge’s chambers first, and maybe it was.

The windows are high, too high to reach, but they let in the painterly sun found above this city. Rays throw soft yellow shadows. Where the judge’s desk would be, instead there’s an interview table, surrounded by half a dozen chairs. One of the walls has shelves built into the paneling, clearly meant to house rows and rows of reference books, but now empty.

And then the guard closes the door, leaving them alone.

Jimmy stands in one corner, rubbing a thumb against his wrist, almost idly. When his hands fall to his sides, Kim spots a line of bruises around his skin.

She moves closer. “Jimmy,” she murmurs.

He turns his wrist around, examining it like he’s surprised by the wounds, too. “You ever have a client take a plea just so they wouldn’t have to ride in the prison transport again?” He grins, tilting his head. “I’m starting to get it.”

Kim shakes her head. “What happened?”

“Nothing really,” he says, and he shrugs. “Just wasn’t exactly a pleasure cruise.” His eyes run over the wooden walls, intense and focused, as if he’s hunting for something. “I guess they wanted to make sure I don’t forget what it’s like in a dark box.”

He throws Kim a smile and then turns, taking a couple of steps closer to the high windows. Sunlight finds his face, casting shadows from his cheekbones, his Adam’s apple. He looks thinner than last time she saw him, wirier. He reminds her of when he got back from the desert.

“Hey,” Kim murmurs.

Jimmy turns. His eyes crinkle with a smile. “Hey.”

But something tightens around her heart to see him here, in a different room, with the sunlight on him. Or even to see him at all, after—months, it’s been months, it’s been since February. Since the snow was falling, and now the tulips are in bloom.

“You don’t wanna be up there right now?” Jimmy asks, waving in the direction of the courtroom above. Kim can almost hear the droning, the slow proceedings, the measured arguments.

She softens her gaze. “I’m not a real lawyer yet, right?” she says. “What could I do?”

Jimmy laughs, raspy in his throat. “What could you do?” he repeats, and then he gestures, palms fluttering at the surrounding room. “All this.”

She shakes her head. All what? It’s nothing. It’s not enough. She hasn’t seen him since winter.

“What did you really tell Skyler about me?” Jimmy’s eyes are darker now, tense.

Kim breathes out. “Only the good things.”

Jimmy’s throat bobs. He glances away, cheeks creasing. “So why’d she do that?”

Another breath. The sunlight falls in waves. Kim says, “What, lie?”

Jimmy nods.

“How do you know she lied?” Kim murmurs, and then, even softer: “How would anyone know?” The words cross the golden room, vanishing into the wood panels, into the empty shelves to be filed away like ancient textbooks. The words slip through the gaps between them, falling down.

Jimmy watches her, his face thin and shadowed.

“Jimmy, this is good,” Kim says, believing it now herself. This is—this is a victory, something won in a different kind of courtroom, maybe. A different kind of law. This is good.

And then Kim feels it again—the pressure on her skin. Cheryl watching her, judging her from two floors up. She closes her eyes briefly, and then she glances at the closed door.

Somewhere in this courthouse, there’s an affidavit filled with sentence after sentence of the truth, and in the end it had meant nothing. In the end, nobody did anything. A grant in Howard’s name and a scholarship and Cheryl dead now, too—a ghost, apparently, according to Kim’s own brain.

Once, Kim had thought that the law was here to tell these things apart: truth, and lies.

It’s all just a show.

“Kim?” Jimmy prompts.

And the judge might be hearing Viola’s motions now. An argument based on something that matters. That he didn’t kill anyone, that the accessory-after-the-fact charges were a reach. And halfway across the country, Patty is waiting to hear the results.

Kim presses her hands against her cheeks, then exhales. “I should go back.”

Jimmy nods. “Give ‘em hell,” he says, and his hand comes back around his wrist, as if pre-empting the return of the cuffs.

Kim tears her eyes away and starts walking. The pale wooden door opens for her and she steps into the wainscoted hallway. She can feel Jimmy’s presence in the room behind her, and she doesn’t know when she’ll see him again—days, or weeks, or another month.

Or another season.

The guard sits on a solitary chair at the end of the hallway, and he catches Kim’s approach and stands, patient.

She walks. Her heels drum on the carpeted floor.

Kim’s phone dings.

Her heart reverberates, struck by the sound. It’s already too late—that’s Viola, she thinks, that’s a message to say the hearing’s over, that the judge has declined the MSJ, that they’ll have to think of something else, something new.

Kim slows, withdrawing her phone from her laptop bag.

It’s not a text message.

It’s an email.

The Florida Board of Bar Examiners. Auto-generated text tells her, Kimberly Wexler, that her results are available on the Florida Supreme Court’s website. Kim inhales. Her thumb fumbles through her passcode, and she pulls up the email and clicks on the link.

The page loads slowly. There’s a document to download. She taps on it and waits and nothing happens. She breathes through tight lips, then tries again.

The file is a list, just four columns.

A column of applicant file numbers, counting upwards as she scrolls. 3911, 3912, 3913, 3914… and beside them, flickering like old film in a reel: pass, pass, pass, fail, pass, filling out the three remaining columns. One for the first part of the exam, one column for the second.

And one column for the overall score. Pass, pass, fail, fail, fail—

Kim keeps scrolling, and the numbers climb and climb and—3975, 3979, 3980—

3981. There. Her applicant number.

She blinks, eyes hazing, lost between the rows, but—pass, pass, pass, say her columns. She checks again. She scans the applicant number, the columns. And then she exhales with a shaking breath, hand on her chest, and reads them again.

Pass. Pass. Pass.

Kim looks up, fluorescent tubes watering her eyes. She smiles, and the smile turns into a laugh, low in her chest. The guard is looking on from the corner, but she just laughs and laughs, the sound of it filling her and overflowing.

Pass, her phone screen says, pass—and Kim shakes her head. It feels like an instruction, now, not a result, and the laughter feels like an instruction—all of it crashing into clarity.

Pass, her phone says. Pass, pass, keep going, not this. Kim presses her fingers to her mouth to hold her baffled laughter in again. She shakes her head and crushes her phone in her grasp, and, “Sorry—” she says to the guard. “I need one more thing.”

She turns, striding back towards the interview room. She pushes inside.

Jimmy looks up, his expression shifting when she’s not the guard he was obviously expecting. “Kim?” He steps forward, one palm out.

The sunlight glints in his eyes. She holds up her phone. “I passed the bar.”

He smiles, his entire face changing with it, brightening. “No shit!” he says. “‘Course you did.”

“No, I mean—” She shakes her head, striding across to the empty shelves, then back, exploding with trapped energy. “I was wrong. This was wrong.”

His brows drop. “What?” He shakes his head. “No, Kim—”

“I don’t want it,” she says, and then she laughs again, the same wild laughter from the hallway. “I don’t want this.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No,” she murmurs, and she holds his gaze—and then her body decides for her, finally, dragging her closer to him, step after step.

She drops her laptop bag. Her hand rises to his cheek.

Jimmy is a wall, steady and unmoved.

And then she kisses him. Her fingers splay on his neck. Jimmy just stands there, unyielding—until he makes a low noise at the back of his throat, surprised, and it’s the noise more than anything else that carves through her—that reaches through her skin and grabs her like something dragged through time.

She curls her hand into his uniform and pulls him closer. His mouth moves against hers, slow and slow and then firmer. Pressure ghosts over her back, a palm on her spine, drifting higher. His fingers weave into her hair.

Kim laughs softly, deep in her throat, moving them backwards. Jimmy lifts his other hand to her hip, holding her tightly—and then he hits the wood-paneled wall, the space behind where the judge’s desk would be. The force of it travels through him into her, their mouths knocking, and Kim breaks to breathe.

Her heart is beating so loud she’s sure the guard must be able to hear it from the end of the hallway. She can feel the warmth radiating from his skin, can feel his breath.

He exhales as she inhales.

Kim kisses him again. It’s an old kiss, a familiar kiss—the start of something. His mouth opens and she presses her tongue to his tongue and he hums, so quiet, and they could be anywhere.

And then she pulls back. Lipstick marks his mouth.

She wipes it away. She wants to put it back there again. Something gnaws in her chest, hungry.

And Jimmy murmurs, “Kim.” His eyes are edged, somehow, with the fear of earlier—hope and fear, always hope and fear. He stares at her as if she’s something that shouldn’t exist. Another ghost.

An impossible thing.

Kim slides her hand down his collarbone, watching her fingers move over him, and then she finds his eyes again. “Oh, no,” she says softly. “Patty’s gonna be furious.”

Jimmy blinks. He looks half a country away; he looks half asleep. “Who?”

Kim steps back, pacing again. “She runs the legal aid.” A glance at Jimmy. “You know, the one in Florida.” And she laughs again, just a few confused syllables.

“You like it there,” Jimmy says, nodding, catching up. “Helping people.”

He still has lipstick around his mouth. She didn’t get rid of it all. Kim stares at the smudge. She wets her own lip and then looks back at his eyes.

“Don’t you?” Jimmy asks, his brow scrunching.

She shakes her head. “I like it here more.”

The sunlight at this angle seems to strip the lines from his skin, to fade the bags under his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks.

“Or—one state north of here, whatever,” Kim says, waving a hand. “Jesus, and I don’t think Florida has reciprocation. I’m gonna have to do it again.”

“Kim, what—” he starts, words vanishing as Kim steps closer again.

She tucks her fingers around his jaw, his ear. She brings her lips to meet his more softly this time, silencing the confusion and the protests.

His chest rumbles under her hand. He runs his palm up her side, up to cradle her cheek, and she can feel him letting himself really kiss her. He brushes the edge of her mouth with his thumb.

Upstairs, high above them: a case continuing, arguments unfolding. Kim wants to tell them to stop. None of it matters. She’s figured it out. Soon—a month from now, a day from now, a minute from now—soon, she’ll want him out of that cold place again, soon she’ll let all the hope and fear bloom inside her chest again. But for now…

Every weekend, she thinks. She could see him every weekend.

She hums into his mouth and pulls back. His eyes are wide and shining. She wants to laugh again but she doesn’t. He’s right. She liked it there. She was helping people. She’d found a place, and it was a good place.

But it wasn’t her place.

And she can do it again. Kim inhales. She knows now—and she’s almost surprised to discover this inside herself again: the confidence. She’ll find more people to help. She’ll sit the bar exam again if she needs to—

—and suddenly she does laugh, bright giggles that she muffles in Jimmy’s shoulder.

“What?” Jimmy asks, the whole word a smile somehow, and she draws back. He tilts his head. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” she says. She toys with the fabric of his shirt. “I just hear it’s the third one.”

His lips flicker. “Third what?”

“The third bar exam,” she says. “That’s the one that really matters.”

His eyebrows climb.

Kim kisses him again before he can answer. He smells like new soap and warm skin and something unchanged after more than twenty years. She makes a soft noise, teeth brushing his lower lip, and his fingers tighten around her.

Somewhere upstairs, she imagines the sound of a gavel, the hammer hitting the block.

Chapter Text

Kim’s fingers hover on the door handle. On her walk back upstairs, she had worried she might run into Viola and the prosecutors—the status conference already over, all the motions heard. Instead, their muffled voices still bleed from beyond the courtroom door: the low back and forth of two men. Judge De Luca and AUSA Castellano.

Kim inhales, grips the handle, and then pushes inside. Her arrival sends out a ripple—Viola and Skyler turning back, and De Luca glancing over, expressionless—but the smooth drone of earlier returns quickly. Like a stone dropped into water, her return has only temporarily disturbed the room’s surface.

The only person who studies her for longer than a couple of seconds is Cheryl Hamlin. Cheryl sits, unmoved, in the last row of the gallery. Nothing outward in her expression changes, and yet Kim feels a shift. A darkening of eyes, as if Cheryl knows exactly where Kim’s been.

Kim walks on soft feet back up to the defense table. The place seems bigger now, the ceiling higher, the fluorescents a little brighter, as if the courtroom is the one that’s changed in the last twenty minutes. It even seems to take her longer now to traverse the gallery, but she finds her seat at the very end and inches it back under the table.

“Your Honor,” Viola is saying, “two things can be true. One: my client was willingly involved in Walter White’s criminal enterprise. And two: after the death of Gus Fring, the organization had transformed so much it should be treated separately. One with new power, new threats—and one in which my client feared for his life and from which he ultimately fled.”

Kim brushes her fingers over her mouth under the pretense of resting her chin on her palm. Light fingertips trace her lips, as if she can feel whether her lipstick has remained in place, as if the patterns she marks here might reveal whether she managed to wipe the last of it from Jimmy’s mouth.

Judge De Luca just sighs. He rubs at his forehead and then adjusts his glasses. “Thank you, Ms. Goto,” he says. “I’ve heard your arguments, but I can’t make a ruling on these RICO claims today.” He taps the desk, a low steady rhythm, and then he exhales again. “And Mr. Castellano. Nothing you’ve said has convinced me that Skyler White’s testimony shouldn’t be admitted.”

Castellano’s lips thin, but he nods.

“So I’m not granting your motion there, and I’m not granting the defense’s motion to dismiss,” De Luca says. “That will all have to wait until trial.”

His tapping continues. It sounds like water falling, dripping from a gutter onto dry dirt after a rain.

Drip, drip, drip.

“However…” Judge De Luca says, low voice dragging the word over several seconds. “The motion for summary judgment on the third claim, the accessory-after-the-fact.” Another tap, another drip, and then De Luca looks up from his notes. “I’m going to go ahead and grant your motion there, Ms. Goto.”

An exhalation—and Viola’s lips flicker almost invisibly with a smile—and Kim feels one growing, helpless, on her mouth, too. All that dripping water seems to have filled her own chest, because now she thinks it’s going to overflow, flooding the courtroom.

No more murder charges. No more murder charges.

Judge De Luca drones on. “Bear in mind it’s an interlocutory summary judgment, so Mr. Castellano, if you feel the need to file a motion to reconsider, you’ll have time to do that. Currently, you’ve provided no evidence to satisfy any of the elements of an accessory-after-the-fact charge, even without lawyer-client confidentiality.”

Kim can barely hear his words. All the strings holding her body together tighten. Any moment, she thinks, they might snap, twanging with bright and sparking edges. She encloses the feeling inside her, holding it in with her lips around her teeth.

“I’m going to set a trial date for June 4th.” Judge De Luca rises to his feet and then pauses there, still behind the bench. “Since neither of you have been in my courtroom before, I want you to know that if both parties come to me with an agreement, I’m very willing to hear that out. We don’t need a circus.” He nods, and starts stacking the papers as he stands there.

Kim breathes out, tilting her head back. Her exhalation seems to move through her entire body. The courtroom ceiling is a chessboard of white lights. The brightness inside her climbs, wound tighter and tighter until Kim swears she can actually hear the sound of it. A high-pitched noise that everyone else in the courtroom surely must be able to notice, too. Soon, she thinks, they’ll turn their eyes to her instead of their papers and documents.

Kim weaves her fingers together and grips her own skin. She feels the fabric of the orange prison uniform instead.

She tries to send Jimmy the news from here, imagining he can feel her presence above him just as she can feel his presence below. A wave of feeling rising inside her as the courtroom clears. No more murder charges, no more murder charges.

The storm clouds of that morning seem to have come to nothing. From the window of the courthouse’s fourth-floor hallway, Kim can only see blue sky. It looks as if somebody has cut Albuquerque and its surrounding mountains from a photograph and laid the pieces atop a blue sheet.

Near the bank of elevators, Viola is talking to the federal prosecutors. From so far away, they don’t look as if they’re speaking of anything important. Just another group of people in suits gathering before a court date.

The rest of Viola’s team waits near Kim. They talk lowly, almost idly, and she tries not to hear the undercurrent of surprise. A couple of them hadn’t expected the summary judgment to be granted. They’re fizzing with innocent happiness, small and safe enough to express in this space—unlike what’s blazing inside of Kim as she stares calmly out at the flat shapes of the city.

The glass runs almost floor to ceiling. Out to the east, she can almost see the old HHM building, though of course it must belong to someone else now. She wonders if they’ve repainted the blue.

Behind her: a door opening, the heavy release of the fire-stop entrance to the courtroom corridor. Skyler emerges, walking with her back straight and a death grip on her purse’s shoulder strap, as if it’s the only thing keeping her upright.

Kim moves along the window, closing the distance.

Skyler stops. The light from the cut-out sky sharpens the edges of her face.

“I thought I said no more surprises.” Kim tilts her head.

Skyler’s eyebrows twitch. “Did you?”

Kim glances back. None of the lawyers are paying them much attention. She asks it under her breath anyway, “Why did you do that?”

“What? Testify?” Skyler asks.

A look passes between them. A dare for someone to acknowledge the embellishments, the lies. Skyler’s fingers tighten around the strap of her purse.

Then the fire-stop doors open again. They hold for a moment, stiff, until Cheryl Hamlin passes through them. Like Skyler, she walks with a straight back, but she doesn’t need to hold onto anything to keep herself upright. She slows, tall and elegant, surveying the gathered people.

Kim nods to her.

Cheryl doesn’t nod back. Her expression just flickers (briefly, just briefly, a fracture over the surface) and then she’s walking again. Kim watches her go. She waits at the bank of elevators, head cast slightly down, her neck rising from her black dress like a swan’s.

“I guess you won.”

Kim finds Skyler’s eyes again, frowning.

“You convinced me,” Skyler says, and she’s talking about her testimony, of course she is. “You must be a good lawyer.”

Kim’s gaze tugs back to Cheryl’s curved profile. Phantom hands grip her shoulders, and Jimmy’s pulse tries to jump from his throat into her cheek. She swallows. “I’m going to try to be one.”

She can almost hear, from the courtyard below, water pouring into the scales of justice. Water pours into her and Jimmy—an indictment or an affidavit filled with bad things so bad no amount of good will ever fill the opposite pan.

But she hears Jimmy again, back in another courtroom. Her heart climbs with every new word. He’ll live with that, he says, about Chuck—about Howard, about all of it, and she realizes that maybe he got to this place long before her. Living with it, living with the water pouring and pouring into one pan and never changing.

Because there was never really a weight shifting back and forth. Never the good things balancing the bad—and now Cheryl vanishes into the elevator. The last glimpse of her is a flash of dark hair, a turn of a shoulder, the ripple of a jacket. Nothing at all, really. Nothing momentous to remember.

There are no scales.

“Did it help?”

Kim starts, but it’s just Skyler again. Her eyes are more vulnerable than Kim’s seen them before, and Kim frowns. “Did what help?”

“What I said in there,” Skyler clarifies. “I don’t speak lawyer, remember?” And she does look uncertain, off kilter. As if she’s not sure whether she made the right choice. Maybe to Skyler, Jimmy had felt like the ghost in the courtroom, there in the real world again in his fading prison clothes.

“It helped,” Kim says. “I promise you it did.”

Skyler nods, turning away. It helped, Kim thinks again, as if she’s convincing herself. They’ll find out how much it helped soon. If Viola can arrange a meeting with the federal prosecutors, if they decide they’re willing to negotiate.

As Kim watches, Viola breaks from the group. She walks smartly down the hallway, betraying nothing, and as she gets closer, Kim and the associates draw to her like magnets.

“So, Castellano’s changed his tune. Actually, Nooryani did most of the talking for once,” Viola says. “They’re gonna come to the table.” An exhalation runs through the group of associates.

Kim feels the relief through her own skin, too—tension unwinding.

Skyler glances between them. “What does that mean?”

“You ever hear how lawyers are just salespeople?” Viola says. “Well, time to barter our price.”

“Did you set a time for a first meeting?” Kim asks.

Viola inclines her head. “Friday.”

Kim nods. “I’ll be there.”

And for a split second she thinks that Viola might be insulted, but instead Viola’s eyes crinkle behind her glasses. “Good,” she says, grinning. “I can always use you.” She glances around then frowns. “Kim, is Jimmy down in holding?”

The skin on the back of Kim’s neck prickles, observed. The burn of eyes on her, but this time she pushes through it. “Yes,” she says. “Second floor.”

Viola just nods, unsurprised. “How is he?”

The question hovers between them.

Kim feels fingers weaving in her hair. She feels the warmth rising from his skin as she presses her forehead to his. At her silence, the others turn, and Skyler’s scrutiny seems to sharpen. Her pale eyes fix fast to Kim.

He’s good, Kim thinks. He’s Jimmy. He’s not being tried as an accessory to fifteen murders anymore. He’s good.

And now he’s handcuffed again, metal around bruised wrists—and she tears her gaze away from the expectant faces, back to the window, back to the city. The cut-out sky is wide and empty and so, so blue.

“Let’s go tell him the good news,” Kim says, finally. “You can see for yourself.”

Search results flicker past on Kim’s phone screen. No news pieces about the hearing yet. She’s sure there will be, eventually, but for now it’s just a ripple through the court system: a summary judgment granted, a couple more motions denied. Nothing momentous, just the everyday routine of the system. A small choreographed display of legal footwork (a little bit messy, a little bit confusing) that doesn’t mean much to anyone.

Or maybe it means everything.

Kim exhales, putting her phone down next to a potted plant with pink-patterned leaves. She eats the last California roll from the tray and settles back in her chair. In the living room, Viola and Lynn talk softly, their voices almost inaudible over the rumble of Jonesy in Viola’s lap.

Another breath. Kim picks up her phone again. She keeps scrolling. She just needs some acknowledgment, some confirmation that it all really happened. The courthouse and the golden visitation room feel as though they might as well be across state lines, instead of just down the I-25.

But they wouldn’t be lit with gold anymore, anyway. The sun has set and Jimmy is back in the prison transport, rattling up freeways with his hands cuffed and blue.

Kim rubs at her lips. She flicks through text messages and brings up the keyboard, then pauses. It’s still early enough in Florida. She phones instead.

Patty, who refuses to acknowledge caller ID, answers as if she doesn’t know who’s on the other end. “Patty Lyon.”

“Hey, Patty,” Kim says, and the others glance over from the living room. “Sorry to call so late.”

Patty scoffs. “Please, you know I’m still at work.” There’s the sound of a door shutting, and then a change in the background hum of the line. “And it’s been killing me to hear how it went, come on.”

And for a moment none of it wants to come out: the day too long and too loaded to put into words, or to pick the first words. “You were right,” Kim says eventually. “The judge granted the MSJ.”

A slap of a palm on wood. “Damn right he did,” Patty says. “And damn right I was right.”

Kim chuckles softly, shaking her head.

“So, what’s next?” Patty asks, crackling over the connection.

“Jimmy’s still got every other indictment against him, but the prosecutors want to talk now. So we’re feeling better.” Kim looks over at Viola, and Viola smiles back. “We’re feeling good.”

Patty exhales. “That’s what I like to hear.”

A motorbike buzzes down the street outside, rising and then falling. Kim studies the pink veins that run along the green leaves of the plant beside her. “I have some more news, too,” she starts, softer now. “Good news.” She nods to herself, knocking the words loose: “I passed the bar.”

Lynn twists, she and Viola both staring over at the table. Even Jonesy makes a huffed noise, lifting his head from the crook of Viola’s elbow. Kim nods to the three of them, an acknowledgement.

“Well, welcome back to the world of the law, Ms. Wexler,” Patty says.

Kim brushes her fingers over her lips. Her fingertips are cool and light. On the pot plant, darker red threads run inward to the stems. The green changes hue there, too, blackening as it folds down towards the root. “There’s just a bit of a problem,” she says, and she almost wants to chuckle at it, at the absurdity of it all. “I don’t actually want to be a lawyer in Florida.”

She doesn’t look over at the living room this time, but she can hear the reaction of its occupants—the shift of couch springs, the mew of Jonesy being disturbed. Paws thudding to the ground.

From the phone, of all things, Patty is laughing—deep, throaty laughter that turns into coughing before she quietens. “Well, then, I’ve got some very good news for you.”

Kim shifts her cellphone to her other ear. “Okay.”

And Patty says, “Because I happen to know Colorado has decided to start accepting transferred MBE scores.”

Kim stills, her skin tightening. She hadn’t said anything about Colorado.

“You’ll still have to sit the other half of the exam, obviously, but, hey,” Patty says. “That’s one day down.”

And Kim can hear Patty’s smile all the way from Florida. “How did you… I don’t know the first thing about the Colorado bar.”

“Oh, I looked it up a while back,” Patty says lightly. “You never know when that’ll come in handy, right?”

Something brushes Kim’s leg, and she starts—but it’s just Jonesy, weaving around her ankles. In the living room, Viola and Lynn are watching with naked interest. “Patty, if you knew I was going to do this, why didn’t you say something?”

“Oh, that’s no fun,” Patty says. “Besides, you were a real help for me.” A humming gap, the phone call passing over the miles. “I liked having you around.”

Kim swallows. She turns her hand over on the table, studying her palm. The veins run to her wrist like a pink-lined leaf. “I liked being there.”

Patty doesn’t reply for a long time. The phone call hums patiently, drawing itself over the long distance. In the background, Kim almost thinks she can hear the thudding music of the bar beside the Miami office.

When the conversation does resume, it’s a change of subject—a new client, a walk-in from yesterday. Patty runs through the case quickly and Kim hums along with the story, offering a couple of suggestions. The easy back-and-forth they’ve found together.

Jonesy weaves through her legs, and Kim leans down to scratch the soft fur at the scruff of his neck. When she tells Patty she’s going to stay in New Mexico for the negotiations with the federal prosecutors, Patty tells her to kick their asses. And eventually, the call ends with nothing—no click of an old-fashioned line, no connection broken, nothing to mark the moment. Just a couple of goodbyes and a promise to check in when Kim’s booked her return flight.

Jonesy purrs beneath her fingers.

When Kim straightens again, Lynn is passing the table, heading through to the kitchen. The fridge opens and closes, and then she returns, twisting a corkscrew into a bottle of white wine. “It seemed like tempting fate earlier, but now you’ve given us an excuse to celebrate!”

Kim shakes her head. “I’m not even going to apply for my Florida license,” she says, as Jonesy abandons her ankles to follow Viola into the kitchen next.

“Oh, you think I mean passing the bar?” Lynn says, prying the cork out, then glancing at Viola over the kitchen counter. “Nope.”

Viola grins. “She means you coming to your senses,” she says, and she finds three wine glasses and returns with them, setting them among the plants. “We’ve been waiting.”

Kim opens her mouth, caught half on the edge of a laugh or a protest.

Lynn fills a glass with wine, glittering and golden, and slides it to Kim with a wink.

“You both, too?” Kim manages. “Who else knew before me that I should move halfway across the country to be closer to a federal prison?”

Lynn’s gaze flicks to Viola, then back to her glass. “We figured you’d get there in the end.”

Kim just exhales. She swigs the wine, and it’s cool and dry and a little sweet. There’s a bitterness, maybe, too—a sharpness that lingers on her lips, and she grimaces. “Only took me a year and a half.”

Lynn leans closer. “And that’s far from the end,” she says, and she raises her glass.

Viola joins the toast, too.

And for once the words feel true. Far from the end, Kim thinks, even though anyone looking at the balance of her life would weigh up what’s come before this moment and tell her there’s no room for anything else. This, they would say, this time in Santa Fe, in Miami, in wherever next… this time is an afterthought. An ending.

But there’s no great balancing system. No scales on which these weights really matter. And no endings either, then. A future: another door, one to a meeting with the federal prosecutors, where she and Viola will play their hand.

Over the table, wine glasses draw together and ring and the sound seems to remain for minutes in the warm air.

The officer grasps the visitation room door without hesitation, without taking a moment to ponder the choice. Kim almost wants to close her eyes, to find that moment for herself somehow, even though she knows it’s just an empty room anyway. One of the now-familiar concrete blocks, with its barred window and the table with the lopsided legs.

But the room doesn’t feel as empty today, even as she’s left alone in it. Kim unlatches her briefcase. There’s not much inside, for once—just a couple of sheets of paper and a pen. She takes out the papers and sets them face down on the desk. The pen beside them. She closes her briefcase again, sets it on the floor, and moves to the window.

The barred glass offers a glimpse of the barred mountains. They’re brown today, rust-colored. The oxidation seems to seep through the places where the sunlight can’t reach, staining them with deep red ribbons.

Or she knows the mountains look like that, at least, knows it from her long drive. Today had somehow felt like a new journey even as she recognized all the landmarks, even as she made the turns automatically. She had driven with her mind on things other than the route: on the way the deep colors stained the wrinkled earth, on the way the trees rose patchwork from the valleys. She looked at these places and imagined the towns hidden among those trees and among the rusted dirt. Towns of empty houses and empty offices and so many choices she feels like she’s been set free to run among them, childlike, full of wonder.

And with every turn another pitch in the brown land and every hill another growth of wintering trees and another choice, and another.

So she knows what the mountains look like today, even though she can’t actually see them from this window, not really. Just a postage-stamp-sized strip of land through the oppressive buildings and the oppressive yards.

The visitation room door opens.

Jimmy enters. He smiles at her, the expression hidden from the officer behind him. It’s a mischievous kind of smile, though without actual mischief. It feels like something he keeps for her alone.

Kim nods to the guard, her own expression flat. “Thank you.”

The officer is familiar. He removes Jimmy’s cuffs without asking. Jimmy keeps his arms steady behind his back until the guard shuffles away and the door closes, and then he flexes, shaking his limbs loose. If he notices the papers on the table, he doesn’t say anything. He just moves to the window and peers out. His cheeks and his throat are sharp in the light.

“Jimmy,” Kim murmurs, half greeting, half something else.

He turns. “Hey.” His eyes crinkle at the edges. “How was your trip?”

Kim smiles back. “Better than yours was, I’d guess.”

Jimmy grimaces, a hiss slipping from between his teeth, but he looks better than at the courthouse. Enough days passed since the long drive from Albuquerque. He’s not wearing anything else under his uniform today, and a burn runs along the inside of a bare forearm. At her gaze, he lifts the arm to study the wound himself, then shrugs. Nothing major, his eyes say, as they hold hers.

Kim nods. “I have something for you to sign,” she says, spreading a palm towards the metal table.

Jimmy’s gaze lingers on them now, his face unreadable.

“It’s not a letter of engagement this time.” Kim’s heart knocks. “It’s a deal.” She tries to find his eyes, but his are fixed on the papers, and so finally she sits. She’s nearest the door today. This is usually his side.

Jimmy’s throat clicks, and he sits, too. When he looks up at her, he doesn’t seem surprised, but his stare seems to cut closer to her skin, as if he’s trying to read the contents of the document in her own eyes.

She looks back, steady.

“How?” he asks finally, one word that frays at the edges like splitting rope.

Kim inches closer. “We scared them. The summary judgment scared them,” she says. “You scared them, back in that first meeting. Skyler White scared them. Viola scared them.”

“And you,” Jimmy says lowly. “You scared them.”

Kim shakes her head. She’d sat in the negotiation meetings—sliding notes to Viola, listening to every breath and every word. She had become Jimmy’s voice in the room. He won’t sign it, she’d say confidently, as if it was still her place to speak like that for him. He doesn’t want that; that’s not good enough. “Jimmy,” she says, “I don’t know if they’re even sure exactly who I am.”

But Jimmy’s eyes glitter. “Oh, they know,” he says. “And I think they liked it better when we weren’t speaking.” He smiles again now. “You’re pretty scary, y’know.”

Kim just lifts her palms from the table. Innocent.

“So, all this terror, what did you get ‘em down to? Six months?” Jimmy asks, and there’s the fraying in his voice again. He rests a couple of fingers on the back of the papers, still not turning them over. Pretending he can divine the contents. “Eight months? That’s gonna be tough, but I’ll muddle through.”

“Jimmy,” Kim murmurs.

He wipes his palm down over his mouth.

Kim inches closer. “Do you know how many clients over the years I’ve advised to take a deal instead of going to trial?”

Jimmy asks it softly, “Is it all of them?”

“It’s all of them.”

He swallows. “Yeah, I know that.” His chest rises and his eyes drift closed, and then he turns the papers over. He scans the first page. “This looks familiar,” he starts, and he clears his throat. “Eight counts of money laundering… federal conspiracy to manufacture and distribute a controlled substance…” Then his eyes widen and he looks up. “No international distribution?”

Kim smiles. “You can thank Skyler White for that one,” she says. “She was going to make a pretty compelling case to a jury that they shouldn’t extend the RICO charges to anything that happened after Gus Fring.” A name that almost doesn’t catch in her throat.

Jimmy keeps reading. There’s an even bigger gap at the bottom of the list. No murders anymore, no accessory-after-the-fact.

Kim has to whisper it. “Turn the page.”

The paper moves. Jimmy’s eyebrows rise. His lips trace the words first as if testing them before uttering them, like a diver jumping.

And she holds her breath until he says them.

“Twenty-four years, two months,” he murmurs.

Her stomach tightens. She knows he knows it, but she does the math anyway. “Twenty-four, minus your earned time, as long as you can keep that job.” Numbers drop from her fingers, down and down. “Minus ten days a month with good behavior.”

He’s just looking at her. He wants to hear it.

“That makes twelve years,” Kim says, and it still doesn’t sound real. She’s been repeating it all day, the entire drive, the rhythm of the turn signal or the brake lights counting up by the dozens. Twelve years, twelve years. “You could be out of here in about twelve and a half years. And I can visit every week.”

Jimmy brushes the side of his forefinger over his mouth, back and forth, thoughtful as he studies her. Then his eyes narrow. “You think I should go to trial.”

“No, I don’t,” Kim says. “Jimmy, I don’t, I really don’t.” She tries to infuse as much force into the words as she can, even though with every repetition she feels a little weaker. “This is real. It’s twelve years.”

But he seems to catch something in her face again. “Kim,” he says. “This is… impossible, what you’ve done here.” He shakes his head slowly, as if in wonder. “It’s impossible. Everyone out there would’ve told you not to waste your time on me, and now…”

Her heart twinges with it all, anyway, with the hope and the promise.

“I’d be a total jackass not to sign this,” he says. “So if you’re disappointed—”

“—I’m not—”

“—don’t be,” Jimmy says, low and forceful. His eyes bore into her.

And Kim looks down. The table doesn’t stare back at her. The burnished metal barely even reflects the lights.

His voice comes gently. “Kim.”

She blinks and the tightness in her stomach doesn’t go away. Her hands are pale on the dark metal. Like paper, like the sheets of paper that don’t say enough. “I don’t want you to go to trial,” she says, finally. “Maybe part of me was hoping for a miracle.”

“You’re crazy.”

She looks up, frowning.

“This is a miracle,” Jimmy says, tapping the paper. “A whole generation of little boys in Cicero are going to learn about this in Sunday school.” He tilts his head, lips shifting in some expression she can’t name.

And Kim just shakes her head. The tension inside her presses against her skin—too much to hope for, not enough to hope for.

“A judge wouldn’t give me anything close to this, even if a jury only found me guilty on all the damn money laundering charges—and believe me, they would,” Jimmy says. “I hardly covered my tracks. Craig Kettleman would be proud!” He chuckles. “All my shell corporations were in my secretary’s name, or my own—hell, I even named all the companies after—” He freezes.

But Kim already knows. She’s seen the names. In discovery files, in depositions. Ice Station Zebra Associates, Ferraday Inc., Tigerfish Corporation. “Jimmy,” she murmurs, “you know I like more than one movie, right?”

Jimmy’s eyes soften. “Well, yeah, I mean…” His throat bobs. “I named them after a movie I liked.”

Her breath falls from her, and she smiles gently. “I don’t remember you paying much attention.”

Jimmy chuckles, low in his throat. “I guess I always had other things to pay attention to.”

Something warm unfolds in her chest. She holds out a hand to him. Jimmy grips it, as if the one point of connection can recall the feeling of nights in a darkened room—in her condo, or her old law school apartment, or his Beachcomber. A television flickering somewhere with images of men dying.

“Listen, Kim,” he says. “A year and a half down already, right? Eleven to go.”

She tightens her grip, nodding.

“Can you remember where you were eleven years ago?”

She closes her eyes. Thin light falls through the window of her second floor office. Her back faces the sun. Her computer monitor is mottled with reflections of passing clouds, obscuring words in her drafted motion. A nameplate on her desk, legal journals on a bookshelf. On the wall, paint sits thick on a canvas. Blue sky above yellow fields, though the blue seems to bleed through the tall grass, and the yellow the sky.

“Because I remember where I was,” Jimmy says, and she opens her eyes again. “I’d just signed a lease on a new office space. It was a bit unconventional, and, to be honest, Mrs. Nguyen never exactly gave me a lease lease, but…”

Kim grins now, weaving her fingers between his.

“Eleven years ago I was down at the courthouse every day,” he says. “And Chuck was already sick.” His voice quakes a little, but he keeps talking. “So I saw Chuck every day, too. That was the most I’d ever see him.” A tight sound as he swallows, and his voice comes tighter now, too. “I’ve been thinking about that time. Getting ahead of myself, thinking about it.”

She leans closer.

“Seeing Chuck.” Jimmy tilts his head. “Not seeing you.”

Kim inhales, holding his gaze. His words seem to travel down old phone lines, flying high above freeways.

He asks an ancient question, “Why weren’t we together?”

Kim scrunches her brow, shaking her head slowly. Heat pricks at the back of her eyes and she wants to hold onto him.

“Sorry—” Jimmy starts, the word splintering. He waves a hand around: the gray visitation room, the shadows of the bars. “Just seems dumb, doesn’t it? We could’ve been…” The words die away, drifting out into the rust-colored mountains.

“We could’ve been?” Kim squeezes his hand. “Jimmy, we were. I dragged myself out into the open again, didn’t I?”

He folds his lower lip between his teeth. He doesn’t get it.

“I felt you pulling away. You were killing yourself,” she says. “You were starting a solo practice. You had Chuck to worry about. And even before then… after your mom—” But she exhales. “That’s just an excuse.” She draws her hand back from his, fingers slipping free.

He watches her, waiting.

“You think I can be scary? I’m not scary, Jimmy,” she says. “I was scared. Always.”

His eyebrows twist, expressive and so open.

“I knew why you were doing it,” she says. “The law school, the bar, the office. All of it was because of me.” She tightens her jaw, holding the truth of the words in her mouth before uttering them. “I always knew that.”

Jimmy’s mouth drops as if he’s going to offer one of the old protests—that it wasn’t for her, that it was for himself, that it was to make his brother proud, that it was for any other reason—but for once he doesn’t utter any of them. Instead, he says, “I wanted to be with you.”

Glass shatters over her skin. “I know,” she manages. “I know that, too.”

Jimmy’s eyes close. His chest shifts up and down. She can see his collarbone, the uniform shirt hanging lopsided around his neck. The shadow of a prison bar crosses his midsection, about halfway down his lungs.

Between them, on the metal table, the deal waits.

The twenty-four years, two months. Her pen beside it. Waiting to sign.

“Jimmy,” she says quietly. She’s sure of the answer but she wants him to say it anyway. “Why did you do what you did at the sentencing hearing? Why’d you blow the seven years?”

His eyes open again. Pale blue, fraying with red lines. He looks—betrayed, almost, as if he’s shocked she doesn’t already know.

So she murmurs, “I want to hear it from you.”

His mouth twists, a lopsided smile. “They told me what you’d done and I…” His Adam’s apple jumps. “Kim, you always made me want to be better. You did make me better.”

She wants to deny it but this time she doesn’t. She lets him talk.

“That whole HHM thing, and law school…” He waves to some vague past, to eleven years ago. “That was better.”

And in the words, she feels the sting of someone telling him he’ll never change, that he’ll never make anything of himself—and she’ll never change, and she’ll never be anything, and big ideas are just for the movies—

“But I was young and dumb,” Jimmy says now, the words falling heavy. “I can still be better even if I can’t be with you.”

She draws her hands together, fingers pressing on each other.

Jimmy’s throat hammers with his pulse. “I guess I figured… who gives a shit about the rest of this world, if you’d just love me again.”

Coldness gusts through her, drawn from somewhere lost, from supercells and storms and rain dripping onto soil. Needles prick her eyes. “Jimmy, I always loved you.”

He shakes his head, staring up at her. The barred shadow stripes his chest.

And she’s standing. At some point she’s risen to her feet. She steps closer. A glance at the locked door. There’s a glass panel in the metal, crosshatched with wire. The guard is somewhere just on the other side, out in the hallway.

Kim leans against his side of the table, next to his chair. The metal edge digs into her thighs. She holds out her hand again.

The bar of shadow hops up to her own skin—and then, as Jimmy lifts his hand to hold hers, it finds both of them. She turns his fingers under the light and the dark, and he lets her. Lines lead from his palm to the base of his wrist, the veins of a different leaf.

She lowers his hand, releasing him. Behind her there’s a glass-paned door, but she shifts closer, and she curls her hand around his head, and her fingers find the base of his skull. Her nails slip through the fine, thin hair.

She kisses him. She makes a low noise, and Jimmy echoes it. His lips move against hers. His hand tangles in the loose fabric of her blouse above her waist—holding her there, not tightly but steadying, as if he needs another tangible reminder of her existence.

And then she moves back again. Anyone could look in. Her heart seems to echo in the room, pulsing like low music. She brushes her fingertips along his jaw, drawing her hand away.

His skin is warm and then gone. She straightens, and walks back to her side of the table.

Jimmy wipes his fingers over his lips. He scans the deal, rereading text he’s already been over.

“Eleven years ago…” she says. She can almost see that Jimmy sitting here across the table from her: the one she met for lunch on courthouse benches, and called late at night, and smiled at in echoing stairwells. The one she was so scared of, whose love terrified her. “It feels like forever.”

“No,” Jimmy says sharply, looking up from the paper. “It doesn’t feel like forever.”

She can feel the truth in it as soon as he says it. They had already felt old, then—already a decade or so into their lives in the desert, already worn down by the work and the studying and the uphill clawing. She can see him now, sitting before her in one of those double-breasted suits, the ones he pretended he picked because of some old movie star and not because they were the cheapest he could find.

His shoe is fastened together with a paperclip. He needs something to hold the loose pieces of himself together.

In the prison room, he holds her gaze tightly. “Eleven years and it feels like yesterday, Kim.”

She echoes it, “Feels like yesterday.”

And Jimmy nods. He picks up the pen. Twenty-four years, two months. Out in eleven. His signature loops along the bottom line, James M. McGill, he writes, and then he looks back up at her. His eyes crinkle with the beginnings of a smile. “So I’ll be out of here by tomorrow.”

Chapter Text

Night clings to the land. It gathers in the low places and reaches for the high places, and the pale gasp of an approaching morning washes over it like a first tide.

Kim’s headlights carve angular pieces from the lingering darkness. They reveal flashes of road markings, of unlit signs. Shadows with expressive branches rise to her right, scaling the pockmarked slope that runs along the highway’s edge. To her left, past the empty, oncoming lane, the land falls away entirely, vanishing into black tar.

The road turns. Shadowed masses climb from the depths now: trees and the tops of trees, dead branches and reaching bushes. The mountains seem many-fingered, clawing up again from buried places. She’s never driven these roads so early, and in the predawn hour they seem a different world, the terrain as alien to her as the unfolding surface of another planet. Some rust-brown giant out there among the stars.

Kim had thought, briefly, of staying someplace much closer by, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep no matter how long the drive. She may as well spend this final night winding through familiar towns—but the towns are foreign tonight, too, their houses and streets seeming to belong to another country. The shadows of Kubrickian roadside hotels and RV parks made unknown at three or four in the morning as she edges the speed limit.

A race against nothing. She’s less than ten minutes away now. She’ll be early.

In a couple of weeks, the sun will have risen by this time. In a couple of weeks, the nights will be coming sooner and the days will feel shorter—but not yet, not yet. A final gift of timing and tallied numbers to make sure the evenings will remain golden a little longer across her porch.

The road carves a channel through the dark earth. The foothills that once gathered around her like an impatient crowd retreat, letting her breathe. They make way for wide open space, a space marred not with farms or prairie grass but electrical substations and crumbling horse runs, whose falling-down pieces look just as industrial and jagged in the dim light. Frozen silhouettes of broken things.

The road is straight now. Kim curls her fingers around the wheel, and her fingers are tight, and her knuckles sore. Nearly four hours of locked bones.

The road dips then rises again. Her eyes flick to a point on the horizon, automatic. In daylight, this stretch would offer a glimpse of gray cement and glinting towers. In the dark, there are no gray buildings and no tall guard posts. Just steady lights.

The lights could be any place.

Her ears click. The sound of it in the quiet car echoes like a hammer striking a metal casing.

This night, she thinks—this is the driving night. This is the new edge of everything, the new honed and balancing blade: life on one side, and something else on the other. She blinks and shakes her head and she still feels it, she’ll always feel it: a dark highway running through her like cold water.

But today her heart shouldn’t sit as solidly as it does right now.

She’ll be early.

The land is covered with the lemon wash of almost-sunlight. Along the empty roadside: the hunched figures of the low bollards, and then the wide fence and the gatehouse rising like the cardboard backdrop of a stage.

Kim slows and slows, braking earlier than she needs to, turning into the prison road. The entrance to the complex. On a normal visitation day, she could follow the steps of the protocols blindfolded, but this morning is different. This morning—though it’s barely morning, anyway, not even six o’clock—she’s without steps.

A guard emerges from the gatehouse, squinting at her with a palm raised. Kim grimaces and flicks off high beams that are supposed to do that for her automatically these days.

Nothing is automatic today.

The prison officer reaches her window and she winds it down. He looks alert enough despite the early hour. He’s not surprised to see a car. Maybe a couple of people make this particular journey every day, arriving here as sunlight breaks, with hope and anticipation vibrating through them, too.

Cool dawn slips beneath Kim’s collar.

“Got a Form 12?” the officer asks.

On the passenger seat: papers sent to her from the prison, mailed through the crumbling postal system. She’s ferried them all the way back here safely, as if they never left this walled place. Her fingers are steady as she reaches for them now.

The officer gives the form a cursory look and then hands it back. “You’re early. Twenty minutes.”

“Okay,” she says.

He exhales. “You’ll have to wait in your car.”

Kim almost laughs. She’ll have to wait. “That’s all right.”

“Visitor’s lot. He’ll be out through the gates.” The officer returns to his booth, and Kim exhales.

Her fingers twist on the wheel. The gate arm rises. Kim drives through silently, just the wheels creaking.

The visitor’s lot is empty. The parking spaces wait before her like a chessboard, as if the move she makes now is going to determine something important. An opening gambit.

She doesn’t have to go inside today, but she stops near the building entrance, anyway, because maybe to park in the distant rows would seem suspicious, would seem like hiding from something.

(You’re being surveilled here, the signs remind her, as ever. You’re always being surveilled.)

Kim shuts off her engine.

Her headlights linger a moment longer and then fade out, too. The visitation building is dark. Just some outdoor lights high up on the empty walls, white LEDs that almost burn blue.

The sky burns blue also, pale and chalky. Kim presses her lips together and stares at it beyond the leaning building. For a moment, she feels as if she can actually see the color changing: this blue a little darker, this blue lighter. The air becoming stained. The Atlantic Ocean sinking into a white shore until for a moment the sand is blue, too. Fleeting and glittering.

Her eyes drift to the tall gates that flank the visitation building.

The gates are all right angles. Gunmetal black in the dawn.

Suddenly, she feels all of it: the whole drive slamming into this one moment—the darkness of her bedroom as she dressed again in the middle of the night, abandoning sleep; the darkness of the kitchen as she brewed coffee, as she stood in her living room doorway; the dryness of the Form 12 beneath her fingertips as she tired to look at these rooms like a stranger would—

As if he’ll be a stranger.

It slams into one moment: the darkness of the street as she held her car keys in her palm, the darkness in the driver’s seat as she checked the time again—and it was still earlier than she needed to leave, still so early, so she had left a couple more notes for TJ at the office: Jason might call, and then If he does, ring back on his granddaughter’s phone. And, Don’t give Oscar’s number to Penny. A sea of Post-It reminders waiting for him in the morning, as if TJ needs any of them.

She should have brought the notes here with her. Laid out on the dashboard. She’s the one who needs the simple messages.

Sleep presses behind her eyes. From a night awake, from a week awake, from a month of counting days.

And now no more counting. She sits inside the vanishing numbers, inside this last visit. The complex feels as unknown to her as if she wasn’t just here last weekend, six days ago, sitting across a table from Jimmy and not talking about October 21st. That would be the last day they didn’t talk about October 21st.

She can see more of the prison around her now, the flat shapes. The concrete edifice, ever unreadable. Its expression betrays nothing, always nothing. The wide doors aren’t curling lips and the narrow windows aren’t empty eyes. Its features resist scrutiny.

Years and years of visits and she’ll never know what’s inside.

And maybe today she had been expecting to, anticipating some flood of understanding or insight: a glimpse into the rooms beyond. The sight of a kitchen and a rec room and a prison cell, just so that she can see it for once, so that this piece of the world can be hers, too—but it will never be.

She tries to imagine it, anyway: the cells, the hallways. A light coming on and a guard leading him out of a room. Just like that. No parole in the federal system, and thanks to his earned time agreement, no supervised release. Only the last several thousand hours collecting, and the days collecting, stones piling in the pan of a set of scales, until the weight shifts.

Maybe she can live with this one balancing system.

Kim exhales. She pulls out her cellphone. Last year, a new cell tower had risen from the hills a few miles away. It hasn’t done much for the patchy coverage. This morning, her emails don’t want to load—but she’s never managed to get them working right on this new phone anyway. She stares at the unchanging inbox. One of the latest emails is a news roundup from late yesterday. She opens it. Crime reports and the declaration of a new state park.

Corrlinks doesn’t load either. Kim lifts her phone higher, as if she can get better coverage a few inches up, but the page remains stubbornly white. She’s only checking it out of habit. She doesn’t need to check the prison email system today.

Or she could message TJ. She’s sure they don’t have any hearings today, but maybe she’s forgotten something. A flash at the back of her mind as if she’s left the oven on. She pulls up her calendar. There’s nothing for October 21st, no court dates, and nothing else either.

She had never figured out what to write.

Still hidden beyond hills, the sun climbs, changing the sky with its passage. Kim sets her phone down again on the console between the seats. She drags the sleeves of her cardigan over her palms. It’s starting to get cooler inside the car, as if the darkness was the warm thing, and the light cold. The sky glows not just with blue now, but with dim yellow rising from the east.

Her body feels the motion of the night’s journey. She feels it like water under her skin. Her neck aches. The cold is sinking beneath her. She rubs some of the stiffness from her spine, some of the sleepless nights, and her eyelids drift closed—

—and maybe she’ll snap back to her bed, another half-dream, and she’s still there, eyes wide beneath the covers in the dark. She’s still staring at a ceiling. She’s unlocking her office door, stretching to flick the high deadbolt, like every morning. She’s at her desk in the old M&W office on Delaware Street, the plaster crumbling and the sun filling the already-overflowing archive boxes. She’s in a courtroom, she’s in an examination room and a bell is ringing—

She’s watching the door of a visitation room, waiting for it to open.

She’s always waiting for it to open.

—and she rips her eyes from the dark gate. She checks the time.

It’s only been ten minutes.

The seconds feel like they’re crawling over her skin. Each one is a month, a year.

She wipes her palms over her knees and her eyes flick again to the gate. She looks at the sky again instead. Gold stains the blue like sand along the water’s edge as a wave draws back. Gold stains the blue like tall yellow grass along a lip of sky. Gold stains the blue like… like…

Kim huffs. She’s shifting here, restless. She’s a nervous kid outside a courtroom door. She’s one of the first kids: Vicky, maybe, or Raghav. Her first ones always stick in her mind the longest—those early cases that walked through her unlocked door, or fell onto her desk from a Denver public defender who was too burned out to keep going. They’re the cases that settle under her skin, that she feels as a part of herself now.

Raghav ripping a tissue into little shreds as they wait with his father.

Kim tangles her fingers together. She wants something to shred. There’s nothing in her car except his release form, her coat, and an empty water bottle.

And his clothes. A shirt and jeans that she felt strange buying, but that now wait folded inside a day bag in the backseat. Just in case something goes wrong. Just in case they try to send him out of here in orange. He can’t leave these gates in orange.

Kim’s knuckles hurt and she pries her fingers free from each other. Her fingertips are white turning red as the blood returns to them.

Blood returns to the sky, too: deep orange flooding up through the chalky blue. She knows the sun is burning with it, a fire lost to the curve of the planet. The smoke from the flames climbs the sky.

Another six minutes gone. Another six months, or six years. She’s peeling wallpaper from an old living room that used to be rented to a woman who liked foxes. The fox faces curl and tear as she strips them back.

Another minute, another year. She’s squinting at a cracked laptop screen in an office on Delaware Street again, and the road has gone quiet beneath the windows, no more cars tonight.

Another minute, and another. She’s raising her hand among a crowd of others in a circular auditorium, and she’s swearing to use her knowledge of the law to better society, and she’s swearing to treat people with fairness and balance, even though there is no balance.

The yard gate and the fences beyond are layers of metal and crisscrossing bars. They seem suddenly foreign, too. Out of place, as if she’s never noticed them before.

She must have seen them. She imagines herself like a ghost crossing this parking lot every weekend, crossing and recrossing, passing through the exact spot where she now sits. With the crunch of snow beneath her boots, or rain drumming on the raised hood of her jacket, or a flat summer sun warming her bare arms.

All these moments are in the car with her now, too, filling the space, claustrophobic—

—and she opens her door.

The cold hits her, a fall wind that’s twisted down here from higher places. It taps at Kim’s skin, knocking away these old memories, bringing her back to the present.

Alone in her car.

Alone in the visitor’s lot on October 21st.

But as she thinks that, headlights blur the cement. A white van arrives. It idles closer to the yard gates, its headlights remaining illuminated. The driver’s window cracks, and then it rolls up again.

Whoever’s inside must have felt the cold of the morning, too.

Kim closes her door. She tugs her sleeves back down over her palms. Her skin is dry. She can still feel the paper against it: the rasp of his release form, the tug of the envelope as she tore it open. The BOP stamp and return address had terrified her, imposing enough that it seemed certain the envelope couldn’t contain good news.

But she’d held a dwindling number in her mind for eleven years. It shouldn’t have felt like a surprise.

Suddenly, in the soft dawn—their headlights betray them. Movement beyond the metal gate, near a guard tower. A wash of light spreading over cement. A glint of a reflection on glass.

Kim leans across into the passenger seat. She can see the side of a van, maybe. A black van. Shadows beneath it, long from low spotlights.

She straightens. Maybe the world tilts around her.

Her fingers move to her door handle and then linger there. Wait in the car, said the officer at the gatehouse, said the instructions in the release forms. You’re being surveilled; you’re always being surveilled.

But something finally begins to fill her, held back until now. It climbs in her chest like yellow sunlight. It’s warm, impossibly warm.

The gates open.

Headlights brush along the gray and the black van follows. Shadows of men line the windows, their heads tilted. The van slows again and stops.

The gates close. Tall metal soldiers rearranging themselves in a line.

Kim’s fingers tighten on her door, clicking the handle, opening it a wedge. She can almost smell the rumbling engine, can almost smell the cold metal. If he’s here, she can get out of her car. If he’s here, if he’s here…

A guard emerges from the gray van, not in any rush today. He wipes a palm over his mouth and then slides the back door along its rails.

She opens her door wider. She can’t see any of the shadowed figures. She holds her breath in her throat, then exhales sharply and moves—rising, stepping into the dawn. Her car is between her and the closed gates and the patient van. She takes a step, her hand on the hood.

It’s cold. She forgot to grab her jacket.

A man steps down onto the cement, then another man. And then—

—and then Jimmy.

The light in her chest rises and rises, terrifyingly bright.

Jimmy stops, staring at her. His mouth is frozen in a nameless expression, his eyes wide and pale. His eyebrows draw together, just a little—and it’s not surprise, but it’s something close to it.

Someone behind him nudges him forward and he moves. He’s not in handcuffs. He holds himself as if he still is, small steps, his arms before him, his wrists close.

The other men move behind him like a stream, flowing with rippling steps in the direction of the first van, the white one. They tilt their heads back and look at the stained sky. None of them wear handcuffs today, either.

But Jimmy takes another step in her direction. He seems part of the alien land and the foreign towns—lit strangely, lit like he’s a dream. She’s so used to the particular shapelessness of the prison uniform that the release clothes—gray sweatpants and a grayer sweatshirt and a black knit cap—seem as if they’re being worn by someone else.

She hasn’t seen him anywhere but a visitation room since Albuquerque. She hasn’t seen him outside at all since—since—

Since twelve years ago, a fence splitting his face into dozens of pieces. Basketballs had thudded in the yard behind him and rebounded and echoed, as if the place had trapped her own heartbeat there instead, and then Jimmy’s face had vanished behind a blank wall—

Kim starts moving again, finally, around the hood of her car.

Jimmy twitches, his head flicking sideways as if he’s about to glance back but then thinks better of it. He starts walking, crossing the parking lot. His shoulders are stiff. He’s wearing tennis shoes with actual laces and he’s carrying a white box and a white envelope. The other men have filed into the transport van, and a driver whips the door along its rails and it—

—slams.

And Jimmy’s in front of her.

Kim exhales shakily. “Hey.”

“Kim,” he says, voice catching on the first letter of her name.

She says, “It’s October 21st.”

“Is it?” he manages.

The rest of her breath falls from her and she reaches for him. He doesn’t react right away, and his arms are frozen between them, along with the hard plastic box filled with the things he’s taking with him. The last twelve years. She hooks her fingers into his sweatshirt, and the fabric feels brand new, and it smells brand new, too—all of it, brand new.

Jimmy’s arms slip free and wrap around her. Plastic presses to her spine—the box. She’d hugged him on Saturday, but this hug feels different, as if the hard plastic is crushing her on all sides. Pressing on not just her back, but her ribs, her stomach. Twelve years digging into her with hard edges, leaving marks on skin.

She imagines the figures in the white van glancing over, imagines what shape she and Jimmy make together here in the still-dark dawn. They’re barely visible, maybe, lost beyond the flare of the headlights.

She presses her face into the crook of his shoulder. She can feel his chest shifting now. It feels different and it doesn’t feel different. There’s no great crashing of seismic change. The snap that echoes here is just the driver closing the front door to his van.

Jimmy seems to twitch with it anyway. His voice comes low near her ear: “Get me out of here before they change their mind.”

Kim pulls back, nodding. She swipes at her eyes, and she tucks her hair back, then she moves to the driver’s side. Her door is still open, and her seat is cold. The release form waits on the passenger side, and she moves it now, tucking it into the glove box.

Jimmy is still standing where she left him. A gray figure through the passenger window. It takes him another moment before he opens the door. He sits like he’s trying to take up as little room as possible, tucking the shoebox-sized collection of possessions right at his feet.

“You can put that over the back if you like,” Kim says.

Jimmy’s hands freeze. “Oh, right.” He turns slowly and stretches to settle the box behind her. He still has the white envelope, slightly crushed from the hug. At her gaze, he tilts it. It’s unsealed, hanging open. Half a dozen twenty dollar bills peek out from inside.

“No charge,” Kim says.

His thumb brushes one of the bills, and he glances over. “It’s my gate money,” he says. “Gotta fend for myself again, right?”

She frowns.

Jimmy’s eyes drop, and he turns and tucks the money somewhere in the backseat, too. As if he’s hiding from it.

Kim clicks her seatbelt and he glances over at the noise. His expression shifts and he does the same—each movement a little delayed, like he’s responding to the world from a long distance. An cross-country phone call.

She turns on the engine. The headlights fade into brightness, kicking off the pale cement.

The white transport van is moving now, and they follow it down the curving roads to the gatehouse. Kim keeps her distance, but she’s still close enough to see the rocking silhouettes in the back seat. Pitching and tilting as the van takes the slow turns.

At the gatehouse, the van stops. Kim idles behind it, several car lengths back.

Jimmy drums on the hand rest. She tilts her head, smiling, and he exhales. His eyes are locked on the white van, shadowed with darkness.

Kim says, “You look like you got as much sleep as I did.”

His lips quirk and then drop.

“Did you manage any at all?” she asks, trying to pull words from him. Trying to settle him here in the car, to let him take up space.

He shakes his head. “I got so worried I’d miss the call for R&R I didn’t even want to lie down. Just sat there in my clothes.” His finger drums again, and he forces air out through his lips. “It’s quiet.”

“Hm?”

He gestures to the dashboard. “This car.”

The car agrees, idling noiselessly, and Kim nods. “It’s a hybrid.”

“Oh,” Jimmy says. “It’s quiet.” His gaze flicks to the dashboard monitor. Glowing lines display the time and the temperature and the local weather. There’s a little picture of a sun.

Kim presses her lips together, trapping something. “Hey,” she murmurs, and she rests a hand on his knee. She squeezes gently, then pulls her hand back.

Jimmy nods. He swipes the black knit cap forward off his head and holds it. His hair seems a little less gray than it has recently. Threads of brown lingering, as if the visitation room has been stripping him of color this entire time.

Before them, the gate officer bends to a knee, shining a flashlight beneath the van. The figures inside are still now, patient. The guard straightens again.

Jimmy’s fingers drum on his hat. A soft rustling. “You know, most guys gotta go right to a halfway house,” he says. “I’d usually see them back inside after a couple of months.” His throat jerks with a swallow.

She shifts, inclining her head.

Jimmy turns. “And I get to sit here with you.”

Kim’s chest tightens. She presses her lips together again. Something wants to come to the surface. She says, “I guess you have a pretty good lawyer.”

He just chuckles softly, looking away.

And his expression become unreadable again. His jaw a little tight, maybe. Warm light catches the angle of it, impossible rays from a sun not yet fully risen.

He looks younger with it, with the strange light. The gray sweatshirt hangs a little loose around his neck. It might as well have a frayed collar and a law school on the front.

His throat shifts. “Kim?”

“Yeah?”

He waves a hand, a sharp movement to the road beyond. “You can go now.”

She looks forward. The van is disappearing, the red taillights turning onto the empty highway. She brushes a hand over her lips and drives up to the waiting officer, whose flashlight makes a white circle on the ground.

‘X’ marks the spot.

Kim stops. As the guard approaches her window, Jimmy frees his hands from the knit cap, setting them out on his knees. Plainly visible, she realizes.

She winds down her window again. The officer doesn’t ask for the form from her this time. He just moves down and shines the flashlight into the back seats. He makes a lap around her car and back to her window.

Kim doesn’t say anything. She waits. She can hear Jimmy in the seat beside her—hear his breath, hear his heart. She can almost feel the weight of him there, tugging her to her right.

And then the guard waves them onward. There must be another officer inside the gatehouse now, because the gate arm lifts with the gesture. It rises and rises and Kim is pressing on the gas, as fast as she can get away with.

It feels like crawling. It feels like the world has frozen, like she’s covering no distance at all, like they’ll never move from this place—and then they’re gone. They pass the raised barrier, and it feels as if they’re crashing through a sheet of falling water.

Jimmy exhales like glass breaking, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. He leans forward and his shoulders shake. Kim slows, glancing between him and the road.

“Keep driving—” he says, clearly feeling the shift.

She accelerates again. The transport van is nowhere to be seen, lost to the night. It’s just them, alone on the road. She drives, retracing her earlier route. The land is warmer now, flooding yellow.

Jimmy drops his hands. He leans close to the windshield, looking up at the sky, looking out. His palm flattens on the dash, and then he twists, staring behind them. His seatbelt cuts into his shoulder, tugging at the neck of his sweatshirt.

She doesn’t need to guess at what he’s looking at. She glances from his face to the empty road and back, flickering. His mouth hangs, a little open. The road is straight and climbing, and in the distance, she can see the sharp lines of a horse run. His brow furrows. The tops of far-off mountains glow golden.

“Wait,” Jimmy says, and then louder: “Wait, stop. Pull over.”

Wheels crunch as she veers onto the metal shoulder. The car is suddenly loud, suddenly rattling. Kim slows and stops and tugs on the handbrake.

Jimmy twists forward again, fumbling with his belt and freeing himself. He opens his door and hops out, footsteps crushing away, down past the back of the car.

Kim exhales and unbuckles her own belt and climbs out, too.

The cold air grips her. Jimmy is still walking, making his way to where the shoulder meets a line of brown grass. When he reaches the edge, he slows. There’s already red dust on his white shoes.

And he stops, his feet on the grass. He stares out over unfolding terrain.

Kim’s eyes snap to that same old spot, too, as automatic as when she drives this road. Gray buildings. Guard towers. The fences are almost invisible from here. Everything else rises simply from the rust-colored land. She can almost pinpoint the visitation building.

Small stones crack underfoot as she approaches.

Jimmy doesn’t look over. He doesn’t look away from Montrose Federal Correctional Complex, with his hands flat at his sides, his so shoulders stiff. Shoulders that, for the first time in twelve years, don’t have the initials of his prison on the back.

Beyond the buildings: the raised ridges of mountains, and beyond them the indigo sky. It’s still dark there, out to the west.

But the sun is coming up behind them both. It’s warm on her back, on her neck.

“Jimmy?” she says quietly.

“I remembered it different,” he says, voice firm. He turns, and his eyes twist. “I saw it when I got here, but I remembered it different from this.”

“How did you remember it?”

He shrugs. “It wasn’t this small.” He looks back again. He lifts a hand, palm outward, like he’s covering the entire prison. His fingers twist and he angles his wrist, and then he drops his arm again. “I didn’t think it was this small.”

And she wants to cover the prison with her hand, too—wants to curl her thumb and forefinger around it and crush it.

She doesn’t. She just takes another step closer.

Jimmy turns to her. His eyes are soft; his eyes are the same. His jaw sets, twisting around something, and then he swallows, and he’s standing in her apartment again, or he’s standing in a dark office, or he’s watching her across a diner table. It feels like he’s shifting between channels and picking who to be—but maybe it’s her doing that work. She’s overlaying it. A remote misfiring, picking the wrong moment.

She hasn’t done this for a long time. Not when she’s looking him inside the prison. She’s used to seeing him there. But here out in the world (out in the world!) the memories are floating up again, broadcast in full color.

Kim clears her throat. “Viola wanted to be here today, you know,” she says. A distraction. “But she’s presiding over that big discrimination case.”

Jimmy nods. “Honestly, I…” He chuckles, and tips a hand at her. “This is already a lot of new people for me.”

“New people?” Kim says, quirking her head. “Who, me?”

His eyes glitter and he shrugs. The plain gray sweatshirt hangs a little wide around his neck. “And I thought there might be…” He turns, staring off again, some focal point near the prison. He exhales slowly.

She tries to finish his words for him. Might be more people—might be press or protest signs or cheering crowds or something else from an old movie, even though she knows Jimmy doesn’t really think like that anymore.

She’d wondered about it, too. Idly, in the night, with her eyes on the ceiling. But the news pieces had died away after his appeal, after his signed plea deal. As if he had signed that deal with the world, too—this is all boring legal nonsense; this is the first unsensational thing.

And now it’s been twelve years since Walter White’s death and the world has forgotten about the lawyers. The world always does. And even if people hadn’t forgotten, they would remember Saul Goodman: the tacky wink and the catchy slogan.

Nobody else has ever remembered Jimmy McGill.

“Are you surprised?” Kim asks, finally.

Jimmy makes a gruff noise, non-committal. “New kids were showing up and they didn’t know me,” he says. “So I kinda hoped…” He scratches his neck and then breathes out, long and shifting.

Maybe he is feeling that time again, too—the changing channels. The old skin. Something slipping from him, peeling away in the soft wind. Floating down and out, over the rusting lines of dirt, over the scattered trees with amber leaves among the green.

There is no gray out there. Not in the land. Her grandmother had said that to her once, her brush tip edging closer to a palette of wild paint. No black in nature, no white, and no gray. The earth is painted with yellowing grass, with matted patches of gold. The mountains are fading indigo and purple-brown, and even Highway 50 is not gray. In the light, the little rocks in the cement are orange and red and amber.

Their own shadows are blue and long, stretching out towards the last gray thing.

Jimmy breathes out. The sound of it is long and blue, too.

She rests her palm on his back. Let’s go, she thinks. Sunlight falls on her fingers.

Chapter Text

Her fingers splay on his back. Jimmy’s shoulders are firm and unmoving, as firm and unmoving as one of the distant gray walls. She strokes down his spine, and the fabric of his sweatshirt gathers before the pad of her thumb like small hills. She smoothes it flat again, then drops her hand. “You ready to get going?”

But Jimmy still stares off towards the prison.

Sunlight presses against her own shoulders, heavy through the cool morning air. It feels like splayed fingertips. “Jimmy?”

The light turns over his face as he looks at her, and he blinks with it. “Yeah,” he says, squinting. “Yeah, sorry.”

She shakes her head. If she’d let herself think about today, she would’ve imagined him running and never looking back—but now she can feel it, too. The tug of the buildings out there. The fences and the reinforced glass, the windowed doors and the x-ray machines and the cement walls and the peeling paint. Twelve years: the same cell, the same bed, the same routine.

It’s so much that someone should want to run away from, to run without looking back, out through whipping grass, but—

She had stopped on her way out, too. A long time ago. There were no hills like this there. Just the riveted and rippling prairie, a sheet-iron land that groaned in the long wind like sheet-iron, too. Yawning and screaming.

Kim feels a pang at making the comparison, even in her own head. She knows it’s not close to the same, not alike at all except for the urge to look back. In that final moment, she had felt as if she were abandoning not just Red Cloud but herself, the self that was so much a part of the place. Without the place, she didn’t know what she would be.

Jimmy’s brow twitches, a line appearing and disappearing. He’s watching her watch the prison.

Kim steps closer, reaching for his cheeks. Her fingers are warm and sunlit there, too, and then her own shadow darkens them. She’s blocking the sun, she’s leaning up and kissing him. Soft and steady, another kind of wall. She’s here.

Jimmy’s palms rest high on her waist, warm against her rib cage.

When she pulls back, his expression hasn’t changed at all. His eyes tug downwards. He glances back at the prison, as if somewhere in the distant, postage-stamp sized buildings, a guard has witnessed them kissing here on the ragged shoulder. Breaking the rules.

Her hands trail to his chest. She, too, can feel the imagined eyes. If she and Jimmy are still watching the prison, the prison must be watching them back. Even half a mile out, you’re always being surveilled.

The line flickers on Jimmy’s forehead. He looks like he’s studying her from a long distance, from a far-off hillside. Waiting for something to change.

But then he slips from beneath her hands and moves, back along the shoulder towards the car. Kim follows him, her footsteps crunching over the gravel. Jimmy opens his door and settles inside as she loops around to the driver’s side.

She sits, closing her door softly. Buckles her seatbelt.

He’s rubbing his knee.

“The cold?” she asks, nodding to his hand.

A hum. “It’s not so bad.” And he exhales, stretching his leg out. “It’s worse when I can’t move it.”

Kim nods. She turns the car back on and notices the quiet of it this time. The engine is a low, electronic hum, until the rattle of the tires over the stones as she pulls back onto the highway.

Heat seeps from the vents in the dash. She can feel herself relaxing with it, sinking deeper into the driver’s seat. They must have stood together on the shoulder for longer than she had realized, because the sun is comfortable above the treetops now, trapped in the wedge made by the far-off mountains.

Jimmy is quiet again beside her. She can feel the gentle flow of his thoughts and his breath, a surface she doesn’t want to disturb.

Close along the roadside, yellow trees shed yellow leaves. They gather in tidy rows, their trunks white and tall. Beyond them, the hillsides are filled with evergreens, their slopes made blue-gray between the crisp yellow. The road turns, angling a little north, and the shadows dapple the cement, long and stretching from the low sun. An alleyway of fall.

The light is pale and dusty and the car seems to cut a path through it, leaving clear air in its wake. Kim flexes her fingers on the wheel. She can still feel Jimmy’s shoulder beneath her palm.

She looks over at him. His face is blank, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the windshield. She wishes she could watch only his expression, to study it for any changes. She used to be able to see right through him.

The sunlight flickers through trees, through branches, arriving finally on his cheeks.

She looks back at the road. The day spills before them, and the journey ahead through that bright light seems longer than three-and-a-half hours.

Lone orange trees dot the hillside like fireflies. Bonfires of bright colors here and there among the faded green. And soon, a town—arriving as the towns do here: unceremoniously. Just a collection of red-roofed houses with dark wooden walls, RVs and empty yards of dry grass. The highway broadens and becomes a gas station and a small store, the cement widening to a flat forecourt marred with dust-burned tire tracks. It’s quiet, the store not even open yet. The lights on the gas station overhang still burn, and the white pumps have red accents like something else from long ago.

Everything today is from long ago.

The buildings vanish in her wing mirror as she takes the next gentle curve of the highway. Her eyes flick to her fuel gauge only now.

She needs gas.

Next time. A sign tells her that Salida is in thirty-three miles.

She glances at Jimmy. His elbow is propped on the window, his head in his palm. He’s still staring out at the oncoming mountains—mountains they’ll soon be climbing, as they twist up the steep highway and into a national forest, where the trees are tall and old and eternally green.

They approach the climb in silence. The car slips smoothly along the road. They pass chain stations that in the darkness of the preceding night had seemed ominous, with their lines of supplicant lampposts, the road fattening beneath them as if taking her through some enormous metal rib cage—but the stations are normal again now.

This ascent, the first after the prison, always feels at least twice as long on the return as the approach. Even on regular weekends, these winding corners would seem to Kim to take the entire trip over again, an endless series of turn after turn, each revealing yet more mountain to climb. In winter, she would make the drive through sheets of white, her tires crunching slowly, part of a slow parade of cars.

Today, the highway is empty. She feels as if she’s traveling through snow anyway: plowing some great weight ahead of her, every mile taking longer than the last, until the car hardly seems to be moving at all.

She blinks and her eyelashes catch the imagined snow. They stick to her cheeks before peeling upwards again.

The hot air from the console seeps inside her, and she turns it down, blinking hard. The altitude presses hard and harder on her ears, swaddling the already-quiet engine in cotton. The fall leaves are like scattered fires on the land: slow burns starting at the base of the hills or along the roadside, just a few embers for now, waiting to spread.

Until finally the climb is over. After everything, the summit seems to appear from nowhere, springing into existence around a bend. The highway widens, and there’s a final bare hilltop whose enormous parking lot invites her to stop here for food and gifts, to ascend to the topmost peak and sit above it all. To survey the rippling hills, to glance back across this continental divide.

And from this high, Colorado might look like sheet-iron, too, and Montrose prison would be nothing among it. Sometimes, she’s driven this road right up into the clouds.

Kim glances into the passenger seat, edging off the accelerator.

Jimmy is still facing forward, his head on his hand. Sunlight flickers and throws him into glowing silhouette. It warms his gray sweatshirt, catches the bunched up sleeve that slips from his right wrist.

He’s asleep.

Her chest tightens. He’s asleep, she thinks again. His mouth hangs a little open, his cheek scrunched on his palm. If she thought he looked younger earlier, on their way out of the prison, it’s nothing compared to now: his face relaxed, lines vanishing. He breathes softly, easy and slow.

She wants to stop here anyway, to freeze in this moment, to linger at the top of the world.

But she keeps driving, her eyes on the highway. The engine seems loud in her ears now, screaming with effort as they crest the ridge. Falling away before them, a new tableau: a floating glimpse of new distant mountains, a jagged range that wants snow even after a hot summer. Its ridges are rippled and bald, a wash of brown-gray in the morning light.

The land on this side of the mountain is closely shorn: young trees in tidy rows, or straggling patches of bare spruce whose dying branches seem almost purple. They cling with dead roots to the crumbling, rocky faces, until soon, even the shorn trees vanish, making way for old quarries, whose buildings perch lopsided on the rippling hillsides.

The fuel gauge creeps lower and Kim ignores it. She can hear Jimmy’s sleeping breath beside her, now that she knows what she’s listening for. Now that she’s getting used to listening for him again.

Her eyelids creep lower, too, and she snaps them back open. She feels like she’s sinking, slipping along an even steeper decline than this gradient. She just needs to get home, just a couple hours more—three hours more, just over three hours more.

She just needs to stop for gas.

The minutes drag at her, each one a new hook in her skin, each one on a long thin line. The hooks are pulling her down too, down and down, and she blinks and she wants to adjust the air con—

But the cold air, she thinks, might wake him. She doesn’t want to wake him.

She looks over when she can. A glance when the road straightens, a longer stare when she can risk it. She’s not reckless anymore, not dangerous—except for this. A grasped glance, with her hands locked on the wheel, before her eyes snap again to the highway.

Sometimes, he looks like her old Jimmy. He’s nodding off as he waits for her in their office foyer, or tucked on the sofa in his office. He seems unbothered by the sun that, here above the world, hangs impossibly high in the sky, streams impossibly bright into the passenger seat. She wonders how many nights in the last week he lay awake across the Rockies from her, tucked in that dry and empty valley.

But sometimes, he looks like a stranger. This man in prison grays, sleeping on her right. Sitting in her car. His slack features as unreadable as the visitation building, as unknown to her. She sees him as she sees herself in photos sometimes—her own face like a stranger’s. When did that woman get so old? She never felt it happening.

When she looks back next, he’s Jimmy again, sleeping in front of a flickering television with yellow papers on his lap.

The sun is before them again now, out to the east. The road runs flat between the hills, past houses and campgrounds. It flows gently out to the horizon, following a river hidden beneath the dense foliage. The water’s journey is marked by a mottled pattern of orange, gold and green, and the green is so pale and bright sometimes it might as well be golden, too.

Highway 50 beckons onward with orange and gold as well. The center lines flash bright on new surfaces and then fade over cracked cement.

And the road that twenty minutes ago climbed through mountains soon settles here among the flat, marshier lands. She’s joined by other cars: shapes that appear in the distance and pass her, or turn into side streets. Power lines flash along low fences, along farms filled with yellowing grass, where black cows graze the brown earth. Past an electrical substation, the metal poles gleaming, the coiled wires pulled back as if ready to spring. The kind of place men once decided to build a prison.

At the sign for Salida, she glances at the fuel gauge again. No warning light yet.

So she doesn’t make the turn. She bypasses the city, curving northward instead. She should, she knows, stop and fill up. Get some fresh air. She needs water; she needs food.

But she keeps driving. An ever-onward highway surrounded on all sides by pale blue mountains, textured and three-dimensional. Houses with their driveways breaking directly onto the road offer glimpses into square-fenced lives: a patch of tidy grass and evergreen trees. The crumbling brick of an old fireplace along a front wall; a backyard filled with rusting cars. A prefabricated house with lopsided wooden steps leading to the floating front door.

In her rearview mirror, the road vanishes. She can feel it back there, the hard cement, the buzz of the stones under her wheels. The flash of a gate arm rising and falling. It grips at her skin, it fixes fingers behind her eyes and fogs her vision, and she blinks quickly.

A yawn pushes up from her lungs instead, burning her throat as she tries to force it back down.

Jimmy breathes softly in the passenger seat.

Out to her west now, the mountains look like the jagged teeth of some enormous skeleton, rising to sharp peaks. Cloud shadows drift over them, rippling with the terrain as if cast through water. The shadow of a swimmer on the clear ocean floor, out on some gray-white beach to the distant east of here.

The highway curves closer, closer and closer, and the mountains grow—as if the crush of that continental divide is happening in real time, tectonic plates groaning and screaming and pushing up into the sky. Pushing and pushing high enough to cut with serrated edges into the blue. To still gather snow even now: white patches falling like inverted shadows in the recessed places, hiding from the sun.

Morning mist rises from them in sheets, hanging as dust would in the air.

At the approach of the next town, Kim checks her fuel gauge again. The light glows now, steady and orange. She holds her breath, willing it to dim, willing the needle to somehow rise, but it doesn’t.

So Kim pulls into the gas station slowly. She shuts off the engine. The quiet is deafening but Jimmy doesn’t wake. His cheek shifts a little on his palm, slipping. His eyelids ripple.

Maybe he’ll stay asleep after all.

She climbs out of the car and onto the forecourt. The day is warmer now, the sunlight settling comfortably into the dusty morning. She fills the tank and hangs the pump back up. Facing to the west like this, the mountains seem supernaturally enormous. She tries to think of them as more than the backdrop of some great stage, and she imagines the exact land that she stands on right now stretching out unbroken on and on until it curves up, becoming almost vertical—

But staring at the mountains feels like falling.

Kim lets go of the pump handle. In the gas station, she buys a bottle of cold water, and she’s halfway to the counter before she doubles back and picks one up for Jimmy, too. The water bottles have little mountains on them, small enough for her to hold in her palm.

When she returns to the forecourt, Jimmy is standing beside the car, flexing his knee back and forth. His gaze shifts to her, and his face relaxes imperceptibly.

She grimaces. She woke him. She nods to his knee. “Stiff?”

He shakes his head, “Just gotta stretch it a bit,” he says, and he limps a little towards the pumps—only a couple of steps. He stills.

Beyond the pumps, there’s a liquor store and an empty shopfront. An old gas station sign missing its boards, offering five empty metal squares to the sky instead. Picture frames held aloft high above them, advertising nothing. Beyond the empty spaces, there’s a long motel: green rooftops and identical green doors. A couple of cars wait in the spaces, their owners asleep within.

Jimmy cracks the lid on his water bottle and drinks steadily.

“How about we get something to eat?” she offers. “You must be…” The words vanish. You must be hungry. Twelve years in prison and you must be hungry.

But Jimmy nods. “Food sounds really good, actually.”

Kim squints out at the sunlight. There’s a Domino’s and a diner, and then the long road towards the rest of this town. She’s never driven that way. “What do you feel like?” she says, and then softer: “My treat.”

Jimmy chuckles. He breathes out, a little shaky, his head dipping.

“Anything you want,” she says, as if this small Colorado town would be up to the request. “What do you want?” She feels as if she’s pulling him back again, pulling him out of somewhere.

Jimmy’s lips tighten, his eyes cast down at his feet. His tennis shoes are dusty from the gravel shoulder, the white flecked with reddish brown. When he does look up again, he stares not at her but at the travel center—though this building can barely call itself that, despite the twenty-foot sign.

A yellow cartoon face smiles above the entrance. A banner running above the windows boasts of FOOD, POPCORN, and SUNGLASSES.

“Okay, then,” Kim says, another tug. “I’ll splash out on a gas station hot dog. Since it’s a special occasion.”

But he shakes his head. He lowers his eyes again. This time he brushes his hand down the fabric of his sweatshirt. His fingers seem dark against the pale gray.

Maybe he’s seeing himself as she had in the car earlier. A stranger in prison sweats. Someone who doesn’t belong in this place, not anymore. “Jimmy,” she says quietly.

He looks up, his brows twisting.

“I have clothes for you in the car. Just a couple of things…” she offers. “Nice enough for a backwater diner.”

His lips flick. “Not orange, right?”

She shakes her head. “Not orange.”

His eyes soften. He clasps his left hand around his right wrist, arms hanging before him. “Do travel centers still have showers these days?”

“That one?” she says. “Probably not.”

He barely reacts, just a slight slump in his shoulders.

Kim closes her eyes briefly. How much of the next few weeks is going to be her stumbling over small luxuries she’s taken for granted? A hot shower. “But we can do better than that.”

At his furrowed expression, she gestures across the street. Jimmy squints, and it takes him a moment longer than she expects to clock the motel, and when he does his eyebrows flick upwards. “Kim, I don’t think they’re gonna rent you a room by the hour.”

“Well, good,” she says. “Maybe you’ll want a long shower.”

He huffs dryly. “Think they’ll let me use it for twelve years?”

She’s not close enough to touch him, but her palm rises a little anyway. As if she can hold all that back for him, just for a moment. “I’m serious,” she says, and it feels like as close as she’s gonna get right now. “It’s not exactly the Hyatt. You shower. Get changed. We’ll find something nice to eat.” At the words, her stomach tightens. “I could use some food.”

He studies her a moment, then tilts his head. “What time did you leave this morning?”

She pauses. She almost avoids the question, but instead she answers lightly: “About two.” More like one-thirty.

Jimmy seems to hear the hedging, somehow. He says, “Long time driving.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Long time.”

His eyes lock on hers for real, finally, fixing her with a familiar scrutiny. It’s comfortable to her now. A hand on her skin, his arms around her back.

“But for now, I think I can manage another fifty feet,” she says, waving across the street again. “Come on.”

And now that she’s had the thought, her body is screaming for it: to eat something, to get some fresh air, to stretch her legs for real. The high-strung adrenaline of the night is crashing, sapped from her by the winding mountain roads and the long flatlands.

They settle back in the car, and Kim wheels around past the pumps and onto the empty highway again, then almost immediately pulls into the driveway of the motel. The entrance is lined with bright white stones, and the statue of a buck with enormous antlers stands proudly beneath the sign. The Slackwater Inn.

There’s not much to it. A line of rooms beneath the long green roof, and a separate office building not much bigger than six feet across. A red neon sign is perched in the windowsill of the lone window, and it burns with the word: Vacancy.

Kim pulls up near it. She’s only just got out of the car when a woman carrying a stack of folded sheets spots her. The woman sets the sheets down on a metal chair, then ambles over. She has to unlock the office door, flicking on the lights and illuminating a desk of messy papers and a computer that might have been bought in the nineties. The woman ignores that, just flicking through a paper register and making a small show of checking which rooms are free—Yes, Kim says, just one night. Yes, just one room—and the owner jots something down and unhooks a key from a wooden board behind her.

“Y’know, check-in time is usually at two,” the woman says idly, twirling the key into her palm.

“Okay,” Kim says shortly. The clock on the wall behind the desk is decorated with antlers. It’s barely gone eight o’clock.

“But I guess I’ll let you check in now.”

“Great,” Kim says, flashing a smile. She holds out her hand and accepts the keys.

“Room nine, right near the end,” the woman says, nodding towards the mountains. “That’s the quiet side. Real nice.”

Kim just nods and thanks her. She escapes from the tight office into the enormous, cool morning. Wind brushes beneath her cardigan, and she slips back into the driver’s seat.

“She seemed like a charmer,” Jimmy says, and Kim chuckles, reversing and then heading down to the far end—the quiet side—the wheels crunching.

She pulls into the space outside number nine’s door. She scoops the bag of clothes from the backseat. As they shut their doors, the sound echoes distantly over the parking lot and out, out down the road and onward, as if it’s reaching the snow-capped mountains and bouncing back to them from there.

Kim unlocks the room. It’s nicer than she expected. It smells clean. The walls are paneled with yellow-brown wood, and the bed is made down with a blue-and-white duvet. A painting surmounts the headboard: white-speckled tree trunks rising from green ferns. A glass door leads to a little fenced-off patio at the back, and beyond the fence rise the tops of RVs and orange trees, and beyond them, more mountains.

Kim slides the glass door open and it glides smoothly over the rails. There’s a small table out here. Two chairs.

When she turns, Jimmy is just waiting near the front door.

She smiles, sliding the patio door closed again and holding out the bag of clothes. “Here,” she says. “I’ll hunt around for some menus. We can see what they’ve got to eat nearby.”

Jimmy takes the bag from her, nodding slowly.

“Take your time,” she murmurs. “Go on.”

He moves at the instruction, wordless and easy. Her heart tenses. She wonders suddenly if she gave him a choice before, over at the gas station. She can’t remember, and she opens her mouth—but then he shuts the bathroom door.

She’s alone.

Alone again, and she should be used to it. She grips her hands together, catching sight of herself in a mirror. The woman in the reflection looks lost. You don’t belong in there, Kim thinks, staring at the strange eyes. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.

She turns, sliding open a drawer in the end table. There’s just a bible, no menus. She checks the other side of the bed, then spots a black binder on top of the mini fridge. Inside are a bunch of papers, all printed at different times over the last decade and in varying states of yellowness, stuffed into transparent sheets. She carries the folder over to the bed and sits on the end. Pizza places and lists of burgers with the same five toppings rearranged in different orders. Beef, cheese, onion rings.

The shower cuts on: a rush of water. A hissing beyond the wall opposite the bed.

Kim glances up at it, at the wall. The wood panels offer nothing. Flecks of white from an old coat of paint cling to the scored valleys between the boards.

She presses her fingertips into her eyes, exhaling slowly. She should have thought about today. It feels stupid, now, to have ignored it for years—to have folded this day away into the corner of her mind, somewhere in the darkness. Somewhere out of sight so she wouldn’t get too attached.

But now she’s so unattached to it she’s floating, drifting through the minutes as if this is a dream. It all feels like unreality. Jimmy in her passenger seat, Jimmy on the other side of the thin motel wall.

And she knows she’s hiding from it all.

Hiding from the real world, just for a moment here, just for a breath. As if unlocking the door to room nine of the Slackwater Inn is going to make it easier to unlock her own door a few hours from now. This is it, she thinks, preemptively, gesturing to her space. This is all of it. The carpets are clean in here, but the fridge is stainless steel.

She wipes her hand down her face, then clears her throat and returns to the menus. There’s a Chinese place, but they don’t open until noon. She checks the time. The clock in here has little flowers on it, a different one for each number.

Jimmy will be out again soon. They’ll get something to eat, some tiny spot, tucked away together. And then they’ll be back in the car, driving headlong at seventy miles an hour towards the real world.

But the shower is still going an hour later, an unending static rush.

Kim has looked through every menu twice over by now. She’s read the little biography that the motel has included for flavor. The place is named for the nearby river—the Arkansas River, winding southward of here. Slack water, the bio says, a body of water with no current. No movement in any direction, just stillness. In tidal systems, the words continue, even birdlife becomes quiet during the slack water period.

Re-reading that same paragraph over again as she sat on the end of the bed, Kim had felt the same tug of sleep as in the car. The heavy weight of her body, absent the adrenaline, absent the momentum. As if stopping has caused the crushing exhaustion more than any of the rest of it. As if sitting here, on the edge of a bed, has sapped her completely.

So she had walked out onto the small patio, hunting for cold air. Breathing in the crispness, feeling it fragment her lungs, slip through her. Her cardigan on the bed, her jacket in the car, and the ice from the mountains sliding through the thin layer of her shirt.

But it hadn’t woken her up. It hadn’t fractured the haze.

The haze: the buzz of the rushing shower.

She slides the door closed again now. She had taken her shoes off earlier, too, and she approaches the bathroom on soft feet. She can’t hear anything beyond the door but the rush of water falling.

“Jimmy?” she calls.

The shower continues, filling her head. She wonders how long it takes to wash off twelve years of prison. Maybe he was right. Maybe it will take him another twelve years.

She knocks on the door. “You haven’t fallen asleep in there, right?”

The rushing water offers no kind of answer.

She taps her knuckle. One more try. “Jimmy?”

Jimmy’s voice comes muffled. “You can come in.”

So she inhales, and she opens the door. Steam curls through the gap, turning in glittering eddies. Inside the room, the air is heavy with it, the mirror beside the doorway fogged. The shower is louder in here, hissing and hissing into a bathtub. The tub has a flat, tiled lip around the edge.

Jimmy sits on the lip, down the opposite end from the shower head. The shower curtain is blue and only half drawn, and it gasps with the new air current, swelling outward and then slackening again.

He looks over at her, too, his chest rising and falling like the curtain.

He’s wet, hunched forward. He’s naked, but he stares at her without self-consciousness in a way she’s never seen from him before—or not just self-consciousness, but without any feeling at all. No easy comfort or warm flirtation.

There’s no familiarity to this. He sits there, staring over at her, as detached as if he’s still wearing the gray sweatpants—or not even the sweatpants, but the eternal orange uniform. It’s like he’s wearing a featureless skin.

“Jimmy—” she murmurs.

His eyes widen a little. He says something but the words are lost to the warm steam and the humming fan.

She moves closer, the tiles damp beneath her socks. “What?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know what to do.”

And for a moment she thinks she’s still misheard him, that she’s misunderstood something beneath the rushing shower and the water drumming on the plastic curtain, on the ceramic bath. She wonders how long he’s been sitting here, at the edge of the tub. The shower spray is sticking to his skin, beading on his shoulders and glittering along his arms.

She moves closer, close enough now that the spray hits her, too—kicking off the curtain. He’s holding, he’s holding… a little bottle of body wash or shampoo or whatever, something complimentary from the hotel. In his other palm, he’s cradling one of the little hotel soaps, still wrapped in its white paper and sealed with a monogrammed sticker.

“Hey,” she says softly.

Jimmy traces her with his gaze, and then he chuckles, low and raspy in his throat. “Sorry,” he says. “I just got distracted. I’m okay.”

Kim shakes her head. She slides the shower curtain down, rings rattling, and weaves an arm under the head of hot spray to reach the handle. Water drips into her shirt sleeve as she pushes the handle flat—but the shower keeps going, rushing and rushing. She turns the handle outward and water floods from the lower faucets into the bathtub.

“Damn it,” she hisses, turning the handle again—and hot water runs down her arm, sticking to her skin—and finally she shuts off the shower.

The bathroom without the rushing static is claustrophobically quiet. Water drips from her shirt, from the showerhead. It echoes on the white ceramic, punctuating the silence like heartbeats.

The fan whirs.

Kim leans back, and the curtain settles. “What happened?” she asks, crouching near him, beside the edge of the tub.

“Nothing,” Jimmy says, and then his eyes drop and he shakes his head. “I mean, really nothing. I just…”

“You didn’t know what to do?” Kim repeats.

His eyes darken. Maybe it’s the spray dissipating, the air thinning. “You think I’ve lost it.”

She swallows. “I don’t think that.”

“It’s just…” He stares at what he’s holding. The body wash, the soap.

“Hey,” she says again, and she holds out her hand. He passes over the little bottle and the packet of soap. They’re both green tea scented. Little leaves decorate the label on the body wash. “These are cute.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says softly.

She folds her lips inward, holding back the pang in her chest. The bottle is warm from his hands, from the shower. She holds it back out for him again. His fingers brush her palm as he takes back the bottle and the soap packet. He sets them both on the rim of the bathtub, turning from her momentarily.

His chest flexes with the movement, then twists as he straightens again. She finds his eyes, and he stares back at her. There’s still nothing in his expression to acknowledge his nakedness, no vulnerability in his face even after so many years.

But his vulnerability is fixed on the hotel-branded body wash instead. He closes his eyes and waves to the bottle, finding some explanation, maybe: “I just couldn’t pick which one.”

Kim feels the air leaving her, her chest tightening. “The soaps?”

His eyes open, staring at the empty bath. His fingers curl over his bad knee.

She says softly, “So use both.”

His face is still, frozen—but then he laughs that rasping laugh again, his stomach tensing and relaxing with it. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “I will.”

She nods. “Good.”

“Both soaps,” he says, rubbing his hand over his face and dropping it. “Why not?”

Kim just nods again. She doesn’t know what else to say.

And he does smile now, his eyes crinkling slightly. “I’m okay, Kim,” he says. “I’m good.”

She runs a light hand over his shoulders. His skin feels cooler than she expected, and it ripples with goosebumps. He must be cold after the hot water. She draws her hand back. “Did you find the shampoo?”

He shrugs. “Not much hair to wash anymore, right?”

Kim just softens her gaze.

“Is there a bottle?” he asks.

“I’ll look,” she says, and she moves down to the cabinet. There’s a couple more tiny containers there: a cloudy conditioner, a thin shampoo. They’re all green tea scented. She brings them down to him, setting them on the lip of the bathtub. “Use both.”

Jimmy’s lips quirk. “I remember how shampoo works, Kim.”

She just chuckles softly. “Okay,” she says. She straightens, and the mirror is clearing now, without the shower running. She can see that stranger in the reflection again. The lost woman. The woman’s bangs are damp, curling over her forehead, a pale brown edged with gray. She says to the mirrored stranger: “I’ll wash it for you if you like.”

The words drift like steam. She thinks, I’ll wash your hair for you, like we used to for each other. A long time ago. Like he had done for months, her arm stiff in a cast, the shower spray bouncing loudly off the plastic bag.

But—

“It’s okay, Kim,” Jimmy says. His feet squeak over the bottom of the tub as he rises, and he stills near the showerhead. “Really.”

She nods. He reaches for the shower handle. The blue curtain hangs, still mostly open, obscuring only the end of his arm. She’s dripping all over the floor. She’s left a trail from the tub to the cabinet and back again. But she ignores it, moving to the door—

“Wait.”

She turns.

Jimmy’s throat bobs. “Yes,” he says quickly. “Yeah, all right.”

Her lungs feel tight. She motions to the edge of the bathtub, near the faucet end this time. Jimmy slides the shower curtain away and sits. He helps her hold down the lever to get the water to switch from the tub faucets to the showerhead.

Kim adjusts the flow, just low pressure. The water is warm and the spray hits her, but she’s already wet. Mostly, the water falls over Jimmy’s knees, splashing his chest. She stands behind him, and she rubs her palm over his back again. Another trail of goosebumps, like last time.

His hair is still wet from earlier. She squirts some shampoo into her palm. It doesn’t smell like tea. It smells like fruit and flowers, like something else she can’t place. She rubs it into his hair, starting at the nape of his neck and working upwards.

She scratches her fingernails lightly against his scalp. She remembers how much he always liked that and she does it again, gentle scratches.

This time his shoulders shake with it. He presses his palms into his eyes and holds himself taut, muscles tight and straining. Kim traps her breath. She slides her fingers down to his neck again and then back, up to the crown of his head.

The shampoo smells like summer. She can feel his breath trembling under her palm, but mostly he’s doing a good job of hiding whatever’s flooding up through him right now. He feels like a ringing glass that might break with a touch. She keeps up the same motion, fingers splaying up through his hair, nails light on his scalp, then back down again.

Water pricks her arm, dripping from her elbow. Her shirt sticks to her, clinging to her forearm, to her side. Hot turning cold. Above them, the fan hums, low and steady and slow. It’s losing the long battle against the steam.

Eventually, Jimmy’s breathing calms a little. His shoulders feel steadier when she runs her palm over them. His skin is warm and smooth with the shampoo.

“How’s your knee?” she asks.

“Better,” he says. “The heat is good.”

She nods, and folds her lips inward, then asks it quietly, “What were the showers like in there?” She rubs his skin. “Cold?”

He shifts. “They were warm enough,” he says, simple. “But you couldn’t control them. You just hit the button and it’d run for a couple minutes. You could usually keep hitting the button as long as you wanted, though.” It’s a fuller answer than she’s used to, than he’s ever given her about that place. As if only now that he’s out of there can he talk about it.

She brushes her thumb into the dip at the back of his skull and he breathes with it.

“Close your eyes,” she murmurs. She removes the shower head from the holder and angles it away from them, lowering the water pressure even more. She tilts it, and the gentle spray finds the back of his head. The water parts the foamy shampoo, splitting it like rain on snow, sending rivulets down his neck, around his ears. She guides the water downwards, massaging her fingertips into his hair.

Suds drift over his skin.

Kim repeats the process for the conditioner, massaging it in and then rinsing it out as best she can. Water pools on the flat edge of the tub, dripping to the floor, but she can’t bring herself to care. She rinses out as much as she can, taking her time with the showerhead, trying to get it all. He’ll have to wash off under the full pressure, anyway. The spray hits the ceramic bath, a rattling echo interrupted with the soft patter of it finding skin again instead, finding the wide expanse of his back.

The water runs and the steam turns in eddies around them, the spray cutting pathways through it, until finally Kim leans over and shuts the shower off. She fixes the showerhead back in place again.

The room smells like fruit and flowers.

As she draws her hand back from the shower, Jimmy reaches for her. His fingers curl half around her wrist and her palm. His thumb presses into her pulse point.

She swallows silently. She stands still, feeling that ringing tension again, the strung emotions of so many years tightening like humming wire. His fingers relax, but she turns her hand to hold him there, her fingertips finding the outside edge of his palm.

His head shifts. She moves closer behind him, half closing the distance herself and half nudging him back, until his shoulders find her chest, his back her stomach.

His skin soaks warm water into her shirt, but her shirt was wet already.

Jimmy keeps his fingers hooked with hers. She can feel his breathing again now, can feel the slight shake in it through her rib cage.

The steam drifts around them and smells like wildflowers. Jimmy turns her hand, facing it upwards. His thumb brushes her palm and moves to the joints of her fingers, pressing lightly.

She used to study his hands like that, too, years ago. Manipulating the bends. Back before any of the rest of it. Sometimes these days, she catches herself thinking that she always understood him, that he was transparent, that he wore himself behind sheet glass for anyone to see. For her to see.

But she never really understood him, even then. She would look at the folds of his fingers, at the lines of his palm, as if she were hunting for a string that held it all together, a thread that would make it make sense.

He turns her hand now. Maybe he’s looking for something, too.

“I’m not a new person,” she murmurs. She dips her head lower, finding the rise of his shoulder. The bone beneath his skin seems closer than the surface than it used to be, and she rests her chin in the pocket of it.

Jimmy’s voice rumbles through him. “Aren’t you?”

She thinks of him asleep in the car. A stranger she’s visited every weekend now in new clothes, in a new space.

His thumb traces patterns on her palm again. They feel so far away now from the highway. She imagines the warm steam is instead the clouds of a mountain summit, and the world is iron, rippling and distant and blind to them. She feels as if she’s driven all night to get here, hundreds of miles from a start point, and now she’s reached the furthest edge of things.

She tells herself she’s not hiding from the world. She’s keeping him for herself. Just for an hour or two, a break from the current, slack water.

The bathroom is quiet.

Chapter Text

The cold sticks to Kim’s skin. The ice that she invited inside from the patio earlier has lingered, unwilling to return to the mountains. After the warm steam of the shower, the bedroom feels as if it has no air at all. A vacuum that needs her breath to fill it.

She peels off her wet shirt and wraps a towel around her shoulders. Her cardigan waits where she left it earlier—earlier, when for some reason she had wanted the cold, had wanted the cutting blade of reality. She doesn’t want that anymore.

But her phone pings in her purse anyway, defiant.

Kim closes her eyes. The motel towel is soft on her shoulders, and the cold sneaks up behind it, snatching at the line of moisture that lingers on the edge of her bra. She moves over to the nightstand and opens her purse, finding her phone and illuminating the screen.

A message from Viola. Just a question. How did it go?

Kim breathes out. She hardly knows how to reply. She taps out letters and then deletes them. How did it go? She can hear him moving in the bathroom, that’s how. She can hear the rattle of the shower curtain. He’s right there. She could call out, and he would answer.

Her thumb hovers over the keyboard. Warmth breaks the room’s coolness, heat from beneath her skin, from down in her lungs. She feels as if she’s floating on her own breath. And she almost laughs, exhaling with a shake.

Free again, Kim finally types, and then, a second message: Thank you.

The bathroom door opens. Jimmy emerges: his hair damp, his cheeks red from the hot water. He’s wearing the clothes she bought for him: jeans and a plain t-shirt in a faded color halfway between blue and purple. He’s holding a knitted pullover.

She meets his eyes and he’s watching her, wary.

“You look good,” she says. “Everything fit okay?”

Jimmy glances down, and he tugs the pullover on over his head. He brushes a hand down his stomach. She’s relieved that she chose a green pullover, that she didn’t bring anything without color. His gaze rises again. “It’s nice,” he says. “Thank you.”

She shrugs. “Just Target,” she says, tucking her phone back into her purse again. She picks up her damp shirt and moves through into the bathroom. The air is still a little heavier in here. The mirror is fogged.

A towel rail runs along the inside wall. Gray sweats hang tidily on it. There’s not enough room to spread out her wet shirt, so she slips the sweatshirt off the top rail. It’s dry, and still so soft, and already a little warm from the rail, and it feels like the prison parking lot. That dawn meeting seems like days ago now.

Kim rubs the fabric. The inside is fleecy, fuzzing over the pad of her thumb. She wonders if he wants to keep these. Maybe they should just leave them here. Gray shapes in the bathroom of a soon-forgotten motel. An empty shell.

“Yeah, that’d look better on you.”

It’s Jimmy, his voice drifting from the bedroom.

Kim glances up—and then her eyes find the mirror. The fog has cleared from the center now, and Jimmy stares back in the reflection. He must be sitting on the end of the bed, but from here it looks like he’s materializing from nothing. Blurring up into existence from the mirror’s frame.

She looks down at her fingers woven with the gray. She uncurls the towel from around her shoulders and hangs that over the rail, too, then pulls on the sweatshirt. It still smells like new things. The fleecy fabric is soft against her bare skin. It’s big on her, and it feels shapeless, but it’s already warmer than her cardigan would be.

She wanders back out of the bathroom, lingering near the doorway.

Jimmy tilts his head. “I was right,” he says, and then he raises and drops one shoulder in a shrug. “Always look better on you.”

She smiles, and she feels like she’s back thirty years ago again, standing in his two-room apartment. Trying on different pieces of him. “You don’t want to burn these?”

“Not now.” Jimmy smiles back, gentle and tired. He looks strange in his new clothes—like a time traveler, her brain offers, the suggestion a little loopy. He looks like someone in an old photograph dressed in modern clothes.

Kim exhales. She sits beside him, and the mattress sinks with her weight. It feels as if she keeps sinking, down and down into sleep.

Jimmy breathes out, too. He hasn’t quite managed to wash off the dark circles beneath his eyes.

“How are you feeling?” she asks softly. After the hot water’s attempt to scrub twelve years from the surface of his skin, peeling away layers of prison soap and cellblock air and kitchen smoke and replacing it with something glowing and pink. She’s surprised he didn’t stay in there even longer.

But Jimmy nods slowly. “Good,” he says. “Exhausted.” He flops back onto the mattress—a little exaggerated, a little silly, as if the new clothes have already brought something back to him, just by settling against his skin.

His rib cage rises, pushing up against his green pullover and then lowering again as he breathes. He seems steadier now.

Maybe the shaking exhalations in the shower had reached the bottom of his lungs, had purged him.

“I looked through some menus and checked on Google,” Kim says. “Most of the restaurants aren’t open until later, but there are a couple of bakeries and a Mexican place.” Her stomach awakens at the words, like an animal blinking open its eyes. “What do you feel like?”

The bottom of his rib cage rises and falls again. “Everything,” he murmurs, but then he raises his head a little and meets her eyes. “Is there anywhere that does everything?”

She just chuckles.

A smile dances on his lips. He flops his head back again, the movement jostling the next words: “Honestly? Here is pretty good.” He huffs out a breath. “D’they have room service?”

Kim thinks of the tiny motel office and shakes her head, even though he can’t see it. She rubs his leg and says, “I’ll bring you something here.”

“Mm’kay,” Jimmy manages.

Food. She can do that. She can get them both some food. Just nearby, she remembers, is the café she vaguely recalls spotting when they arrived here: a colorful building two down from the motel.

She rises and the mattress shifts and Jimmy breathes, not stirring as she moves past him to grab her purse. His bare feet rest on the carpeted floor.

“I’ll be right back,” she says, and the eyes fall on the room key, waiting on a console near the door.

The echo of metal on metal, bouncing off cement walls. The familiar click of a heavy door closing. Cuffs latching.

She says, “I’ll leave you the room key.”

Jimmy’s throat bobs. He looks small there on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Hand on the door, she lingers—but she wants to give this to him, too. Ten minutes with no one watching him. No one waiting outside a room, and no one turning gaze after surveilling gaze upon him.

Outside, she finds her breath again. As if she’s been holding it ever since she left the shower. She unlocks the car and grabs her jacket from the backseat, slipping her arms inside. The cuffs of the gray sweatshirt bunch up and she tugs them through the sleeves.

The café is visible from the motel forecourt, waiting joyfully across an expanse of parking lots. Kim walks to it, her hands inside her jacket pockets. A car rumbles along on the highway to her left, and she’s nine years old again, moving on the ragged edges and wide places only designed for machines. Kicking at dead grass. She passes an empty shopfront with opaque windows that admit nothing: no information, no light.

And then the café. The menu for this place had old cars driving along the top, and now Kim understands why: it’s a refurbished gas station. The old overhang shelters not pumps any longer but blue tables and orange chairs. The enormous windows are painted with cheerful images: muffins and coffee and curling tendrils of steam, the brushstrokes wide and textured.

A couple of cars sleep in the lot here, their owners visible beyond the glass. Kim pushes inside the café, into the warmth and the hum and the drip of black coffee. The place retains the industrial ceilings of its earlier days, bright lights hanging on long wires. An old Texaco sign adorns the wall perpendicular from the entrance, enormous and red. Beneath the sign, leather booths curl around white tables. Framed paintings hang haphazard elsewhere, textured and colorful.

Kim orders a couple of bagels, some pastries, and two coffees. She gets Jimmy’s coffee black, collecting a couple of packets of sugar and creamer while she waits. He can decide what he wants.

Her chest pangs. He can decide, starting with a cup of coffee.

Everything always starts with a cup of coffee.

The painted windows cast their decals over the cement floor. Shadows of curling steam reach for her feet. The shadows are a little translucent in places—they’re marked with the brushstrokes, too.

The man behind the counter fixes plastic lids to paper cups, normal and slow. A machine whirs. The other patrons eat breakfast and talk and everything is so mundane and ordinary and none of them know. And, somehow, it’s the mundanity the does it, that makes this moment feel more real to Kim. It’s not a dream, not a gasp of frozen time. It’s just a normal day, and a guy in a woolen hat is tearing open a sugar sachet, and a woman in glasses is spreading cream cheese over half a bagel.

Kim smiles. The expression burns out of her like a flame looking for oxygen. She smiles and she tips her head downward, tucking her hair back.

Nobody else can feel it. A metal spoon clacks on the rim of a china mug. Nobody else can feel the joy that’s coming in waves, that her body is still not sure what to do with. She tunes in and out of it like a broken signal.

“Ma’am?”

Kim blinks. It’s the man behind the register.

He nods to a carry tray with the two coffees and a brown paper bag. She straightens, moving up to take them. On the way back out, she passes through the shadows of the painted decals: through donuts and coffee steam and wine glasses.

The morning doesn’t seem as cold when she returns to it. She crosses back to the motel. Looming above her: the empty frames she had noticed earlier. Six boxes without their contents, an empty message against the wide blue—

Texaco, she realizes. The old word. One frame for each letter.

The world is filling in its details.

On the return trip, she steps through scattered trails of orange leaves that line the edge of the motel lot. The leaves are too damp to crunch, but they stick to her soles momentarily, traveling a few feet over the parking lot before falling away from her again.

Kim opens the door.

Jimmy is still on the bed, lying above in the covers in his new clothes. He’s drawn his feet up since he left; and he’s facing the door, curled on the side that she still thinks of subconsciously as hers after all this time.

Kim sets the coffees and bagels down on the console. Jimmy’s eyes flicker a little. She can’t tell if he’s really asleep. Not like in the car, when she could almost feel it seeping from him, reaching for her own skin.

It’s surprising he feels secure enough to sleep in these new places, these vulnerable places—but maybe these aren’t vulnerable places.

She moves as silently as she can, tugging off her coat and draping it on the console, too. She crosses the room like she’s carrying something filled to its brim, something she’s trying to stop from overflowing. A liquid surface, unbroken but pitching slightly with every step.

Pitching more as she sits on the end of the bed. She slips her shoes off.

She’s behind him now; she can’t see his face. She wonders if his eyes are open.

His breathing is slow and steady.

Kim draws herself onto the bed and the brimming thing inside her overflows. Like she had in the car, she feels the tug of him, but this time, she lets herself be towed by it, by all the hooks that have ensnared her skin since the sun rose. The hooks pull her up behind him, and the mattress seems to sink into her instead of the other way around—warm and soft and engulfing.

The hooks drag her over, closer and closer, until she’s behind him. She moves slowly, and he doesn’t stir—but there’s that feeling again: that he’s really awake right now, that his eyes are open.

She doesn’t want to scare him. She settles back there, shallow and still.

And then he does move: huffing, and shifting a little backwards, just a little. Kim exhales. She slides the right-hand pillow along the mattress, closer to him, lying on her side behind him. The bed sinks and the mattress creaks.

Slowly, she loops her arm over his waist.

He keeps breathing beneath the curve of her elbow. She exhales.

She fits behind him like an old piece in an old groove. She can smell the soap and the shampoo again now, the strange floral scent. Green tea. It clings to her—to the air between them. She tucks her other hand under her pillow. Her forearm runs down the expanse of his back. He’s warm through his new clothes—through the new colors.

Darkness reaches up for her, dragging her closer.

In another motel bed, years ago, in the black, Jimmy’s arm was a solid weight over her, his other bicep warm under her cheek. He held her, gripping on like something he thought he’d lost, and she had felt the turn of his thoughts behind her: that she was alive, that he was alive. That they were together.

His heartbeat had thumped through her own skin. It had pressed into her until it was so deep it could never leave—the feeling of him trying to sleep back there, holding onto her and holding on.

Now, Jimmy exhales in one long breath. Her arm moves with it, and when she breathes in, the air seems warmed by him, too, warmed by his weight there before her. She curls her knees up to match the bend of his knees.

Eyes closed, she feels the movement of the drive again. The engine and the turning and the humming silence. Sleep has been waiting for her this whole time, ghosting at the edges of things. She feels the drive: the twisting roads, the shadows in the dark. The old hotels and chain stations, the long stretches of nothing but black. Her body aches, drifting with the movement of it, always the movement: turning and slowing and breathing.

Light presses against her. It’s long and bright and slips through her eyes. Kim scrunches her face up, turning into the pillow.

Awareness crawls up her spine.

She’s closer to him than earlier. Her chest is pressed along his back. Her lower arm is a numb weight tangled under the pillow and her head. Her forearm prickles with bright lights but she ignores it, pressing her forehead against the pillow that’s squished between them. The air she breathes is hot and close and smells like the green tea shampoo.

Her chest feels warm and soft. The fleecy lining of the sweatshirt rubs against mostly-bare skin. Every movement brushes the fabric over her, every inhale and exhale.

She tightens her arm over him, almost subconscious.

His breath sweeps over her loosely-curled fingers. Slow and slower, spreading up her skin and through her body in fine waves. One breath, and then another—and then nothing.

He’s still.

When he breathes again, she feels it as a much longer exhalation, ghosting over her knuckles. Her arm rises and falls with his movement.

“Jimmy?” she whispers.

He makes a low noise and his rib cage shifts with it. Kim lifts her head from the pillow and adjusts her dead arm, and then—“Shh,” Jimmy mutters. “We’re asleep.”

Kim laughs softly, the sound spilling from her into the space between them.

Jimmy’s back tightens. “What time is it?” he asks, throat raspy.

She closes her eyes and then opens them again. The edges have been honed off her exhaustion, but she still feels as if she hasn’t really slept much. It’s been maybe an hour, she thinks—forty minutes of dozing here with her body pressed against his. “Don’t know,” she murmurs.

She turns the wrist of the arm slung over him, angling her watch towards his face. Jimmy’s head twists on the pillow. “Just after four,” he reads out.

Kim blinks. “What? Really?”

“Uh huh,” he murmurs.

Kim rolls back. Her numb arm dances with pinpricks as she slides it from beneath the pillow. She checks her watch, too. Coming up on four-fifteen. “Have you been asleep the whole time?”

Jimmy flops onto his back now, too. His cheek is textured from the seam of the pillow, and when he smiles, the pressed lines move with his skin. “Off and on,” he says. “You?”

She wipes a palm down over her face. Her expression seems to answer the question.

“Thought so.” His eyes crinkle. “You needed it, right?” And he seems lighter than earlier—floating a little closer to the surface, a little more bright.

Kim exhales. She can still feel the warmth of him along her body, under her arm. The feeling comes with a pang: “I trapped you.”

“No,” he says firmly. “Kim, no.” His eyes widen a little, fixing her with the point. “Not trapped.” He shakes his head again, the movement rustling the pillow, and then he brings his hand onto his chest. He glances from her to the ceiling.

His chest rises and falls. He seems wide awake now. His fingers tighten on his chest as if reaching for something.

When he asks the soft question, she knows what he was trying to grab. “Maybe we could stay here?”

Kim’s chest warms. He’s feeling it, too, then: the joy of this time away from the current of the world, away from the many miles left to real life. Their real life, now—but it’s still so hard to think of it as more than just hers. Her house and her office, her routine that she’s desperately tried to build with space enough for him inside it.

She knows there’s space there. But it’s hard to really feel it.

Jimmy’s eyebrows twist. “You already paid for the room, right?”

Kim nods gently. “Let’s stay,” she says, agreeing like it’s his idea—and the choice washes her with relief. It’s a warm shower. Staying here. Time spreads before her suddenly, almost endless. The rest of the evening, the entire night.

He tilts his head on the pillow. “Go back to sleep?” he murmurs. “You still look tired.”

She shakes her head. The evening and the night, stretching out like a different road—a thought that fills with energy, alert and bright. “What about something to eat, then? For real this time?” she asks. “Unless you already—” She glances across to where the bag of bagels and pastries waits, clearly untouched. The coffees in their carry tray, stone-cold by now.

Jimmy frowns at her like he never even considered moving, let alone opening the bag.

Kim sits forward, shaking out her arm. Her back aches, and her neck is stiff from sleeping at an odd angle—from the whole day, really. The last few days. She’s been holding all of it there, she realizes, the weight of everything pressing into the top of her spine.

Jimmy sits up, too, the bed shifting with it.

She rubs her skin, hunting for the stiff, deep muscles. Her stomach groans at her, and that one is easy to fix. “My clients on parole always said the first thing they wanted was a burger,” she offers. “Soon as they got out: double cheeseburger.”

Jimmy’s eyes drift closed. “God,” he murmurs, “and fries.”

Her heart tugs. “And fries,” she echoes.

“—and onion rings—”

“And onion rings,” she says, recalling the repetitive menus of the motel folder. “I know for a fact there’ll be onion rings.”

His eyes open again. She stands, beckoning, and he rises with her. He does look better than earlier, she realizes: the bags beneath his eyes a little lighter, his face a little less hollow. The alternative afternoon feels foreign to her now: a world where he changed into these clothes quickly, where they found some food at a roadside diner and then kept driving for hours beside each other.

Her eyes stuck on the road, not his face.

Now, her neck aches even looking at the car where it waits outside their motel room door. Kim tosses her jacket into the backseat—something else she didn’t buy for him, a warm coat. She frowns, then turns around and buckles her belt.

Jimmy mirrors her. He seems more at home in the car already, just after the change of clothes.

The car turns on, a low hum that Kim feels mirrored in her stomach. The electric buzzing runs through her as she retraces the route past the gas station. This time, she turns right, heading northward to the rest of the town.

It’s about a five-minute drive into Buena Vista. The enormous mountains spread purple in the late afternoon, warming with the light of the low sun. Along the right-hand side of the road, closer hills climb into the sky, speckled with grass and orange shrubs.

Small businesses begin to appear along the roadside. Car-parts shops and fishing suppliers. They pass a small church, around which spring enormous trees with ancient trunks, much older than anything else nearby. Their leaves are orange and falling, too.

She’s driving to nowhere in particular. She looks for a main street—and then Main Street finds her, announcing itself on a green sign affixed to a set of traffic lights. It’s the kind of main street with a huge gas station on the corner, and this one casts an enormous white light down onto the forecourt, beaming even though the sun is still above the mountaintops.

The street is more vibrant than she’s expecting. Restaurants glow already in the early evening. Cars line the roadside and the sidewalks collect ambling figures who move with an unseen current past shopfronts and newly-renovated buildings, past antique shops and a real estate office. Past a place selling bicycles and a drugstore. Pumpkins grin with toothy smiles from window ledges. Between the restaurants, in the gaps of once-empty lots, tables crowd on paved patios with spun fairy lights trailing above them, or white umbrellas unfurling like pale moths in the approaching dusk.

Jimmy’s head turns with their movement: tracking shops, tracking bright restaurants that gather patrons as five o’clock approaches—and then the welcoming buildings cease. The end of the town finds them suddenly, the street unfolding onward towards the shrub-flecked hills.

Kim slows. She turns around, tracing back in the opposite direction.

The falling sun shines through the windshield now, warm and almost red.

Kim pulls into one of the diagonal spots near the drugstore. She unclicks her belt and Jimmy quirks his head at her. “I forgot to pack toothpaste last night,” she says. “Didn’t think I’d need it, for some reason…”

His lips flicker. “You lure me here with cheeseburgers—”

She chuckles, stepping out of the car. Jimmy opens the glove box briefly before joining her, tucking his hands in his pockets as he waits for her to lock the car.

The drug store is closing soon. A lone clerk lingers behind the counter. Kim trails down the aisles until she finds a section with travel gear. There’s a kit with a little tube of toothpaste, a purple toothbrush, a razor, and a little unlabeled bottle of what must be body wash. More soaps.

She finds a packet of underwear, too, and some socks. She lingers over the display of gloves—there’s a pair in the car, but she didn’t bring any for Jimmy.

And at the thought of him, she turns. He’s not in the aisle with her.

She spots the top of his head across the store and moves over there.

“Hey,” she murmurs, gesturing with the travel kit. “I’ll buy this, and then if we get one extra toothbrush—”

Jimmy turns. He’s wearing glasses—from the rack before him, she realizes. Huge wire frames that cling to his nose. His gaze flicks to the travel kit and his eyebrows climb steeply, and he draws the glasses back off. “Woah, nope,” he mutters, setting them back on the rack before him. He turns back. “Sorry, what did you say?”

Kim just shakes her head, glancing at the rack of reading glasses.

“Real pain in the ass to try to get a pair of these inside,” he says, and he shrugs. “Now I guess I can just buy ‘em.” He scans the rack and picks another pair, a different prescription. These get rejected too, as do the next pair, and then he dons a third.

He studies the test text. His lips shift with one of his new smiles, the ones that feel odd out here in the real world. An emotion passing through him without full expression. The current glasses have simple, dark frames with slightly rounded lenses.

He turns to her again. The glasses still have the card backing woven through one arm, a narrow yellow piece that hovers above his ear. A smile spreads slowly over his face now—this one fuller, folding his cheeks. “Hey.”

Kim softens her gaze. “You never said.”

Jimmy shrugs again. “I don’t need them that bad,” he says, and he takes the pair off and folds the arms back down neatly. “And now I get to pick.”

“You get to pick,” she echoes warmly. She studies the frames in his hand, tucked into the card. “They looked nice.”

His smile lingers.

“Go choose a toothbrush, too,” she says, nodding in the direction. “I found a kit with everything else.” Jimmy hums agreement, and she follows him back across the store. The clerk glances up mildly from behind the counter.

There’s a scant selection of full-sized toothbrushes to pick from, just the primary colors. Jimmy decides on a blue one.

“You want gloves?” she asks, pointing. “I didn’t bring you any.”

But Jimmy’s hand is rising past the gloves to a hanging line of knitted hats. Some are dark and neutral, others zigzagged with pom-poms on the end. He unhooks one: pinkish-red, a little muted, but still miles away from the black thing handed out by the prison.

He tries the hat on, too. The tag sticks out against his forehead. “What?” he says, eyes crinkling.

She just smiles.

“I’m old, Kim,” he says. “I can’t see properly and my head gets cold.”

She laughs brightly. “Is that all?”

He grins, swiping the hat back off his head.

She gestures with a palm. “Come on, then.”

But Jimmy shakes his head. “I got it,” he says, digging into his pocket and withdrawing a wad of folded bills. His gate money. His gaze darkens as he stares at the cash, and then he meets her eyes again. “It needs spending.”

She just nods.

Outside, Jimmy plucks the tag from the knitted hat and the frees the glasses from their display card. He settles the hat on his head and looks around. The sun is already a little lower, the light already a little more golden. It floods along Main Street as if the road is a vessel specially design to catch it, channeled westward.

Kim tucks her bag of purchases into her car. They’re close enough to the bright restaurants to walk now, and they do—strolling with the flow of other people along the sidewalks.

Trees with crunching leaves chatter above them. Their fall colors mirror the red-brown buildings of the town. They pass a bakery, closed now, then a pizza place. The next building down is a low brick restaurant that immediately smells of food. Yellow lights glow inside, and there’s a menu stuck to the window.

She scans it. The place seems to be half a distillery, and there’s a long whiskey menu beside the food, too. The food looks good. Bourbon barbecue sauce and house made buns.

“You see this?” Jimmy says, pointing to a sticker in the window.

Voted Best Cheeseburger 2019, says the sticker.

“You think the world’s best cheeseburger is in—” Jimmy looks around, lifting off his glasses again. “Where are we?”

She just nods, hand on his arm. “The world’s best burger is in Buena Vista, Colorado.”

It’s warm inside, the shelves lined with whiskey bottles. The restaurant opens onto one of the courtyards Kim saw on the drive before: a paved area filled with wooden tables under white umbrellas. It’s early enough that there aren’t many diners yet. A couple of men drink glittering beers at the end of a table.

“Outside?” she asks. “Or in?”

But of course it’s not really a question.

They sit at a table beneath one of the umbrellas. There’s a planter box beside them filled with red and blue flowers whose petals peek from a tangle of thin branches. After handing over the menus, their waiter clicks on a couple of outdoor heaters. The heaters flicker into crackling flames, the light waving inside dark metal tubes.

Kim feels the warmth almost immediately, seeping through her jacket.

The cold drinks of the other men do their job as if designed by an advertising committee, and she and Jimmy order a couple of beers before the waiter retreats. He passes beneath a doorway decorated with pointed antlers.

Jimmy picks up his menu. He shifts it a little further away from him—a gesture achingly familiar to her now, she’s seen him do that before—and then he chuckles. He slides out the reading glasses that he’s just tucked into his collar. When he puts them on, his eyebrows lift again.

“Y’know, part of me was starting to wonder if they were just blurring things for effect these days,” Jimmy says. He flicks to the next page—but then he closes the menu. “We can probably just call the guy back. Two burgers, right?”

“You sure that’s what you want?” Kim asks. She feels it again, the worry that she’s directed them along this path without noticing.

“World’s best burger, you kidding?” Jimmy says. “‘Course I do.”

Kim exhales slowly, glancing down at her own menu. There’s the award-winning burger and a mushroom burger and—and a hatch chile burger. “Hey,” she says softly. “Green chile.”

Jimmy’s eyes widen behind his new glasses. “Wow,” he says. “Taste of home.”

The words hover there, even though they’re printed clearly on the menu. “Old home,” she says, finally. “Maybe next time.” Their next time in this restaurant in this out-of-the-way town on the route to the prison. “Anything else you feel like?”

Jimmy’s fingers drum on the table and he frowns. “Maybe a salad?” he says, and then he laughs raspily. “Do they have salads here?”

They do—a couple on the final page. When the waiter comes back, he sets down their beers, and they order the burgers and a salad. Kim adds an extra bowl of fries, just because. The waiter vanishes again, back inside the glowing restaurant.

The beers are frosted and glittering. Jimmy lifts his glass to his lips. His throat bobs with a swallow. He sets the beer down, eyes drifting closed.

He’s quiet, but the expressions that drift over his face are so loud.

Kim’s chest pinches. She reaches for her own glass. She sips from it and she tries to imagine tasting this for the first time in twelve years. Ice-cold and bitter, spreading out through her skin. She doesn’t say anything, either.

Jimmy opens his eyes again. He wipes his hand over his mouth and chuckles, and she expects him to go for another sip immediately, but he doesn’t. He turns the glass on its coaster, staring at it as if the golden liquid is a lot further away than right here in front of him.

The outdoor heater flutters with orange flames. Sunlight cuts triangular pieces from the wall of the building across the patio.

After a few minutes, another group get seated nearby, talking and joking with each other. At a bright peal of laughter, Jimmy looks up from his beer, his eyes finding the new group.

He fidgets a little. He straightens his sleeves and looks away.

Kim can almost hear his thoughts, the same question turning and turning. Do they know who he is? She tries to impose the man before her onto a screaming billboard, tries to transport those creased eyes behind their new glasses up into the sky instead. His eyes had never matched his leering grins up there.

Jimmy catches her gaze. “Already feels so normal sometimes,” he says. “You know?” His lips tighten and he looks down at his food. “I didn’t expect it to feel like that.”

“Yeah,” Kim echoes.

The group laugh again brightly, welcoming another couple. A few of them wear shorter sleeves, as if clinging to the last moments of summer.

Jimmy spins his beer on its coaster, his forefinger and thumb pinching the bottom of the glass. “Thank you for earlier.”

“You don’t need to thank me.”

“I’m gonna, though,” he says, looking up at her.

Kim just nods. She sips her beer again. The glass is slick beneath her fingers, and the warmth from the outdoor heater presses on her shoulders. She shrugs out of her jacket, hanging it over the back of the chair.

Jimmy’s gaze lowers.

She glances down, too. The gray sweatshirt. Kim rolls up the slightly-big sleeves and tucks her hair back. She feels slightly charged: sparking with the pins and needles of earlier. The outdoor heater brushes her with waving warmth, rising and falling with the strength of the crackling flame.

Jimmy rubs his forefinger over his lower lip. The umbrella flutters above them, canvas cracking in the wind.

Soon, their food arrives, the waiter laying it out on the table between them. Burgers and fries and the salad. The food is colorful and greasy and the salt flecks on the fries almost seem to glitter.

Kim slides her plate closer.

But Jimmy takes a moment. He frowns at his burger, his eyes intense, and then he picks it up carefully. He bites it—and he freezes—and then he makes a low noise, snapping back into movement. He consumes the burger like oxygen. Lost in his own space.

Kim eats hers slower. She sets the burger back on her plate after a couple of bites and pops a fry in her mouth. She has another sip of beer, then tilts her head. “So, what do you think?”

Jimmy shakes his head, reaching for a napkin from the holder and wiping his mouth. “Jesus, Kim, if that isn’t the world’s best burger, just send me back to prison.”

She chuckles warmly.

“Mmf,” he manages, shaking his head again. “I think—you know those old monks, or, like Ancient Greeks, whatever?”

Her lips flicker. “Who?”

“You know, how they’d deny themselves any pleasure for years—” He exhales, and he reaches for a fry now, too, dragging it through ketchup and then crunching through it. “Might’ve been onto something, Kim. I really think they were onto something.”

“You reckon?”

“I’m serious,” Jimmy says. “You were right. World’s best burger is in…?”

“Buena Vista,” she offers.

“Buena Vista, Colorado,” he says, tapping his palm on the table. “Even without the whole abstinence thing, this has gotta take the gold. Right?”

She smiles. “It’s pretty good.”

“Pretty good?!” Jimmy cries.

Kim shrugs. “Bun’s a little soggy.”

“Oh, shut up,” Jimmy says. “You don’t know anything. Give me yours, then.”

“No,” Kim says lightly. “I want it.”

“Come on,” Jimmy says, dragging out the vowels. “World’s best burger can’t be enjoyed by someone with that attitude. C’mon!”

The nearby group glances over, but this time instead of shrinking from the scrutiny, Jimmy just grins at them. His face fractures with it. For a split second, she thinks he might involve them in the debate, but all he does is smile.

When he turns back, his glasses flash with reflections of the spun fairy lights.

“Okay,” Kim says, taking another bite and swallowing. “You’re right. It’s the best one.”

“Thank you.”

“Better than the best.”

“Thank you!” he repeats, more effusive. His eyes crinkle at the edges. He eats another fry and then reaches for the flat bowl of salad. He scrapes some onto his plate slowly, lettuce and tomatoes and croutons spilling colorfully.

When Kim bites her burger next, she thinks maybe he’s right.

Jimmy eats the salad more slowly, and silence settles between them again. The ripple of the flame inside the heater, the snap of the umbrella as the wind rises. The group at the next table get whiskey tasting trays and argue loudly about undertones and overtones and other silly descriptions, their joy infectious.

Kim finishes her burger and picks at her fries.

Her beer is almost gone now, warming at the bottom of the glass.

Jimmy jabs his fork at the salad, eats the stabbed mouthful, and then studies the empty fork. His brow creases.

“Not the world’s best salad, then?” she asks.

“Oh, it’s great, just…” He stares at the fork, then laughs softly. “Feel like I can taste the metal.”

“The fork?”

He shrugs. “Yeah,” he says, setting it down. “Guess I’ll get used to it again.” He tilts his head at her, eyes softening. “Y’know whenever we got lettuce inside, it was that bagged lettuce, like—pre-shredded. Just bits of green ice that somehow got moldy in hours.” He huffs. “Never thought I cared about lettuce before that.”

She smiles carefully, waiting in case he wants to speak again.

But he doesn’t seem to want to this time. He props his chin on his hand and turns, watching the street.

Strangers wander along the other side of the low brick fence separating this patio area from the main sidewalk. At this angle, with another of the heaters in the far corner behind him, she can finally see the tortoise-shell pattern of his glasses. Visible and glowing with the light shining through, orange and yellow like the flames.

Kim tips some salad onto her own plate. It’s fresh and simple, and she savors it.

Music rumbles through outdoor speakers, pop tracks she hasn’t heard in years. Jimmy drinks a little more beer and then he turns back to her. The evening feels warm, almost balmy, with the heaters going. In the patio, under the white umbrella, she can’t even see the mountains.

They could be anywhere.

And she’s even glad she didn’t order the green chile burger. Here, in the warm night, with Jimmy tapping his thumb along to a Kate Bush track, it might feel too much like old things.

He finishes the rest of his salad, eventually scraping his plate clean. He jabs the last tomatoes from the salad dish and eats those, too. They make a good dent in the extra bowl of fries—though it’s mostly Jimmy, who stares at his own fingers as they move to the bowl and return every time with another fry, as if he is performing a minor miracle.

The music thrums and the flames crackle, and her muscles sink with it, relaxing and relaxing. Her long sleep in the motel room has cut the day into separate pieces, each miles apart, each the other side of a void.

On the one side: dark highways and an empty prison parking lot, and the looming black shadows of prison gates. On the other: the falling evening of Buena Vista, the orange trees and warm flames, and the heat pressing deep into her skin.

Kim finds Jimmy’s hand with hers on the table, smaller fingers tucking inside the bend of his palm.

By the time they emerge from the restaurant and back onto Main Street, the sun has lost itself behind the enormous, western mountains. The sky swells with the fading traces of a sunset, long strokes of deep red among the dark blue.

It’s cooler beyond the patio, and Kim buttons her jacket over the sweatshirt. Jimmy stares fixedly off down the street, his glasses folded in his hand, the knitted hat pulled down over the tops of his ears.

“Ready?” Kim murmurs.

He turns to her. He’s glittering a little with the beer now, his eyes bright, a loose smile playing on his face. “Mm…” he says, and he scratches his cheek, still grinning. “So, I’m starting to think you planned all this.”

Kim tips her head. “What?”

“Magic dream town,” he says, waving to the buildings. “And you just happened to stop for gas.”

Kim chuckles. “Tank was empty.”

“Sure,” Jimmy murmurs. He trails along beside her, ambling steps over the sidewalk. The town sparkles with lights, as if every building is strung up with the fairy bulbs now, not just the restaurant patio. The trees tremble, and their leaves gather along the sidewalk and in the gutters, wary of traveling too far from home.

And maybe the beers have hit Kim a little more than she expected, too. Out here in the cold, her skin seems to hum. With the alcohol and the good food and the intoxication of the entire flickering meal. She steps through a gathering of sharp-tipped golden leaves, and they crunch underfoot.

“Kim, when I said thank you before, I just meant…” Jimmy exhales sharply, and he moistens his lips. “It helped,” he says. “You lying there.”

She had thought he was talking about the shower. She nods, and they pass beneath a streetlamp. A puddle of light.

“It helped, having you right there sleeping,” he murmurs, and he slows, stopping and facing her. “You snored a bit, y’know—that was new.” But his eyes crinkle. “It was nice.”

“Nice?”

“Yeah.” A shrug. “Charlie snored, so.” Jimmy starts walking again, and then he glances over at her in the dusk, and the light of another streetlamp splashes his face. “He was my longest cellmate.”

Another piece. Illumination falling on the unknown world. Her chest fills with it, but she plays it easy. “Your cellmate? I’m touched.”

“You should be,” Jimmy murmurs. “He’s a good guy.”

Another nod. Another crunching step. “What did he do?”

“B&E’s,” Jimmy says, and then he shrugs. “He had like an eighty-year-old brain inside a twenty-year-old body.” A grin, his shoulder brushing hers. “Always talking about Steve McQueen and Miles Davis.”

Kim smiles. “I like him.”

“Yeah, you would’ve,” Jimmy says fondly.

The trees above them agree, clapping. Kim’s car waits for them outside the now-darkened drug store. The streets are bright and glowing, and people wander to the restaurants and bars, and from inside the restaurants and bars comes the crackle of laughter and conversation.

Jimmy’s shoulder brushes hers again, and he laughs at himself. His hand finds her spine, holding them steady.

And nobody knows them, she thinks—nobody knows them here at all.

When they return to the motel again, the place feels familiar. It smells of the shampoo, and the bedspread is crumpled, and Kim pulls off her jacket. It’s warmer in here now, the heating running. She sets down the bag of drug store purchases and slips out of her shoes. She drapes her jacket on the console.

The room is pale with the light of the RV park beyond the patio, with the still-blue sky of twilight. The room is fuzzy—a little lost at the edges. Maybe Jimmy’s right. Maybe somebody is blurring the world on purpose.

Beside her, Jimmy tugs off his shoes. He tilts sideways—propping one hand on the wall for balance. Kim chuckles, resting her palm on his back.

“You’re a lightweight,” she says.

He looks up, grinning. “I am,” he agrees. “I am, I’m a lightweight.”

“Two beers?”

He laughs. “Prison changes people.” His face is bright with another of these new little jokes, like he’s been offering to her since she woke this afternoon. The jokes feel both natural and purposeful at once. They feel like steadying hands, though she couldn’t say exactly who they’re steadying. Maybe both of them.

Jimmy draws off his pullover. She had almost forgotten the color of his shirt—blue, a little purple. He folds the pullover neatly, setting it on the end table with his glasses. It’s still early enough, really. Night has barely fallen, but she’s as tired as if it’s after midnight—or as if it’s some other time entirely, a time that doesn’t belong to the usual routine of days.

He flicks on the bedside lamp, and the bulb illuminates slowly. A rising haze of yellow beyond his torso, throwing his body into silhouette as he stands there beside the bed.

And Kim says, “I’m glad we stayed.”

Jimmy turns. His brow is furrowed, and hopeful.

“Hey,” she murmurs, stepping closer. She can feel his hand on her back again, the light pressure remaining from the Buena Vista main street. She can almost hear the rumble of other voices still. The blur of cars and the jangling laughter of strangers.

Jimmy’s eyes flick downward, then back up to meet hers. His face is shadows, the lamp bright behind him.

The memory of his hand on her back pushes her closer.

She steps forward and rests her palm on his cheek. She kisses him. He tastes a little of beer, hoppy and warm.

It’s a slow kiss, so much slower than any other kiss she can remember. Slower than anything from the last expanse of years in visitation rooms. Slower than snatched moments when she would try to fill the gesture with all the intensity she could, as if she could transfer the feeling through his lips and inside him—something to carry from that room, something to linger with him as he was led back to locked doors and cells and dark places.

His cheek is still cool from outside. His fingers tangle in her sweatshirt at her waist.

Then he draws back.

He studies her in the shadows. She wonders what he sees there.

So she kisses him again, hungrier and firmer this time. Jimmy makes a low noise. They shift backwards, and she finds her breath, inhaling piece after ragged piece of this—oxygen, this oxygen. His chest is firm and shifting, his hands grip her: on her hips, her waist, hooking into her jeans. A bulb illuminating, brighter and brighter until she can hear an electric hum, until the burn of some enormous current pulses in her ears.

She breaks away, fingers trailing on his shirt, on his arm. The connection holding. He watches her, his mouth open and his eyes dark. With the descending movement of her fingertips, he sits. As if she’s tracing his journey down to the edge of the bed.

The creak of the mattress shatters through her.

“Lie back,” Kim murmurs, and Jimmy’s throat clicks. He slides along the bed. He ends up in almost the same position as earlier that morning, his head on the pillows on her side of the bed. He stares up at her as she joins him there, her movements slow and balancing. His hands come to her waist to guide her.

She shifts above him, tucking a leg between his. His fingers trace her, finding bare skin above her hips, as the sweatshirt hangs down off her. His eyes are black and wide, and he’s so real and heavy, there beneath her.

She inhales deeply, as if this moment alone can fill her to the bottom of her lungs.

Then Kim lowers herself, nestling into the warmth of his chest. For a moment, she just lies there, her forehead tucked into his shoulder.

Jimmy folds an arm around her back. His fingers sweep through her hair.

“Hey,” he says—and it feels like an answer to her from earlier, the word arriving from him now in a falling tone. The end of a sentence.

She breathes, and his fingers trace familiar patterns in her hair, finding old threads. The gesture is soft and steadying, a gentle pressure that falls away as soon as she lifts her head.

She shifts up to kiss him again. With her whole weight on him, she can feel his every response to her movement. Every short breath and heartbeat rumbles up through her own skin.

The intensity drives upwards again. Jimmy’s fingers twist in her hair, and his stomach shifts and she moves with it. She tightens her legs around his leg, and she can feel him gradually getting harder against her hip—and it’s been so achingly long, so long the chasm of missing time is so wide and painful she can’t stand it.

She presses harsher kisses along his jaw, kisses from another time now, kisses that feel like tequila and bright lights.

Then Kim rises again, inhaling sharply. She hooks her fingers into his shirt, and he’s nodding at her, nodding at something, anything. She shifts off him. She wants to feel him over her again, wants to feel him crushing her, too.

The mattress creaks again as she lies back against the pillows. A knife blade of sound.

He’s stiff and a little unbalanced, but she draws Jimmy above her. He kneels between her legs. She rises to kiss him, fingers hooking around his neck, and then she settles flat again.

Jimmy doesn’t follow her down. Instead, he pushes the sweatshirt up her stomach, sliding the soft fabric over her skin.

“Jesus,” he hisses. “I couldn’t stop thinking about that all night.” His palm runs over her bare stomach and then down again, his hand huge, covering so much of her. He stares at his fingers there, his eyes like pitch.

She watches him watch her. She curls her fingers around his left forearm, the one holding up his weight. His hand is pressed into the mattress beside her shoulder. She can feel the tension right beneath his skin—but he just stays there, frozen except for the other hand drifting over her stomach, pushing the sweatshirt up higher again.

Kim closes her eyes. The world becomes a small town of lights, becomes a single motel room, becomes the warm circle of slow movement on her stomach.

Until Jimmy shifts a little. His forearm flexes under her fingers, and his other hand vanishes from her. She can still feel him between her legs. When his hands come back, they adjust her thighs a little, tugging them slightly higher up him.

“Don’t laugh…” he murmurs, tentative and unexpected.

She opens her eyes.

His eyes flash with light; the reflection of the bedside lamp in his glasses. His pupils seem larger behind them. He stares darkly down at her, studying her again, studying her—she realizes—in full clarity.

She feels the crawling touch of scrutiny.

The faint-voiced awareness of how she doesn’t look much like she did eighteen years ago.

Jimmy closes his eyes.

Kim doesn’t move. His chest moves carefully. Steadying breaths, she realizes. She lifts a hand to his side. He makes a low tempering noise, squeezing his eyes tighter.

“Jimmy.”

His jaw works. He swallows, and when he opens his eyes, he moves immediately down to kiss her. He shifts even closer, her thighs inching up his thighs, and his palm finds her stomach again. She twists her fingers in his shirt, sliding it upwards, too, until she can feel the heat from his bare skin.

His glasses slip a little. He breaks away to pulls them off, spilling them across the bed. He settles above her again, and this time his bare stomach meets hers, and Kim rucks his shirt up higher and higher, trying to get it off him—but when he rises to help she just tugs him down, addicted to the sudden weight, the force of it all pressing against her lungs.

He’s crushing her in the way that had always felt claustrophobic with anyone else.

It’s never suffocating with him. He mouths down her jaw, her neck. She presses his head tighter there, feeling every kiss as a bright jolt through her. Her other hand trails down his back, scraping light fingernails over her skin. He moans sharply, and she scratches him—

—down and down, and then her fingers slip beneath his jeans.

Jimmy makes a gruff noise into her shoulder, his hips pressing into her. So she does it again, her fingers sliding around his hip.

“Wait, Kim,” he manages, lifting his head and sitting back a little.

She lets her hand fall from him. Her chest shifts with dragging breaths.

“I just…” he starts. “I might not last very long here.”

She softens her eyes.

His face shifts in response, and he brushes his fingers over her skin, another soft pattern. “I’m a lightweight, remember?”

She tangles her hand with his, shaking her head. Her heartbeat runs away from her, pulsing in her ears. She can’t catch it.

“I mean it,” Jimmy says. “I’m like an old monk. It’s been—” His voice cracks. “Been a long time.”

She swallows. “Been a long time,” she echoes. “I know. Two old monks.”

But he smiles at her crinklingly, and his fingers tighten on hers. “You’re not a monk.”

“Old nun, then,” Kim says.

And Jimmy laughs, his body shaking with it. “Shit, Kim, you think I could’ve learned anything at Sunday School if you were there looking like this?” His chest rises and falls, a little unsteady.

“Did you learn anything at Sunday School?” Kim asks. The question summons not just the last decade but all the decades before it, and it feels too sharp, too bladed in this dim room.

But Jimmy smiles gradually. “Maybe,” he says, soft and solemn. “Maybe I learned penitence.” His fingers splay over her skin, and he slides the sweatshirt up again until he can cover her entire stomach. His thumb lingers on the edge of her jeans and he swallows. “But maybe someone else taught me that.”

Kim exhales, trembling. She runs her fingers over his waist, and his hips twitch. She shakes her head. “Jimmy, I know we’re not thirty-something anymore. You know I know.”

Jimmy nods. The movement of his hand slows, and he studies her, and he seems to find something in her gaze, or in the tension of her, because he says, “And I like this Kim.” His voice is low and honest and it swells through her. “For a long time, I didn’t think she’d be here.”

Kim presses his palm into her skin. She presses her breath out from inside her with his hand, filling a gnawing void. “And I like this Jimmy,” she says, pressing down again with the emphasis. “I was so sure—” But she swallows it. She tries another way. “I didn’t think he’d be here either.”

Old fear snaps through her like plucked wire. And she means—she means all of him, all the names he used. All of them Jimmy.

He shifts, feeling it, feeling everything unsaid. His voice is quiet, “I’m alive.”

She nods. “Yeah.”

He repeats it: “Alive.”

And then he leans down, finding her lips, and Kim draws him closer, closer and closer. She fumbles for his belt buckle, fingers working until she gets it open. Jimmy’s hips jerk again, and she gets the button undone, the fly down.

He shifts back, feeling for her jeans blindly instead, his fingers skimming over her. She helps him, their hands bumping together. She lifts her hips, and Jimmy drags her jeans off her and then he settles back into place. His pace feels frenzied now, and he mouths firm kisses into her stomach, past her belly button, and then lower. Slipping her underwear down now, too.

His breath hitches, and her legs twitch a little just with the sound.

“Alive,” he says again, hushed.

Her fingers scrabble for his shoulders at the word, tugging at his shirt, wanting to inhale him—“Get up here.”

Jimmy presses another kiss to her stomach but he obeys, rising to kiss her.

She hooks her fingers into the fabric over his back, holding him close and there. Her hand runs down, brushing his boxers—the boxers she brought him here, she realizes. Every part of those other clothes stripped from him.

She palms the shape of him through the fabric. His hips stutter. When she slips her hand under, she knows he’s not gonna last long, she’d know even if he hadn’t said anything. He gasps and swallows and ruts into her hand.

She shushes him, and he tucks his head into her neck. His whole body is tense and coiled.

Jimmy comes quietly, so much quieter than she’s used to—his teeth gritted, swallowing any sounds. He just trembles with it. It’s another difference, and she knows there’ll always be little differences, rising from surprising places.

He gasps, one illicit noise, and then he’s silent again.

Kim rubs his back. She can feel him breathing. She imagines she can hear his sounds with her palm instead, and she listens to the gasps and shaking inhalations that way. His arms quiver on either side of her. She wants him to drop all his weight to her again, but he doesn’t.

The muscles down his back flutter.

She rubs a slow pattern. Eventually, he stirs. He lifts his head from the wedge of her neck, and his eyes find hers, and he stares at her like he’s going to shatter. The lamplight finds new shadows on his face, shadows from the last eighteen years, and she lifts her fingers up to trace them.

Jimmy’s eyes flutter closed. He’s still for a moment, and then he slides downward, down her body. This, after everything—is achingly familiar. His lips firm on her stomach, his fingers trailing around inside her thighs. Faint and taunting.

Kim clenches her teeth. She’s so close to the edge already, her skin tightening and sparking more than it has in years, more than it ever does on her own.

Jimmy hums something soft and unknowable into her skin. His fingers brush over her and she shivers with it, with this dance at the edge of a precipice—and then he slips his fingers inside her, and she squeezes her eyes shut.

But Kim aches, still shifting up to meet him. He presses her stomach down, his left hand in its familiar space. He holds her there, and she can’t breathe, and she leans forward a little, unhooking her bra—but then Jimmy’s fingers curl in her and she loses what she was doing. She’s lying against the pillow, her eyes locked shut, everything overwhelming except the darkness.

And the world is a town the world is a room the world is his fingers inside her.

Until his mouth joins his fingers, light and teasing, barely there. She feels crushed with the familiarity, and the press of his thumb is the same, and the playful, ghosting breaths are the same, none of it forgotten. Like he’s thought of this every day for twelve—for eighteen years.

She bucks a little and he holds her down. Her jaw is tight and she inhales shudderingly, and then he relents, marking her first with his tongue, then increasing the pressure.

His fingers seem to draw her to a higher and higher pitch, finely-bowed.

At some point, he slips his free hand up under her loose bra. As his palm finds her breast, he groans, and the noise rumbles through her, and the noise is what breaks her.

And the years spent without him aren’t worth it, nowhere close—but in the stretching seconds as she comes around his fingers, his mouth hot on her, she understands what he meant about the ascetic monks, because as the tension breaks through her it breaks with every one of those lost years, and every one of those visits, and every room she lay in without him in it. Crashing with the weight of thousands of days and thousands of bricks.

She tightens her thighs and holds him there, holding onto him and holding on.

Hours later, though it’s still not late, Kim emerges from the bathroom. She’s washed her hair with the motel shampoo now, too, and the scent of it hovers around her in a cloud. She curls the towel, warm from the rack, tighter around her chest.

The bed is empty. She feels a momentary pang, and then she notices light glowing outside on the patio, beyond the glass door.

She pads over. The door slides smoothly open.

Jimmy is sitting on one of the chairs, his head tipped back, gazing upwards.

Kim steps out to join him, pulling the door closed again. “Aren’t you cold?” she murmurs. The paved stones are like ice beneath her bare feet and her damp hair clings to her scalp.

Jimmy drops his head down, studying himself. He’s just in a t-shirt, but he shrugs. “Little bit, maybe.”

“Come back inside,” Kim says. “I don’t wanna sleep with a block of ice.”

But he just holds out his hand, reaching for her. She takes it, letting him draw her closer, draw her beside him. “Look,” he says, and with his free hand he points up at the darkness.

She studies it, studies the night. There’s a glow to the east. A light from the RV park. And directly above them… it’s not darkness, of course it’s not. They’re staring up at the huge expanse of stars. Her gaze cuts from bright point to bright point.

She doesn’t know any of the star’s names. Nobody knows any names here.

It’s cold but she breathes through it. “Jimmy?”

He hums. His jaw is sharp, carving pieces of light from the darkness.

Kim says it softly, “We can go anywhere, you know.”

He stills. He looks down at her. His eyes are bright and catch the pinpricks of the nameless stars.

“We can go wherever we like,” she says. “We can take as long as we want. We can have a hot shower tour of the Rockies.”

He chuckles, dry and crackling in his throat.

“You choose,” she says. The night is vast and glittering and she squeezes his hand. “Where do you want to go?”

Chapter Text

Years ago, he had asked her to run away. Over half-finished plates of fries, on a weekend between mailroom days—Let’s run away, he had said, trying to drag her out from a haze of study and Xerox, and she’d let him.

He asked her to run, but she chose where to go. Out beyond the city, beyond their lives. She led them to a place from a movie she had seen even longer ago at the cinema in Aurora. They had been showing a double bill, The Plainsman and Hang ‘Em High, but afterward she only ever remembered Hang ‘Em High. She remembered men fighting in sand so white and so empty it had looked like snow, and she remembered how the screen had been bright enough the whole cinema had lit up with it and she could see everything clearly.

On that weekend escape with Jimmy, the entire world was bright. The land was painted with clean and sharp lines. White Sands, the real White Sands, glittered and widened into a vast and open expanse, like a hand unfolding before them.

So Jimmy filled the empty space. He gave her new little pieces of himself. More fabric from the cloth of Jimmy McGill, the guy who had just showed up in the mailroom one day, the austere boss’s younger brother, who woke up the world. He shared these things with her as if he didn’t realize what they meant, and he settled over her, heavier and heavier with each new piece.

He gave her more and more of himself for her to want to hold.

But out on the white sand, she knew the wind would just keep blowing. The weather would uncover new layers of the glittering gypsum and bury the old ones, until the patterns they had made together were gone.

Kim loved a place that might give so much to them and then forget.

She can’t see his reflection in the mirror from here. Just the side of his back obscuring the glass, just one of his arms. The rest of the mirror throws off spangled prisms: pale yellow from a ceiling light that flickers above an old, turning fan.

The dull flashing keeps time with his brushing, back and forth. A tangible moment, something she can grab—as if she could hold the air itself and trap the flickering light and the brushing and the flex of his shoulders.

She moves into the bathroom behind him. “Hey.”

Jimmy’s eyes cut to her in the mirror. His reply is muffled around the bristles: “Hey.”

Kim presses her forehead into his back. It’s a small gesture, but it grips her like something bigger. It’s an old gesture. The kind of gesture that spills from her thoughtlessly around him. That only ever spills from her with him.

Jimmy’s voice rumbles through his bones. “Ready to go?”

“Almost,” she murmurs, eyes closed… and then she exhales. “Yes.”

Jimmy tucks his toothbrush into their little travel pouch, and he trails behind her as they leave the bathroom. The painting above the bed seems to emit light this morning, a thin kind of brightness that seeps into the bedroom, clinging to the rumpled covers.

They can’t stay here forever.

Kim checks for traces of them. All they’ve left behind are Jimmy’s release clothes in the bathroom trashcan—save the sweatshirt, which Kim drapes over her arm as they head out to the car. She tucks her jacket and everything else into the back seat.

Behind the passenger side, hidden: the little plastic box of belongings Jimmy took with him from the prison. As she turns, she sees Jimmy’s gaze land on it, too.

His expression is unreadable.

She moves past him, heading to the driver’s seat.

It’s overcast this morning, and a little warmer for it. The clouds shed huge, winged shadows over the mountains. Across the eastern hillsides, the fall colors are kaleidoscopic, glowing golden where the sun hits and sinking to blackish purple in the shadows.

As they approach Buena Vista, the same buildings that yesterday seemed a little dreamlike, a little unreal, this morning have a simple banality to them. But the banality moves her in its own way. She remembers Jimmy asking her if she had arranged all this, just for them. He was giving her a bit too much power, as always, but she wishes she had.

She squeezes his knee, and he looks over at her, curious. She just smiles.

The road hums under them. Orange trees slip by like flames.

Jimmy leans forward. “There it is,” he says, pointing out his window. “I told you.” As if she hadn’t believed him.

A roadside diner. The building is unassuming and small, the windows warm with steam, and Kim pulls into the lot. Empty parking spots carve little breaks in the banks of fallen leaves, as if a snow plow has been through here, clearing gaps in the gold-red.

They head inside. Warm chatter rises from the line of booths. A sign asks them to seat themselves, and so they do, at a table near the front windows. Kim peels off her jacket, hanging it over the back of her seat.

Jimmy snags a couple of menus from the table holder. He hands her one, then settles his glasses on his nose and unfolds his menu slowly. His eyes scan, and scan—and then he exhales in obvious relief.

Kim tilts her head. “You worried they wouldn’t have pancakes?”

He chuckles, shaking his head. “Well, they do,” he says. He closes his menu, tapping the plastic cover in an offbeat rhythm. His smile lingers, and the lights flash on his glasses whenever he moves.

Beyond the front windows, the streets are quieter than last night. A woman walks her dog. The dog stops at the base of every tree, pawing and sniffing at the dry orange leaves.

A waitress fills their cups almost to the brim with steaming black coffee. Kim curls her palm around her mug, feeling the warmth against her skin, the heat of the ceramic.

Jimmy flicks his menu open again, like he’s double-checking. “I’ll have the pancakes?” he says, but it’s almost a question.

“Plain or fruity?” the waitress asks back, and there’s even a twinkle in it.

But Jimmy’s staring vaguely at Kim, clearly not ready for a follow-up. It takes him a second, and then he blinks—settling his glasses on his nose again and glancing at the menu. Kim checks hers: the pancakes can come topped with fresh fruit and pecans. The moment holds a little long, but—“Fruity, for sure,” Jimmy replies.

Kim lets out a small breath. “And I’ll have the Denver omelet.”

The waitress nods. She tucks her pad into her pocket and moves away with a breezy smile.

Jimmy exhales. He moves the menu aside, and then he lifts his steaming cup to his mouth and sips—and swallows, words exploding from him: “Holy shit!”

Over at the next table, the waitress turns back.

“Sorry,” Jimmy says to her, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth. “Sorry. That’s just really good coffee.”

The waitress chuckles warmly. “Well, give me a shout when you need a top-up.”

Kim stifles a grin. “Something else worth the long wait?”

“Just about,” Jimmy says. He weaves his fingers through the handle of his mug and seems to study them there. The surface of the coffee is black and twinkling, trapping the diner lights.

Kim sips from her cup. The caffeine sinks into her like a mattress, like Jimmy’s hands in her hair. Sensations spiked with electric shocks.

Jimmy taps his thumb on the ceramic. “They need to invent a different name for the stuff they served inside. I guess I’d tricked myself into thinking it was coffee, but…” He shakes his head, and he has another sip, then he tips his head back and swallows. “No way. That’s coffee.”

It’s not long before their food arrives. Jimmy carves delighted wedges into his stack of misshapen pancakes. Fruit piles on the top: strawberries and blueberries seeping colorful juices. Kim enjoys her omelet almost as much, his delight infectious.

They eat, settling into a warm silence until Kim’s phone lights up. She smiles, murmuring, “It’s TJ.”

Jimmy nods, chewing.

“My associate,” she adds.

“I know that,” he says softly, and he has another sip of coffee. “Place burning down without you, huh?”

“Actually, he was telling me everything’s under control,” Kim says, and then another message pops up and she chuckles. “And also he says hi. You’ll like him; he’s a Cubs fan.”

“Oh.” Jimmy frowns at the phone and then speaks to it: “Hi, TJ.”

Her smile softens. “My phone’s not quite that smart, yet.”

Jimmy exhales. “Yeah, I know that,” he says. He brushes his forefinger over his mouth.

“We’ll have to get you one soon, too,” Kim says.

Jimmy’s eyes meet hers and she suddenly sees the worry in there, flashing like a light on a Bluetooth earpiece—but then he shrugs, and he cuts another hearty triangle out of his pancake, and he’s back to the Jimmy of earlier, making short work of his pancake stack, and the fruit, and the rest of his coffee, and part of her omelet.

And as they eat, the dinner clatters warmly. It feels momentarily as if all the colors of the town have condensed into this one room: the twinkling lights and the laughing people, and it somehow feels as if the others here are celebrating something too. As if they’re in on it.

Last night, she had felt like a stranger in a comforting world of strangers, but now, she just feels a kind of camaraderie. Maybe everyone here is experiencing this town like she and Jimmy are. Tasting good coffee for the first time in twelve years.

The whole place feels newly free.

A young woman grins at Kim from a photo, her arms raised in a red life vest. She’s one of several similarly grinning faces on the front of the glossy brochures that catch Kim’s eye as she leaves the bathroom.

There’s a display on the diner counter, competing white-water rafting spots fighting for customers. Experience Thrills, says one. Live Wild, another. In a clear plastic stand beside the brochures, huge glittery words advertise an all-you-can-eat pancake special. A dare by association.

Kim hasn’t seen any white water yet. The river as glimpsed near the motel is everything the motel’s name promised: slow and still and contemplative. She flips back the first layer of brochures. Nothing but high-octane adventure.

Well, she thinks, picking up one, that’d be one way to feel the ride of the last twelve years again: compressed into a forty-minute, non-stop thrill ride. She smiles to herself, and Jimmy meets her eye across the diner as if he’s felt the smile.

He’s in the middle of talking to the waitress. The waitress jots something else on her order page—and then keeps writing, and writing, and writing. A lot of pancakes.

He nods along with whatever she’s saying. After about a minute, Kim sees him mouth the name Jimmy, hands floating towards his own chest.

The waitress tears off the top page of her pad and hands it to him, and then she moves down to the next table.

Kim wanders back over and sits. “Get her number?”

“Ha ha,” Jimmy says. “Much better than that. I got some travel tips from a local.” He folds the paper in half and tucks it in his pocket, his eyes glittering—and then he notices the brochure in Kim’s hand. “White-water rafting?”

Kim chuckles. “It’s all they had,” she says, and she unfolds it. There’s nothing different inside, just more pictures of screaming young people.

“You trying to kill me?”

She smiles, shaking her head and closing the pages again.

“Because you did a good enough job of that last night.”

Kim splutters around her coffee, raising her hand to her mouth.

Jimmy glances off to someone behind her. “Sorry!” he says, grimacing, and he’s putting on a show for a fake person, like he used to. “Sorry, it’s just really good coffee.”

Kim snorts, and the diner hums warmly, the bubbling consciousness of this place laughing with them, too. Everyone’s in on the joke.

After breakfast, they wander along Main Street again, a quieter version of the night before. The morning light is pale behind the clouds. They pass the bakery that Kim saw yesterday. It wears its history proudly: an old wooden building like something from an Old West town. She can see the grain from the trees that made the thick boards of its facade.

Nearby is a standalone bookshop, painted all over in a shade of mint-green that feels almost as old as the bakery. Tall windows run up the front, and the lights are warm beyond the glass.

Inside, it smells like something faint and floral. There’s a section on the local area, and Jimmy lingers there. He turns to her. “Do we need a map?”

Kim shrugs softly. “I’ve got my phone.”

“Right.”

She hopes that wasn’t why he brought them here, but Jimmy just takes it in stride, moving down past the aisles.

The woman behind the counter greets them quietly. She’s reading something thick enough it lies open of its own accord on the table, spread-eagled.

Colorful stationary decorates a section of the left-hand wall, arranged and displayed by someone who knows what they’re doing. Little transparent Post-Its specially designed for narrow margins, pens with inks that change color as they dry. Kim feels the appeal of that second one viscerally: writing out notes in temporary pink and watching them settle into blue permanence.

But she drifts onward, leaving Jimmy to browse. She passes biographies and history books, weaving between stacks of jigsaw puzzles, until eventually she’s back near the guides on the local area. Colorado birds and Colorado rivers. A map is pinned to the cavity of an empty shelf. Blue ink traces the path of the Arkansas River down and down, a snaking, pulsing line. At the bottom of the map, appearing and vanishing, rendered in purple, is the Rio Grande.

The woman working here ambles over from behind the counter, tucking a couple of books into free spaces. Her white hair is pulled back from her forehead with a yellow headband, and she smiles at Kim. “Looking for anything in particular?”

Kim shrugs. “Just browsing.”

“Visiting Colorado?”

Kim’s knee-jerk response is still agreement. Yes, she only just got here. Yes, she’s just visiting. But she shakes her head. “It feels like it,” she says, “but I’ve lived here for a while.”

The woman just nods. “Time keeps shrinking, huh?” she says. “Looking to learn more about the land?”

Kim hums. “Recommend anything?”

“Well…” the woman starts. She glances at the geography books, at the glinting spines promising flora and fauna. “Those’ll tell you about the place, but this’ll make you feel the place—” she says, and she slides a thin novel from the shelf.

The cover is all clouds. Plainsong.

“It’ll hook right into you,” the woman says. She moves away again, returning to the counter.

Kim flicks the book open.

Her gaze drifts, like the clouds on the cover, left to right.

When she closes the book again, Jimmy is closer than before. He’s studying a shelf of secondhand fiction, and as she approaches, he reaches for one, checks the inside cover. He glances at the wedge of his remaining gate money that’s stuck between his thumb and some kind of notepad.

“Get whatever you like,” Kim says.

He looks up, softening. “Thanks,” he says. “I just… everything else changes, right?” He lifts his hand, shifting the money. “Not this.”

With the movement, a flash of the cover of his chosen book. The Shining.

He catches her gaze. “It’s the last book I took out from the library inside,” he says. “I wanna know how it ends.”

“You don’t remember how The Shining ends?” Kim nudges him. “I know we’ve watched that together.”

“Sure,” Jimmy says, but he shrugs. “Just… the book might end different.” He tucks it under his arm.

She glances at the other items he’s holding. A sketchbook and some colored pencils. “And are those part of today’s plans, too?”

He looks at them as if they’re new to him, shrinking from the question momentarily. Then he says, “I’ve been doing some sketching. Only things I cared enough about to take with me, really.”

She meets his eyes, and there’s something in there. Pride, maybe. She wonders if that's what's inside the box.

“I figured if we were going to see some beautiful things…” he adds, wandering down towards the counter now. “Maybe I might want to sketch them.”

“Beautiful things?”

“That’s what I asked Myrna for directions to,” Jimmy says, handing over his selections at the counter. “I don’t think Myrna from the diner would lie to me.”

Kim tilts her head. “Myrna, huh?”

Jimmy just nods. “Like Myrna Loy,” he says. “I told her I used to know a Merna in Chicago.” He shrugs. “Different spelling.”

He seems proud of this, too, as he recounts this story to Kim, this easy conversation with a stranger.

Back outside, the green of the bookshop seems chosen on purpose to pop against the orange trees. They approach the bakery again, and this time they duck inside, getting another coffee each for the road. Something else warm to hold while they walk back to the car.

Kim settles back in the driver’s seat. She turns the ignition, and the engine hums affirmatively, ready to go. Alive again. “So where now?”

Jimmy tugs the paper from his pocket and unfolds it. “Head south towards Poncha Springs. Is that specific enough?”

Kim nods. “I can do that,” she says. “Do I get to know where we’re going?”

“Not yet,” Jimmy says, eyes flashing to her. He clicks his belt. “Just let me show you the sights.”

Kim smiles. Of course she’ll let him.

She pulls back onto the highway. This time yesterday, Jimmy had been asleep beside her. It feels like much, much longer ago. Her whole perception of that day, release day, is falling apart: the interminable night, the interminable drive. She feels as if she had met him there much later than sunrise.

Today, everything has returned to some kind of normal rhythm. Waking up after the sun and taking time for breakfast.

The engine whirs and Kim sips her coffee. It’s hot and perfect.

She passes sights that she would normally only see on the way to visit him. A fence that zigzags clumsily over uneven ground. A farmhouse with a fluttering flag and a crumbling chimney. On those weekly journeys, these landmarks were always accompanied by the thought of Jimmy, and so to have him here somehow feels inevitable. As if in looking at that stooped tree and that painted barn door and thinking of him, she’s finally managed to conjure him here beside her, in her silent car.

Kim folds her lips inward. “Do you want some music?”

Jimmy glances over. “Sure.”

She gestures at her phone in the center console. “Coverage is a bit spotty sometimes, but pick whatever you like,” she says, telling him her passcode and then adding: “It’s the green icon at the top.”

Jimmy nods slowly, picking up her phone and tapping in the code, but then his finger stills. After a moment, he opens Spotify, and the home screen greets him with option after option after option.

“Or I have a few CDs in the glove box.” She nods to the CD player she had resigned herself to not expecting when she replaced her old car—but then there it was, familiar and friendly.

Jimmy exhales gratefully. “Yeah, I think I’ll stick with that,” he says, popping open the glove box.

He studies the CDs for a few minutes, and then, like he so often did when he was in her passenger seat, he picks Kristin Hersh.

This album is still quite new, and Kim hasn’t listened to it very much. She’s only played it occasionally, always on these long drives. A CD bought like half a dozen others during the last few years to patch over the quiet areas of poor cell service. On her first trips to Montrose prison, in rental cars, she would travel the whole way there in silence—or before silence, she would just leave the radio as she found it. Not changing anything yet at all.

Colorado slips past them to the beat of the music. Rust-colored fields and golden trees. Out to the west lie the snow-dusted peaks—and then a curve in the road, and a steep embankment, and the mountains are lost to it.

Power lines arrive and vanish like drum beats.

Jimmy unfolds his piece of paper again. His list of beautiful things. They pass one of the white-water rafting sites that Kim has often vaguely noticed in this stretch, but have never meant much to her. Then another one.

Coming up ahead, she sees signs for a rest area, and then the turn-off for a wide parking lot. A couple of yellow school buses flash beyond yellow trees.

Jimmy says, “Stop here?”

Kim nods. She slows, pulling off the highway. The rest area slopes downwards, and then there’s row after row of parking spaces and picnic tables. For all the cars, there aren’t many people around. Racks of colorful life vests line the approach to a footbridge.

Kim shuts off the engine and grabs her coat, and the two of them climb out of the car. The roar of water greets them immediately: an almost mechanical noise, like the turning of some great machine.

The air is damp and cool. They head for the bridge, and the metal surface sinks a little as they walk out onto it. Below them: the rapids. The water tumbles over rocks that seem impossibly big.

Kim’s rivers aren’t like this one. Rivers, to her, are the slow Rio Grande, or the muddy Republican River cutting a path of green trees through the prairie. Rivers are the Indian River, so enormous that the distant cape fades into gray, so sluggish it delivers rotting seagrass to Titusville to die.

The churning Arkansas River kicks up spray. The whole place smells of moss and earth, as if it’s just been raining.

It smells alive.

A couple of men cross the bridge behind them, hiking towards the first turn of the rocky path that winds its way up the ragged mountainside. She and Jimmy follow the path along the bank of the river, descending a couple of steps. Jimmy presses a hand to his knitted hat as if it’s going to blow away.

The clouds clear. Bright rays of sunlight fall on the water and on the spray. Little particles flash and glitter and cling to her sleeves. The river is cast in gold.

Jimmy picks up a reddish leaf and tosses it. It floats off and then sinks, vanishing. He does it again, a bigger leaf. It glides over the water, mapping the river’s contours, and then it slips below. “Is it gone?” he asks.

Kim nods—but then she points off to a boulder, where a reddish leaf clings to the gray.

It could be any leaf. They watch until the current breaks its hold.

Jimmy exhales, and she can barely hear it over the rushing water. “There was a guy who tried to get out—like, escape escape, you know?” he says, and he chuckles thickly. “He was chipping away at the grouting in the showers.”

Kim waits, nodding slowly.

“Big dreams of getting into the sewers, I guess.”

Kim watches him, but he’s just silent now. Silent and thoughtful. “What happened?”

He shrugs. “Fucked up his hand worse than the grouting. It almost went septic.”

“Jesus,” she hisses.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “But some guys didn’t have anything at all, you know?” He studies his hands, and Kim watches them, too: his knuckles wide, his fingers lacing together. After a moment, he bends, and he picks up another leaf.

He lets it go.

They watch the orange leaf get swept along in the blue.

Back on the highway, Kim feels as if she’s still carrying it all with her: the damp air of the wild river, and the new piece of Jimmy’s life. She holds it there inside her. They keep heading southward, on familiar roads. She points out landmarks this time, murmured gestures to a tree growing like a tuning fork around power lines, or an abandoned house missing its front door.

Near Poncha Springs, Kim slows. They’re approaching an intersection. “Usually, I turn off up ahead,” she says, as the road splits into two lanes. “Which way am I going today?”

Jimmy scans his paper. “We need to keep heading south.”

So Kim follows the highway onwards, something new—new to them both, like Buena Vista had been. Over the speakers, Kristin Hersh sings with a voice that seems to come from inside Kim’s own throat. A voice that always feels like it’s screaming up from some shared, familiar place. Echoing in some old land.

The highway carves a deep channel through red-green hills. The road itself is cracked and weather-beaten, taking the turns wide and smooth. Up to their right, the hillside rises and falls, becoming steep and jagged rock, and then flattening to reveal smooth scars of past landslides.

Jimmy taps his hand softly on his knee. She feels it like his palm is brushing her own skin—the repeated sensation of him beside her there, there, there, as the road turns and climbs.

Pale white trees line the left-hand bank like skeletal figures. Some are bare already, are already wintering for the year. Their thin branches reach for the cloudy sky.

But ahead of them, the sky seems to be clearing completely. Blue emerges in patches, flashing with color as if replacing the vanishing trees. Deep hues of green and gold slip away the higher they climb, until soon the road is winding through an empty land that’s welcoming the winter snowfall. Here, says the bare land, come here, there’s nothing growing, nothing to disturb.

And soon, the highway begins to descend. The ashen land ripples outward from the car like scrunched paper, bucking and bowing, on and on until it inevitably darkens and becomes deep blue, deep purple.

The color of distant mountains.

Before them, the descending highway falls onward, always empty. Kim can’t see the land waiting before them yet, but there is an inescapable sense of it: of something out there, a wide and vast something far below.

And at every turn, it seems as if this road is about to deliver them to a sheer cliff.

The CD loops. Jimmy hunts for another. Slow guitars seep from the speakers, fading and drifting with the hum of the engine. Here, on the shoulder of the falling highway, they pass a hiker: a hunched figure in blue carrying an enormous pack, marching onward with his head down.

The more they descend, the taller the mountains become. The range just keeps going, on and on parallel with them, bigger and bigger with every minute, as if the entire world is folding up with the dry crunch of paper to cradle them both here on this highway.

Kim glances at Jimmy occasionally. He doesn’t seem concerned about this long pilgrimage along such a pale and empty road. When she does catch his expression, he’s often smiling, a loose and carefree thing that plays on his lips as he gazes out at the mountains or the sky or any of it.

The first little town they come to is barely a town at all. A few ancient buildings are drawn to the highway as if by a magnet. A store is surrounded by pottery like a graveyard, a glittering mess of multicolored pieces that clamber over each other by the dozen: huge clay planters and blue-speckled flower pots.

Beyond the town, the land empties again: mile after mile of dry and drying nothing. Jimmy leans forward anyway, peering beyond the windshield as if he’ll be able to spot something in the blue-white distance.

The highway marks a perfect line ahead of them, straight and unerring, and if it weren’t for the mountains this could be the drive to Aurora, her mother smoking behind the wheel. The yellowing land is exactly the same—but no one here, Kim notices, is trying to get the dry earth to swallow corn. No one is trying to make the place into something that it isn’t.

The first highway sign arrives in silhouette, a mile out.

Jimmy exhales, and he sits back.

“We making a turn?” Kim guesses.

“We’ll see what it says.”

She hums. “And what am I looking for?”

He taps his palm on his leg again. “You’ll know it,” he says. “And I guess this is gonna spoil the surprise.”

The sign drifts into legibility. White text on brown. A national park, the exit in one mile. Kim inhales slowly, and she nods. She can feel her heart like it’s a few feet behind them. Beating and beating, tugged forward by the car.

Jimmy doesn’t say anything now. She can feel him looking at her, can feel his thoughts hanging there with the hazing music.

She asks it lightly: “Sand dunes, huh?”

“Sand dunes, yeah,” Jimmy says. She can hear the smile in his voice. “Can you see anything? I can’t see anything.”

Kim studies the skyline again. It’s as empty as before: just the wide, freckled land and then the distant, graying hills. “I see mountains.”

Jimmy lets out a low huffing noise, almost a laugh.

But Kim glances over. He’s staring out, determinedly, and she nudges his shoulder. “Jimmy, what did you ask that woman?”

“Myrna?” he says, and his voice is a little sly now. “I told you. Beautiful places.” He props his elbow on the ledge of the car window and leans against his hand, staring at her now, rather than through the window. “And Myrna told me about this. Big sand dunes in the middle of nowhere. You ever hear of something like that?”

Kim’s smile glitters through her chest. “I might have heard of something like that.”

“Not here though,” Jimmy says.

It’s so hard not to look at him. “No,” Kim agrees. “Not here. I heard about it a long time ago.”

But if anything, knowing what to expect makes the land even more bare. There’s nothing around, a great and vast nothing. Kim thinks maybe she would have spotted these apparent dunes easier if she hadn’t seen the sign, if she’d just driven, mind on Jimmy’s presence beside her and on the dry expanse.

The sun climbs with the morning. Here, beyond their descent, there are almost no clouds at all, and the day seems perfectly still. It hangs with a kind of dusty presentness in the sunlight.

Whenever they pass a lone tree, its branches are fixed and unmoving.

There’s no wind today in this windswept land.

They reach another turn off. This one is marked with several signs. Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, they say, a few times over. White text on brown. Colorful lettering on the picture of a mountain. This next road is narrower, and it gives the sense of being only barely paved. The noise the wheels make over the cement is a little louder, a little closer against her ears.

At first, the dunes arrive like a mirage.

Just a shimmering at the base of the mountains. An otherness about that spot in the distance.

A gap in the land.

And the closer they get, the more it seems like just that: a tear, a rip in the textured paper of these mountains, beyond which Kim can see the pale nothingness of some void.

From the speakers, notes on a piano fall like raindrops. Nobody is singing for now.

In the corner of her eye, Jimmy turns to her. She can feel the weight of his gaze again, as they drive towards this impossible thing. The road is unerring and straight, and Kim lets herself look at him.

And for half a second she’s surprised by who she sees there: this older Jimmy alive on the other side of everything, the one who looks at her with a changed face.

Somewhere in the lull of this empty country, it feels like she’s slipped into a dream. In her dreams, he never looked like this. Even her subconscious mind couldn’t let her hope for this.

But the real Jimmy materializes there, as unbelievable as the distant dunes.

The dunes. Over the minutes, they’ve grown and grown. They’re not just a tear in the land anymore. They’re undeniable.

Kim’s mind wants to deny them, anyway. The approaching dunes rise as tall as buildings, as skyscrapers. An optical illusion. She tries to blink them away, but she’s fighting against reality. The truth of these behemoth hillsides of sand, and beyond the sand, even more gargantuan and wordless: snow-capped mountains, their white peaks rising into the deep blue.

The snow is so white here it seems like just an undercoat. Like the flecks of the trees have been dappled over it with thick brushwork.

Kim breathes out slowly. “Okay,” she murmurs, and she glances at him. “I don’t even care what else is on that list.”

Jimmy’s eyes glitter. “This is kinda the only thing,” he says, unfolding the paper again, and for a second it seems like he’s the one unfolding the land, creating crackling ripples.

This country is a terrain that could only make sense in miniature. It will never make sense on this grand scale.

Soon, the narrow road meets a wider highway again. There are no signposts here, but Kim doesn’t need them. She turns in the direction of the rising dunes. In the distance now, she finally spots another car. A red dot crawling onward, as if dropped there to give a sense of scale to it all.

The CD loops—or it looped a little while ago, she’s not sure. She thinks they’ve heard this track already. She doesn’t change it, and neither does Jimmy. They stick with the droning wash of guitars that sweeps them, riverlike, on and on.

Out beside them, a couple of houses. A camping ground. Everything is wedged against the eastern hillsides, facing towards the pale, western dunes. A travel stop selling boards and sleds, and then a narrow motel, whose serene and empty-looking rooms watch over everything.

But the buildings seem like playthings compared to the towering dunes.

Kim slows at the window of a tiny gatehouse. There’s a fee per car. She hands over some cash, then takes her ticket.

The gate arm rises. The movement of it darts through her. This shifting arm, like a slip through time—she’s being surveilled—and then it shudders, vertical.

Kim forces out some tightness in her chest and drives on.

The road continues beyond the gates for longer than she expected. They drive for at least another ten minutes before the road arcs around and leads them to a parking area, where a bank of scraggly trees separates the lines of cars from the dunes. The whole place feels like a glade: decorated with picnic tables and patches of grass. There’s a shower building and some toilets. A line of drinking fountains.

Kim stops. She twists to face Jimmy. “You were going to show me the sights?”

He just grins, tugging his knitted hat over his head.

And she returns the smile. The two of them climb out of the car. Kim opens the back door and hunts for the water bottles they got at the gas station yesterday, then she shakes their things out of the day bag and tucks the water in there instead.

“Come look at this!”

Jimmy is standing near the hood of the car, looking out through the treeline towards the dunes. Kim moves up beside him.

He glances over and wordlessly takes the bag from her, then points through the foliage. “Are those people?” he asks, and he seems genuinely curious, squinting his eyes. “I can’t tell.”

“You need bifocals, old man.” But it takes Kim a moment, too. When she does see the people, she’s surprised Jimmy noticed at all, because the specks moving over the dunes are microscopic. She has to force herself to acknowledge them as humans, because from this far away they barely even have limbs. They’re just dots, crawling over the ashy expanse like gnats.

“Holy shit,” Jimmy whispers, shaking his head. His voice cracks as he says it again, “Holy shit.”

It’s beautiful, she thinks, and it’s terrifying, too.

A young Jimmy in her passenger seat.

They move on, heading for the edge of the parking lot. At the beginning of the path to the dunes, there’s a collection of sign boards. The boards are weather-beaten, struck by a wind that’s not present today. Topographical maps of the area mark the geographic transformations through time, showing the enormous lakes that existed here once, lakes that dried up and left sand in their place.

And then the sand that was pushed here by wind after wind, driven into this corner and caught by the palm of these enormous mountains. Cradled here, all the sand from miles and miles. And Kim is lying in her bed a long time ago, feeling ancient water beneath her. An old buried ocean, an ocean filled with dinosaurs.

She moves on.

In spring, the next sign says, a river runs through this place. In other seasons, they’ll cross only the lingering traces of it.

When Kim finishes reading, Jimmy’s standing at the end of the path.

She walks up beside him. The bank falls away a little before them, down to a dry riverbed where carved channels twist like old veins through the dirt and through the sand. Here and there, a thin trickle of water finds passage, but most of the tributaries are empty.

They step out, crossing the veins like stitches.

The sand gives under Kim’s feet, shifting. Before them, trailing up to the dunes: the specks of the other people, the hovering gnats. The dunes themselves are so colossal her eyes can’t quite hold them. The scope of them slips from her every time she looks down at the riverbed.

From afar, the dunes had seemed a separate thing, but as she and Jimmy walk this enormous expanse, the transition feels unnoticeable, lost somewhere in the sinking sand and onward footsteps. At some point, they’re simply beyond the riverbed.

Kim’s breath comes harder, and Jimmy is breathing heavily behind her.

She pushes forward, and the sand skids and furrows beneath her feet. Jimmy follows her. His palm rests briefly on her shoulder, and he makes a soft huffing noise, but they keep climbing, higher and higher. The dunes are so enormous that even here among them, the other people seem miles away. Teenagers trying to keep their balance on sand boards, or sledding down with whoops of laughter—then trying to race back up their slopes, running with steps so heavy they sink past their ankles in the sand.

Jimmy is ahead of her now. Kim brushes his shoulder, and he twists back to her and laughs—a panting laugh between ragged breaths.

The sand fights them as they climb, as they weave yet more stitches up these slopes. On one of the signs near the entrance, there had been a description of the different types of dunes: star dunes and parabolic dunes, defined by the shape of their arms.

She and Jimmy climb one of these arms now, a little ridge that curves upwards towards a crest. For a moment, it seems like they’re finally ascending, but as they climb she realizes it’s just a false summit: the sand spilling away beyond into more peaks and higher peaks, on and on.

Kim’s calves ache like stiff wood or iron pokers beneath her skin. The sand tries to hold her back, trapping her by slipping into her shoes, by sneaking between her toes. And every step is making her heavier.

But they keep going, up and up, past another false summit, then another.

Jimmy is slightly ahead of her, digging stubbornly onward. At the next faux peak, he glances back, and gasps, “Water yet?”

But Kim shakes her head.

He nods, wiping his palm over his mouth. She stays behind him, watching him move. A familiar kind of determination sets into his shoulders. A part of him that she always felt like other people couldn’t see. It would slip over his face when he studied, when he prepared for a big case. She always imagines the same expression on him that night in the desert—

It’s a seizing thought. It hits her like a gasp of wind here on the ridge of a dune, stinging her face with sand.

He walked for thirty-six hours while heavy things carved his body apart. And then, back in their apartment, he had stared at her and cradled a barely spoken thought between them: that she gave him the power to do that, too. That the strong part of him came, like everything, from her.

She shakes her head. She wonders if he’s thinking of it too, here among the sand.

He must be thinking of it.

Kim rests her palm briefly on his back again, and he looks at her, expectant, but she just follows after him. They have water. It’s a cool October day. Even the sand is cool today.

And the sun is a comforting presence on her cheek, and the warmth pushes her further forward. Ascent after ascent.

Before them now, finally: one more peak. One more peak, she thinks, a grinding thought. One more, one more… So she gasps onward, the two of them zigzagging like sheep, leaving furrows of cascading sand. Kim’s breath presses against her own ears, and she struggles to find more of it. Her legs ache and ache.

A pale, wide arc of sand. The footsteps of unseen others. Ripples and creases, like sheet iron.

They breathe and climb and breathe—

—and ascension to this peak only reveals more peaks. Another false summit.

The dunes go on forever.

Jimmy exhales raggedly, stopping and tipping his head. “Jesus—” he manages, shoulders heaving. “Y’know—I even exercised—way more in prison more than my entire twenties and thirties—” A gasp. “But I can’t—”

He slips the backpack off his shoulders and unzips it. Kim accepts a water bottle this time, turning around as she raises it to her lips.

And she freezes, staring back the way they came.

She lowers the bottle. “Jimmy,” she says, nodding at the view.

The dunes tumble impossibly down from them. Kim thinks the word again: Impossible. She forms it clearly in her mind and holds it there.

This is impossible.

They’ve come so much higher and further than she realized. They’re higher than buildings, higher than all of it. Higher than all these falling ridges, and the rippling iron, and the wide, empty river.

The people down in the river are the ones who seem like crawling insects now. The trees around the parking lot as so small they’re just smudges of color. New visitors arrive on the path. Dots without definition.

“Jesus,” Jimmy manages, and he lets out another ragged gasp. He lowers himself to the sand here, sitting suddenly and looking outwards.

Kim feels as if she’s floating above it: above the rolling sand, and the gash of the road, and then beyond that, the mountains. Mountains that are displayed for them here as if they’ve been unfolded along the horizon like an old piece of parchment. The white ridges buckle.

A torn world somehow laid out before them in infinite detail. Kim feels as if she can see each individual tree.

And when she turns left, looking north, there’s just the sand. The dunes fold and ripple, peak after peak, uncountable, alien and impossible and unreal—until yet more lofty mountains. The curving edge of palm that’s caught everything here over hundreds of years.

All winds blow to this place. There’s no wind today.

And Kim finally sits, too, steadying herself with Jimmy’s shoulder. Her legs scream. “That’ll be easier on the way down, right?” she says. “We made it.”

“Thank God,” Jimmy says, almost laughing. “I don’t know if I could’ve gone much further.”

Kim wipes her damp brow with a palm. “There’s nowhere higher to climb, right?” Behind them, unseen: more towering peaks. Endless distance.

“No,” Jimmy says. “Nowhere higher. This is it.”

She grins at him. She drinks her water between each caught breath. The sun is pleasantly warm on her opposite cheek. She bends and tugs off her shoes, tipping out mounds of sand.

Jimmy copies her, and he exhales. They nestle bare feet beneath glittering grains. “I coulda handled this in my thirties,” he says, dropping his forehead into his hands and chuckling.

“You think?” Kim asks softly, tilting her head.

He looks up at her. “Maybe. Whatever.” He gives another low chuckle. “Whole place makes White Sands feel tiny.”

Kim nods. She knows what he means. And it hadn’t been small back then. Years ago, those dunes in New Mexico had seemed to her so ethereal and vast they could never be filled: a glittering expanse of whiteness that carved a new hole in her chest every time she looked out at it.

She scoops up a handful of this other sand. Pale yellow. It holds flecks of so many other colors: purples and oranges, a multitude of hues. Particles of ground-up rocks from miles away, from hundreds of miles beyond this point. Subtly different shades of other places, and different sediment layers, mixed together here so completely that it would be impossible to ever separate them again.

Miles and miles, she thinks. There must be some white gypsum here.

She lets the sand tumble from her fingers. It falls in ribbons back to her feet. A magnetic pull.

Jimmy’s voice comes scratchy as the sand. “What were we running away from?”

She turns, tipping her head. But she understands the question. He means back then, back before it all. She exhales, and her breath seems to fall down the vast, rippling dunes.

The dunes have no answer for her.

So Jimmy keeps talking instead. Just like he did a long time ago. He offers words to the vast and empty place, thoughts that drift from somewhere behind them: “I’m older than both of them now,” he says. “Older than my dad. Older than Chuck.”

She hadn’t realized. She hadn’t even thought about it.

Jimmy’s voice is soft: “Do you think Chuck knows?”

The wind rises again briefly. It stings Kim’s skin with sand, and then dies again. The sun warms the stinging places. She hears Jimmy’s voice in a courtroom, Chuck’s letter in his hand. His words drifting out, sure that somehow Chuck would know how remorseful he was, how much he had changed.

At the time, she hadn’t heard the crocodile tears.

But the question today is real. He offers it to this wide and hungry place. It’s all real now. All the responsibility and remorse she asked him to pretend to feel once, thinking that in pretending to be something he might truly become it.

Jimmy runs his fingers through the sand, and he lets a handful go. “I know I shouldn’t care what he thinks anymore.”

“Of course you care.” She wants to tell him that she thinks Chuck would be proud. She wants to tell him that Chuck knows that he’s finally stopped running from honest and painful things. She wants to say that to him.

Jimmy rubs at his lip. “But I guess he’d say he should’ve just left me in Cook County after all,” he says. “Always meant for prison, right?”

She studies him. The sunlight is golden on his skin as he gazes out at the endlessness of it all. Specks of light dance in his eyes.

She wants to know. “What do you think would’ve happened if you’d stayed there?”

He glances at her, then lightly shrugs. “I dunno. I guess I would’ve done the time—probably paroled early.” A grin at her. “But I think I was just making a bigger and bigger mess until someone noticed and forced the change on me. So if Chuck hadn’t been the one?” His voice trails off, and then he repeats himself, “I dunno…”

Kim reaches for his knee and squeezes it. He finds her eyes. She holds his gaze softly.

Jimmy breathes out. “He’s dead, anyway,” he mutters, and he scuffs his foot into the sand. “If he could really see me, he’d just ask how I could hurt him that much and keep going.”

Kim folds her lips inward. There’s a turn of wind across the dunes: lifting sand, curling and revealing a path. The wind moves down towards the river, finding a resting place.

But we all hurt each other and then keep going, she thinks, watching the disturbed surface settle again. The glittering sand falls back into place.

Jimmy shakes his head, like he’s shaking the wind out of himself, too. He brushes a light palm over his face and then flops onto his back. His breath pushes out from his lungs. She imagines the grains slipping under his shirt, under his pullover, beneath his knitted hat.

He opens one eye and peers up at her.

“Comfy?” she asks.

Jimmy waggles a hand. “Sand’s cold,” he says, and his eyes drift closed. His chest rises and falls, and then after a moment, he opens his right eye again, squinting at her. “So, this other place we’re going to…” His brow furrows, like he’s trying to see her clearer. “What’s it like? Tell me about your house.”

The sun brushes like a palm down Kim’s back, and then it presses on her spine. “Our house.”

Jimmy’s throat moves with a swallow.

“It’s small,” she says eventually. “But it’s nice.”

He nods, shifting on the sand.

She imagines herself there, imagines herself approaching the door one morning. Her description comes slowly: “It’s south-facing. The driveway always needs to be shoveled, but the backyard gets lots of light. And the windows in the kitchen get the morning sun.”

Jimmy props his head up on his palm. His expression changes with each word, as if he’s seeing the house now instead of her, instead of the dunes.

“There’s a great pizza place a few minutes away, and the guys who work there know my order,” she says, and she chuckles. “But the blind in the kitchen is broken. And the fireplace needs cleaning.” She sighs, thoughtful. “And I guess the realtor kept going on about the original hardwood floors in the living room.”

“I remember the floors.”

And Kim had almost forgotten. She had brought in the listings to get his opinions. Years ago, so far from the finish line she had felt a pang with every new page. She’d wanted to involve him, but they’d brushed through the marketing descriptions at arm’s length.

“I might’ve built it up in my mind,” Jimmy murmurs, and he sits upright now. Sand spills from his back.

“I get it,” Kim says quietly. “But it is ours, you know.”

Jimmy just swallows.

“I can tell you more about it,” she offers. “Before we get there?”

Jimmy stares off at the mountains, nestling his feet in the sand again. Below them, little specks of other people crawl over dotted paths. “That’d be nice,” he says, but then he twists to look at her, squinting. “Maybe later? The more I hear, the more I’m gonna want to be there.”

And Kim feels it: the house across mountain ranges from them, past the long highways and the twisting ascents, past the familiar farmhouses and power lines and the rapid-tossed Arkansas River. “We could make it back tonight,” she says, but even as she offers, she feels the weight of her aching legs. Exhaustion crushing her at the thought of driving for another four hours after this.

“Nah,” Jimmy says, facing forward. “We climbed all this way. I want to keep looking.” He exhales, tumbling a hand in a familiar gesture, waving to the world. “It’s so big.”

The sentence is simple and true. The warmth of it fills her. “Yeah,” she says, smiling gently. “It’s big.”

And Kim thinks of the night before, out in the dark of the motel patio, looking up at the huge black sky. The stars had felt small compared to this.

It takes them a long time to leave, to pull the trigger on the vast descent. Jimmy stumbles on ahead of her, the half empty water bottles keeping hollow time inside his bag. Kim’s balance shifts, her hand coming to his shoulder or elbow occasionally as they skid downward, the sand shuddering beneath their shoes.

They pass groups of teenagers who double-take as if they’re seeing two ghosts emerging from the wilderness. And maybe they are ghostlike: whenever Jimmy glances back at her, she can see little flecks of sand in his eyebrows. She can feel the sand on her own face, too. In her hair.

But the return journey is quicker and easier. They make it to the wide riverbed with longer, slipping steps, the sand building a falling staircase just for them. After the dunes, the sand of the dry riverbed seems stable and firm. A final expanse to cross, shoulders jostling each other, the water bottles sloshing and drumming.

As they reach the car, Jimmy slows, flexing and rubbing his knee.

“How is it?” Kim asks.

“I actually think that was really good for it,” he says, almost believable. “We should do that more often.”

Kim chuckles. “Well, if you feel like killing yourself, there are a lot of hiking trails out our way.” They lean against the car, shaking more hills of sand out of their shoes. But the glittering grains don’t want to let go, and Kim brushes her feet as clean as she can get them before putting her shoes back on and settling in the driver’s seat.

“Hungry?” she asks, as Jimmy hops in beside her.

“Jesus,” he exhales. “Starving.”

“Did Myrna include directions to the nearest big town center?”

“Hah,” Jimmy says. “No, she mentioned something about big sand dunes, and then I didn’t care about anything else.”

Kim softens. She folds her lips together, thoughtful. “Well, there was a travel stop or something on the way up.” She can recall the word ‘restaurant’ on the side of the building, though the look of the place hadn’t promised much. “I’m sure they’d have stuff.”

“Stuff?” Jimmy echoes, but he clicks his seatbelt on. “Let’s do it. I think it’s about to be the world’s best stuff.”

The Great Sand Dunes Oasis is a place that’s trying to be everything: part visitor’s center, part gift shop, part sand-board rental. The restaurant widens out beyond an open archway in the gift shop. Cheerful tables collect hungry diners, and there’s a small kitchen and a service window.

The entire place is wood-paneled and low ceilinged, a prefabricated box that’s been planted here in the sand. Around the service window, old metal signs for Coors Light and Budweiser are hammered into the wood.

Laminated menus wait in a little box near the entrance. She and Jimmy scan them, lingering at the small counter. A woman emerges slowly from the kitchen.

“You go,” Jimmy says to Kim, gesturing to her as he reads the menu.

Kim orders a BLT and a Coors original, and the woman punches dollar values into an old, mechanical cash register. Jimmy takes another moment to think, and then he gets a plate of nachos and the chicken salad, and a beer, too. The beers come in tall plastic cups with frosted sides.

She and Jimmy sit at one of the few spare tables. A window with curtains hanging above it offers a view of the rising mountainside. It’s not even five o’clock yet, but everyone around them seems to mirror their exhaustion. A shared existence here after long days of swallowing sand and climbing unsteady dune ridges.

They eat quietly. Kim is so hungry that it all tastes good—but, somehow, Jimmy’s chicken salad is the best thing there. A huge bowl filled with more toppings than she would have expected, and generous pieces of shredded chicken.

While they eat, Kim pulls out her phone. There’s barely any cell coverage, but she looks for the motel she saw on the drive up and gives them a call. Yes, they have a vacancy. Yes, they’ll be waiting for her. Yes, she can pull right up to the reception door.

When she and Jimmy finish, they cross back through the open archway to the rest of the Oasis center. Snowboards for sand surfing are stacked up along one wall, and there are spinning racks of magnets and keychains and novelty jewelry. Cheerful t-shirts wave from staggered hooks on another wall. Most are colorful things bearing the silhouettes of people surfing on dunes, or jagged mountain ranges.

Kim unhooks a shirt that looks like the road signs, white text on brown. Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.

It’s something clean. It’s something to wear tomorrow, while the wind blows the traces of their visit from the sand, and the real place forgets.

Jimmy picks a shirt, too. A purple mountain range across blue fabric.

In the end, the motel is only a few hundred feet from the Oasis rest stop. Kim’s car crunches up a gravel road, and she collects the key from the front office. The man inside remembers her name after the brief phone call.

Their room is warm and clean, everything simple. The walls are wooden here, too, like inside the Oasis center. She lets Jimmy shower first. He emerges without the sand in his eyebrows, and he smells of a new kind of motel soap.

Kim takes much longer under the water, washing the sand off her skin with the faint pressure of the motel shower. The particles cling around the edge of the drain. Pieces of rock from everywhere.

Prairie stones and white gypsum.

The hot water seeps into her muscles. She closes her eyes and drifts. She thinks of what else she could tell Jimmy about the house waiting for them at the end of these highways. Anything to make it more real: rooms and doors and not just some unknown space beyond the horizon.

Kim shuts off the shower. She dries herself and changes into the new t-shirt and the last of her clean underwear. She brushes her teeth over the sink.

The t-shirt is so soft against her skin. As soft as it will ever be.

When she emerges, Jimmy has dragged one of two chairs over from the table to a spot near the sliding glass door. He has one leg crossed over the other, and he’s sketching something in his new pad. A red pencil is tucked behind his ear.

She lingers near the bathroom for a moment, and then moves up behind him.

On the paper: not the dunes and vanishing mountains, but a lone tree beyond their door. A power pole rises beside it. He’s using a brown pencil, rendering the shadows, and, as she watches, he picks up a yellow one and begins the light places. The specks of the leaves.

“That’s really nice,” Kim murmurs.

Jimmy looks up slowly. He knew she was there. But he shrugs, and taps the side of his glasses. “I’m not used to wearing these,” he says. “And I never had colors. Dunno if I’m using them right.”

“Looks right to me,” Kim says quietly.

She likes Jimmy’s tree better. She can feel the sun on Jimmy’s tree.

So she squeezes his shoulder and moves past him to the bed. She settles above the covers, sinking into the soft mattress. Sleep claws at her, but with her eyes closed, part of her still feels like she’s climbing. The sand sinks and cascades beneath her.

And she can even hear it: the whisper of fine grains, rasping like pencil on paper.

Kim sits up again, opening her eyes. “Will you show me your other sketches some time?” she asks lowly. “Any time.”

Jimmy looks over at her. A line appears in his forehead. “Yeah,” he says, quiet and high. “Yeah, of course.” He rises from his chair and sets the sketchbook aside, then he heads to the kitchenette near the door. His box of belongings from the prison waits there on the counter, nestled among his pullover and other clothes.

He opens the box. She can’t see his face, just his shoulders in his blue shirt.

His hands move inside and then emerge with a small stack of papers. He walks over to her. It’s a haphazard-looking collection, different sizes, torn edges.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he says, “but sometimes I’d rip those blank pages out of the backs of books. Cheaper than the commissary.”

He passes over the stack, and then he moves away. He doesn’t return to his sketchbook. He just moves back over to the box, and from beside his clothes, he picks up the new copy of The Shining. She sees him open it, flicking the pages. Looking for his spot.

Kim tightens her lips and looks down at the sketches.

She smiles. The first is in dark pencil. Light and shadows. A shimmering lake stretches out to a distant, ragged shore. It looks like early morning.

The next sketch is of an old church. Smudged imperfections and a strange perspective give it a lopsidedness, but it feels more real to her for it. The next page offers a road that vanishes into wispy trees. The trees look like the trees in old movies, like the trees from another country.

Another page. Three sketches of the same mountain range, small on the white space.

She knows these mountains looked small from the prison.

Past the mountains, the sketches drift closer to real things. Three chairs with warped legs, facing each other. She can see more sides of the chairs than she would be able to in life, as if she’s moving around them.

A folded stack of clothes. A stairwell.

Then the sketches of his prison cell come piecemeal. A window and its surroundings. A door handle. A half-shadowed bed. Her lungs tighten with each one, and the paper is rough under the pads of her thumbs.

She had thought, yesterday morning, that she would never be able to see this part of his life. She’s holding it now. A bulb in the ceiling. A square, fold-down table with two books on it.

She looks up. Jimmy’s not reading The Shining anymore, if he ever really was.

He’s just watching her.

“These are so good, Jimmy,” she says.

He nods, his eyes holding hers. His fingers curl around the spine of his book. Kim shifts, tugging the pillow up higher behind her, and Jimmy studies her.

She holds his gaze until he moves closer. The mattress bucks as he settles on the bed, sliding up beside her. He’s still holding his book and—

—and a little clip-on reading light.

Jimmy notices her gaze. “My buddy gave it to me when he got out,” he says, passing it to her. “You gift all your good stuff the day before release.”

Kim nods, clicking the light on. It glows faintly. She turns it off again.

Jimmy tugs on the pillow behind him, getting comfortable there. Kim hands his light back. He just tucks it beside the book above the covers. “I should’ve given it away, too, I guess,” he says. “But I… I like it.”

Kim nods gently. “I’m glad you kept it.”

He nods, too.

She breathes out. He deserves something he likes from that place, she thinks. She closes her eyes. And when she opens them again, she shuffles to a new page of sketches.

Jimmy watches her. He’s still wearing his reading glasses. This page, and the next one, show more of the same mountain range as earlier. Sometimes, the entire range is represented with just the horizon line.

She angles the paper. “Is this from your window?”

Jimmy makes a low humming noise. “It was weird seeing it yesterday from the road. Looked so different.”

“Yeah?”

He nods, shuffling closer to her. When he reaches for the paper, she hands it to him. He props the page against The Shining and slips the red pencil out from behind his ear. And then he draws another mountain horizon for her, ragged and identical to the others. “You see it?”

Kim’s eyes trace the line. It looks the same to her. She says, “I see mountains.”

And Jimmy chuckles, quiet and rumbling. He draws his glasses off and hands them to her. She sets them on the nightstand.

“Not reading?” she murmurs.

He makes a soft noise. “Too tired,” he says, and she makes room for him against her. He curls into her side gradually, tucking beneath her arm. His head on her chest. He’s warm and heavy.

He clicks into her like a snapping piece.

Kim lowers the stack of sketches to her stomach and sorts through them with her free hand, picking up one at a time. She doesn’t know if Jimmy’s eyes are open or not. She thinks they are.

He moves with her breath, slow and steady.

She lifts another drawing. His cell window, again, small and narrow. The mountains are visible beyond it this time. An increasingly familiar line.

And she brushes her thumb against the rough paper. “You know, you can see mountains from our house, too,” she starts. “Big ones. You can see them from the upstairs window…”

Chapter Text

An orange dot in a field of white. It glows flamelike on the corner, untouched by the snow. It seems a new arrival to the street, this lopsided orange sign: For Sale.

Kim’s wipers brush snowflakes from her windshield. Beyond the glass, the sign flutters as if swept by the movement of the blades and not the wind. The dark road is flanked by trees spun from fragile sugar. The houses themselves wear the snow much more heavily: their roofs swelling with rounded white edges, icicles clinging to awnings.

She pulls alongside the snowbank. The orange sign flickers in the gray.

After a few minutes, a car with equally orange decals turns into the driveway of No. 1123, its lights glowing. Falling snow glitters red behind the brake lights and then dims.

Kim shuts off her engine. Her wipers still, and the heat from the dashboard turns slowly through the air. Crystals of snow seem drawn to the car, magnetic. Pulled against the glass.

The snow crystals are drawn to Kim, too, as she steps outside. They stick to the arms of her jacket, to her lips. She tugs her hood up and her cheeks burn and the road crunches beneath her boots.

Other than her footsteps, it’s quiet. The heavy, muffling quiet of the fresh snowfall. The silence clings to her like the cold does.

A realtor emerges from the decaled car, unfurling an umbrella to keep off the snow. The umbrella is orange, like the sign. Flakes stick to the fluttering plastic. “Kimberly?” the realtor offers, crunching over.

Kim nods. “Just Kim.”

“And I’m just Jo.” Jo wedges her umbrella against her shoulder and they shake hands. “Let’s take a look, eh?”

Kim nods again. They turn in unison towards the building before them.

“So, you can see the split there,” Jo says, pointing. “Originally, the house was all that lovely eggshell white—” A gesture up the path to the white section of the house before them. “It was eventually split into two rentals. See, there’s even a separate approach, just down there. So, the blue paint was used to avoid confusion I guess.”

Kim tucks her hands into her jacket.

“The adjoining door has been plastered over—well, I’ll show you inside,” Jo continues. “The main house has two bedrooms. The master upstairs, and a smaller one that the owner has been using as a study. A couple of bunk beds would fit well, I think—”

“No kids.”

Jo softens. “Ah,” she says quietly. “And is it just you, then?”

Kim says simply, “No.”

The snow gusts a little. It’s been collecting on the orange umbrella, matted patches of white.

Kim glances up the shoveled path before them. The path is paved, rising four steps from the sidewalk, continuing for a few feet, then climbing another three steps to the front porch. The front door.

Jo continues, “A few years ago, the owner moved back here. She used 2/1123 as a small business. The downstairs living area for clients, the upstairs bedroom as her workspace—uh, tailoring, I believe.” Jo’s umbrella sheds snow. “Something with cloth. Anyway, it didn’t work out.”

“Huh.”

“Now she’s selling up and buying someplace warmer,” Jo says. “Florida Keys.” The realtor leans closer, trying to draw Kim beneath the orange umbrella, conspiratorial. “And she already has a contract on a condo conditional on the sale of this place.”

Kim’s eyebrows climb, but she holds back the rest of her reaction.

Jo shifts away again. “So obviously she wants to sell quick.”

And she’s hired you to get her a good deal? Kim thinks, but she keeps her expression flat, studying the front path and the dark windows. They approach the first door, the white section of this divided house.

“If this doesn’t suit,” Jo starts, “I hope you’ll tell me more about what you’re looking for—or what you and your, uh…”

Kim cranes her head back. Her hood slips down. “For today, it’s just me,” she says, filling the expectant silence.

Jo doesn’t reply.

Snow falls lightly on Kim’s cheeks. She studies the house, and the house studies her return. The windows look thoughtful and wary, as if waiting for her to be the first one to speak.

Kim had awoken that morning thinking of snow. A Red Cloud kind of snow, the kind of snow that erased the world for a day—or for two days, for a week. A fresh snow, light and silent, like a stereo being turned down.

The kind of snow that offered a moment’s lull before hardening again to packed ice, before freezing the banks of the Republican River. A brief quiet before the dry yellow heads of corn would poke through the white again like fractured wood, like ruins in a pale bombsite.

“—nothing but top forty hits, no repeats before the workday’s done—”

She and Jimmy have been back on the road for about an hour now. They’d slept late—or she’d slept late, anyway. By the time Kim had crawled up from her dreams, Jimmy was already reading beside her, a quiet presence in the room.

As she opened her eyes, the turning pages of his book had sounded like the snow of her dreams.

From the motel bed, she could see out through the sliding glass door and beyond the patio. The world past the glass had seemed like a cinema screen. Lit up and unreal. Minutes slipped by, and the morning sun had crested the mountains and revealed the dunes one by one. An immense golden glow, as if each of the billion individual grains were being slowly illuminated one by one in series.

Kim had just stayed there, watching the sun find the dunes. The light descending the peaks as giddily as the two of them had yesterday, tripping and stumbling with collapsing ribbons of sand.

Beside her, Jimmy had closed his book and watched it, too. Warm and heavy in the bed.

“—a cold front moving up the East Coast—”

But now, the dunes are behind them. Hidden in the rearview mirror, in the flat country, and Kim keeps driving.

Years ago, on returning to Albuquerque, she’d felt the pull of White Sands long after losing sight of the place. A cord connecting her to the dunes, tugging at her heart the entire drive back, and always after it.

There is somewhere else out there, the tug had said, there’s a world where everything would have been okay, where everything was beautiful and easy. And you left it behind.

But looking at the Colorado dunes one last time from the doorway of their motel room, the sand glowing in the morning—so much bigger, so much brighter… She had felt nothing. No cord in her head.

She’d just felt Jimmy behind her, his palm brushing her sleeve.

He’d asked if she was ready to leave, and Kim had nodded. She knew what he meant by the question. Ready to leave. Ready to go home.

When he’d smiled at her, she had kissed him.

A soft kiss, nothing new, but when she pulled back, he’d looked a little surprised—his eyelids rising from a blink. She’d caught him off-guard with a brush of affection.

Got him, she’d thought, like she used to.

“—phone lines are open, just text in your most embarrassing first date—”

Low voices accompany their drive. Jimmy is flicking from radio station to radio station, never lingering anywhere for very long. Genre-jumping transitions between hosts and disk jockeys, slow-voiced newsreaders and gentle music.

He glances over at her self-consciously with this latest shift, almost apologetic, and she smiles.

Kim doesn’t mind. She likes it.

The further they drive, the more colorful the world becomes. Past the cloud-shadowed land between the highway and the mountains. Up into the skeletal hills and then back down, through national forests whose trees wear their fall colors proudly. Golden leaves cluster like baubles, the hillsides strung up in festive lights.

On the other side of Poncha Springs: an achingly familiar highway. Here’s the cracking cement she’s driven across every weekend for twelve years. There are the fractured, repaired lines. Maybe this whole time, the damage had been caused by the weight of those drives alone, over and over.

Kim had always felt both better and worse during these return journeys north. Better for having seen him again, better for a quiet conversation about her current case load—and yet worse for it, too. Worse for how normal it felt. Worse for the way she could drive the route to his prison without conscious thought, her mind completely elsewhere.

But each drive up this highway was another mark on some tally. Another weekend, another seven days down. Through fall colors and deep green summers, through twelve rounds of winter snow.

She won’t have to drive this highway in snow again. The weeks weren’t endless, even if they felt like it at the time. They were counting to something. They were counting to Jimmy here beside her.

And he’s awake today, and he’s not wearing gray. The prison is behind them, and the dunes are behind them, and all she feels is the road before her.

The sun settles higher, warm and golden with the afternoon. Jimmy killed the radio a few miles back, and now he sits silently beside her. The land slips by in well-worn tableaux. Images that crack at the seams, yellowing like old newspaper, like a book she’s read too many times.

Kim’s neck aches. She rolls her head back and forth slowly, her eyes forward. Once, during long nights of studying or Shepardizing, that gesture used to help. Now it’s just a reminder of the knot in the muscles.

They pass the road to Buena Vista. The town is too distant to see from here, but she can feel the glitter of the lights. They pass the Slackwater Inn and, opposite it, the gas station.

The car needs gas again. She’ll push it a little further this time. Onward into the new.

And now the motel disappears behind them, too. Montrose prison, and the dunes, and Buena Vista and the motel and the Arkansas River. Rapids and breaks in currents.

Jimmy exhales. She glances over. He’s chewing his lower lip, his face in shadows.

Kim looks back at the road. The wheel is steady under her palms, and the sun falls on her fingers as she holds on. She says, “There are seven steps up to the front door.”

Jimmy turns. “Seven?”

She nods.

“Okay,” he murmurs. “Not eight?”

She shakes her head. “Not eight,” she says. “Just seven.”

He chuckles warmly, his expression changing with it. He stares out at the oncoming land as if seeing the house again now, as if adding the steps to the image.

But then the quiet settles back in the car, and a mile marker counts down, and the smile slips from his face like falling snow.

The highway collects mountains, shuffling giants who approach them tentatively. Their peaks climb tall and gray, bearing white snow up into the blue sky. The road cuts determinedly through the flat land, past shimmering reservoirs and small lakes that find the white peaks and reflect them even brighter, somehow.

The gray cement points in a straight line at one of the inevitable mountains until, like a game of chicken, it turns in a slow arc that matches the slope, cutting a long path into the side of the rising dirt. Behind them, glimpsed in mirrored fragments: the wide land and the pale reservoirs, the folding mountains..

It’s busier here than it has been, the city drawing them closer and closer.

At the first gas station sign, Kim flicks her turn signal and follows the slip lane down to rows of the pumps. She pulls into an empty spot. Nearby, a family in winter clothes huddle outside a van, waiting for something.

She and Jimmy climb out of the car into the cool afternoon. Jimmy stretches his legs, and she sets the pump nozzle in the gas tank.

The pump engages, motors buzzing.

Kim rolls her head on her neck again. She can feel every bone in her spine, stiff pulses emanating from the base of her skull. She massages her palm into the nape of her neck, staring off past the empty pumps and past the humming highway. The air here smells sweet and cloying.

The nozzle clicks. Kim hangs it back up.

She opens the door to the backseat and pulls out a water bottle. Beside it: the half-finished sandwich from a travel stop earlier in the drive. Plastic cheese inside a plastic packet. She can’t stomach more of it.

Kim straightens. Jimmy has walked about a dozen feet away, out to the edge of the gas station, where the cement gives up against the scraggly grasses.

He’s blowing into cupped hands, staring out at the vanishing highway.

Kim grabs his water bottle. She approaches slowly, each step pushing up into her stiff muscles with more force than she’s used to.

Jimmy glances over. She offers the bottle and he takes it, drinking slowly. The bottle gasps as he lowers it. He says, “I’d offer to drive, but…”

Kim shrugs. “I might turn that down even if you did have a license. I don’t know if I could handle the lead foot.”

Jimmy’s eyes crinkle with a hidden smile. He’s staring off towards the freeway as if he’s looking for something there. Something among the distant mountaintops. His middle finger drums against the hollow bottle and then stops. Drums again then stops.

“What’s up?”

Jimmy shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “I’m good.”

But she stares at him. A hand on his elbow. “Jimmy.”

He does smile now. It’s a strange smile that doesn’t reach his eyes—and then he shakes his head as if shaking the expression off his face. “I just keep thinking I’m going back.”

It sounds like a question. It sounds like he’s asking her, like he needs to check.

“We had yesterday,” he says, “and the day before. But they were just like dreams.” He gives a shuddering breath. “And now I have to go back.”

Kim shakes her head. “Not back,” she says gently. “You’re not going back; we’re going home.”

The words seem to have slipped through him. Water over stones, barely clinging. He drums on his bottle again and the plastic echoes.

“It’ll feel real once we get there,” Kim says, and the wind curls up behind them. “I promise.” She brushes a palm over his back. Come on, she thinks.

He nods again. His back shifts a little.

Kim closes her eyes, thinking. “The blind in the kitchen isn’t broken broken,” she says lightly. “As long as you let it down really carefully, it’s actually okay…” She can feel the tension seeping from him with every word, as if she’s drawing it from him with her palm on his back.

Finally, he exhales. “I hope you haven’t been waiting for me to fix it.”

Kim smiles now, too. “Well,” she says, brushing her thumb on his shirt and then dropping her hand, “you might need a project.”

Jimmy laughs even brighter at that, and he finally turns.

Waiting for them beside the pump, the car looks dustier than before she left for this trip. It’s gathered dirt from road shoulders and motel parking lots. It’s gathered ancient sand.

They settle back inside. Kim’s limbs sink into the driver’s seat, resigned to returning to this position yet again. The back of the seat, otherwise perfectly comfortable, digs into her spine.

She shifts and exhales, then turns the engine on and pulls away from the gas station.

Jimmy props his head on his hand. “How much longer?”

Kim hums thoughtfully. “Maybe an hour. More with traffic.”

He nods. “An hour,” he echoes.

Soon, the highway widens. The surface gets smoother, the road markings clearer. All signs pointing towards the city.

Jimmy reaches for the radio again, exploring the channels. He drums his fingers on his knee and stares off. He exhales sharply. “You’re right, though. I do need a project.”

She glances over briefly. “Jimmy, you don’t have to pretend to know how to fix a broken blind—”

“No,” he says, firm. “No, I mean…” Another breath. “Thirty years later and I’m landing in a new city again. What am I gonna do?”

Kim’s foot drifts to the brake instinctually, hovering there. She doesn’t press it. She keeps a steady pace instead, on and on.

They’re still an hour away, still faced with turn after winding turn on the highway—and then the highway will become the freeway, and the cars will surround them, and the houses with gather at the roadsides like snow on a windshield.

Jimmy drums on his bad knee. “And I guess I keep wondering what Chuck would think.”

Her foot hovers again. She doesn’t brake. Maybe any change in momentum will halt his thoughts, too.

“They were supposed to have these vocational training things before we got released—‘course they didn’t, so nobody got to learn welding, anyway,” Jimmy says. “But six months ago I’m lying in my bunk wondering what Chuck would think if I decided to be a welder.”

The highway curves, slow and wide. Kim says, “Do you want to be a welder?”

Jimmy barks out a little laugh. “No, of course not.” He grins at her. “Kim, look at me.”

Kim tries to keep the smile off her face. “Well, I’d support it.”

“Yeah, I know you would—”

“Do you?” She lets the words carve into the air. She’s always wanted him to know that. So she repeats it: “Do you?”

Jimmy swallows, a click through the car. He nods, just a movement in the corner of her eyes.

“Good,” she says. “Even if you just want to read Steven King books from now until forever, that’s okay by me.”

“Hah.” He scratches his neck. “Yeah, good inspiration in there.”

Kim glances sideways. The car hums and steady music seeps from the radio, drum machines and autotuned voices. Jimmy hops stations again, and it lands on NPR, then a sports station, and the voices chatter and chatter.

Another hop, and the radio returns to music.

The song is slow and swelling. It’s nothing she’s heard before. She feels like she knows it. It draws her forward, it draws her inside herself, and she keeps driving and it’s just her and the car and the music, and Jimmy beside her.

She can’t look at him. The oncoming lane is full and the road is turning. She can feel him.

“I mean it, okay?” she murmurs. “You can pick anything.” Her voice is tight with the words, and not strong enough now. Anything, she thinks—but her mind fills with the vast road behind him.

A moment in bed with him thirty years ago, trailing her fingers up his chest. You could be a lawyer.

The brush of paint on her toenails beneath swimming lights. Maybe you’ve got a future in elder law.

A yellow pad pairing his name with every type of law under the Albuquerque sky, then a copper mug cool under her hand as she tells him she wants to help people.

And he’d said—I’ve been thinking about criminal law myself, lately. And he’d started dreaming of an office down by the courthouse, too.

She exhales through her nose. Now, he can pick anything.

Beside her, Jimmy taps his knee. The sound is like the lid on a pot—so familiar to her, the sound of holding something back. A sound from the days of rattling heels.

She remembers his words yesterday, a soft story of prison life by the river, almost lost to the colossal rest of the day. Some guys, Jimmy said, didn’t have anything at all.

Here in the car, Kim knows the feeling, knows it like something still carried beneath her skin. She knows not having anything. She knows sometimes it doesn’t look like a barred cell or a desert city or even a snow-blanked town barely on the map.

Nothing-at-all might look like a thousand piece jigsaw, all in white.

And she’s sure it’s familiar to him, too. His own nothing-at-all wore bright colors and screamed like the air pump beneath a smiling Lady Liberty.

Ahead of them, the highway grows from two lanes to four. It carves great pieces out of the earth, a mammoth effort to level the land in a flat ribbon before them. A grass median separates them from the oncoming traffic. Businesses appear among the red-leafed trees: gas stations and travel centers, mountain resorts and drive-thrus. Time counts down with exit signs. Each flash of green another few minutes, another five minutes, another ten miles.

Sometimes, a new turn will reveal bare, mountainous land. No city yet, not quite yet.

But Jimmy shifts. The signs keep counting.

And the enormous freeway descends like a black carpet. It cuts between cliffs so ragged it feels as if the hillside has been ripped apart by enormous hands, the exposed rocks the torn edges of the fabric from which the land is made.

Huge yellow signs warn them of the steep grade. Kim can already feel it in her stomach anyway. A sinking like gravity.

The freeway falls and falls, winding in sharp corners, and then—like a gasp of breath—they reach the side of this final mountain, and beneath them the land opens up into orange-green trees and orange-green houses whose rooftops are all painted the same color as the land. Among it, red rocks splinter upward, reaching like alien structures, like the terrain of a foreign planet. Rust giants from millions of years ago, or millions of miles away.

But Kim just keeps driving. The engine is a low and steady hum. And then, as the freeway scores through a broken hillside: the distant shapes of a city.

Jimmy’s finger finds erratic patterns on his jeans, out of time with the music.

“You know you don’t need to figure things out before we get there,” Kim says softly. “It’s okay.”

He just nods.

“We don’t even have to go home, anyway.” She shrugs with one hand, then returns it to the wheel. “Maybe we drive forever.”

“Hah,” Jimmy says, and he clears his throat. “What about the poor kitchen blind?”

“So it’ll stay broken,” she says. “Big deal.”

He lets out a soft sound, almost a laugh.

Kim glances in her rearview mirror and then shifts lanes. “It’s not even broken. It just needs finessing.”

But Kim flicks on her turn signal and enters the interchange, curling around a leaf of the enormous concrete clover, leaving this freeway for another. The car hums and the radio offers slow music, and Jimmy glances at her, curious.

“One more little detour,” Kim says. “I know a place.”

The freeway moves north, glued to the base of the mountains. A slope ascends to their left, flecked with golden trees, and the foothills of the Front Rage curl fall-colored fingers up around them. Reservoirs capture the pale blue of the sky.

The freeway thins, and slows. Next exit. The sign is green and simple.

Kim shifts lanes, following a white pick-up. The white pick-up climbs the exit ramp and turns right at the top.

Kim climbs the exit ramp and turns right, too.

It’s a turn into lazy streets, into slow streets. She crawls along languidly. Mismatched houses dot the roadside. Brick houses with tile rooftops, wooden houses with blue-trimmed windows. Small houses dwarfed by shadowing trees.

Jimmy curls his fingers around the back of his neck, staring out at the fluttering orange trees. Above the hills, the sky is soft and hazy, as if the afternoon sunlight shines brighter on the air up there, warming the blue.

Another turn, a left now.

The hills rise around them, downtown restaurants knotted together as if the road is bending from the weight of them—as if the entire world is bending from the weight of them, from a couple of blocks of old buildings and tiled intersections.

Kim flicks her turn signal.

Jimmy glances over, but she just pulls into a parking lot among the restaurants. Ivy clings to brick buildings, old and comfortable there among the mortar. A library and a pizza place.

“Let’s get something to eat,” she says. “And then we’ll go home.”

But she says it like a question, glancing into the passenger seat. Jimmy nods, wiping a palm down over his mouth.

As they climb out of the car, she can feel the tension seeping from him again. Above the buildings, a mountain climbs steep and bare, rippling with green and brown until abruptly it levels. A tabletop.

You’re not going back, Kim thinks, channeling words into her expression, into the brush of her fingers that guide them around to the front of the restaurant. It’s empty, it’s early, but they’re open.

She knew they would be.

She and Jimmy are sitting at a table outside beneath a cracking umbrella. A young couple eat nearby, the remnants of a pizza gathered between them as they murmur softly.

It’s warm in the sun. Jimmy slips his knitted hat off and stares down the street. The other couple move their plates away and set their phones beside each other on the table, craning over and studying the screens as if they’re hunting for something on a map.

Jimmy’s gaze tracks things behind Kim’s head. Cars or people walking—or business names, maybe. Ideas for what to do.

Their pizza arrives.

She’d let Jimmy order, and he ordered pepperoni with olives like he’s still thirty-three and studying with her late at night.

As soon as she takes a bite, she’s starving. The sad, truck-stop sandwich of a few hours ago didn’t do much, but the pizza is hot and perfect, the crust chewy and blackened where the dough bubbled in the oven.

Jimmy eats slower than her, prying a slice free. He chews distractedly, his brow furrowed.

“So, not a welder…” Kim starts, wiping her fingers on a napkin. “How about a treasure hunter?”

It snaps him out of his thoughts, eyebrows climbing as he looks at her. “That’s a real jump.”

Kim shrugs. “There’s gold in the river up here,” she says. “It comes down from the mountains.” She tips her head. “And there’s gold in the mountains, too.”

He just chuckles, and he takes a bigger bite of pizza now.

“Or a deep sea diver,” Kim offers. “Or an arctic explorer—oh!” She taps his hand on the table. “I’ve been waiting to watch The Terror with you.”

“Terror?” Jimmy echoes around a mouthful of crust.

“You’ll like it,” she says. “A lot of men in coats dying in the Northwest Passage.”

He blinks quickly, looking away from her. When he swallows, he wipes his lips with a napkin and nods. He tears another piece of pizza from the tray and eats it, gaze drifting behind her.

“Good pizza?”

Jimmy shakes his head, seemingly in awe. “‘Course it’s good pizza,” he says. “It’s incredible pizza.” He tips his head back, blinking. “Everything out here is good.”

Something in Kim’s chest unfolds.

Jimmy sits forward again. He takes a bite of the slice he’s holding and nods as he chews. “Nice crust,” he mutters, and he studies it there in his hands, ripping the edge with his fingers.

“So maybe a pizza chef?” she says lightly, glitteringly.

His eyes crinkle at the suggestion, but then his face changes. “Do you know what I did in Omaha?” he asks. “Jesus, I haven’t thought about it in forever.”

She doesn’t know. She’s a little surprised to learn he did anything at all. In her mind, when she pictures it, he’s just in one room. Hiding and scared of the world.

“I managed a Cinnabon,” he says. “In a mall.”

Kim’s lips twitch. She hunts for the joke in his face but she doesn’t find it there. Just amusement and maybe a bit of shame.

“I was a decorated member of the Cinnamon Smiles club,” he says, so matter of fact. “Making the world a more delicious place.”

Laughter bubbles from inside her. “Shut up.”

“No, really—” His eyes are deathly serious.

She snorts, pressing her hand to her mouth, and the laughter slips around it, effervescent. The waiter catches her eye from the doorway and smiles, too, retreating back inside without visiting the table.

“I didn’t even get to keep my employee of the month award after I got arrested—” Jimmy says, but he’s laughing, too.

The sound of it rings through the sleepy street, their voices intermingling and then dying away. Above them, the umbrella creaks and snaps in the wind.

Kim reaches for her water, then pulls her hand back. She’d almost forgotten… “Before the sprinkler place,” she says, “I interviewed for a manager job, too.”

Jimmy raises his eyebrows as he sips his Coke.

“Hobby Lobby.”

And now he’s the one scanning her face for signs of a joke.

It isn’t one. “They turned me down.”

Jimmy slowly shakes his head.

“Talk about self hating—Hobby Lobby,” Kim says. “Jesus Christ.”

She holds his gaze—and then laughter cracks up through the surface of them both again, buoyant and vibrant. The sound of it fills their table, fills their half empty glasses. The entire street is crackling with delight.

“I was just going through the classifieds,” Kim says, wanting to explain. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t choosing anything.”

Jimmy’s expression softens. “I get it.” He shrugs. “Cinnabon was at the top of the classifieds, too. Guess there were no ‘a’s or ‘b’s that day.” He rubs his chin, eyes distant. “They hired me at the interview—well, they hired Gene Takavic there at the interview.” He enunciates the name, like something foreign in his mouth. “He had a very impressive resume. Glowing fake references.”

His face darkens with that, but he doesn’t look away. And maybe it will never feel real to her, she thinks, some pieces of his life. Some parts of her own life don’t feel real either.

(A flame flickering and a door opening.)

She swallows. She tries to think of his time in Omaha in this new light. It’s just a different small room from the one she pictured—a small room inside himself instead, trapped behind another new name. None of himself left.

Maybe Jimmy’s nothing-at-all had smelled of cinnamon.

Hers smelled of seagrass and instant coffee and backyard cookouts.

They don’t quite finish their pizzas. Jimmy takes his time over the dregs of his Coke, the ice cubes rattling in the glass. The wind stirs through the street, cool against her neck.

The waiter comes past to clear their empty plates. “Taking that with you?” he asks of the remaining slices.

Kim nods. “Yes, please.”

“You got it, Kim,” the waiter says, nodding and collecting the tray along with the balanced plates.

Jimmy watches the waiter leave, and he rubs his finger against his lip. He seems to be toying with something, with the words inside him, maybe, and then he turns to her. “So, they know you here.”

The waiter is just inside the door now, talking to another one of the waitstaff—a man with a white apron cinched around his hips.

“Yes, they do,” Kim admits. The two waiters nod, and smiles drift over their shadowed faces as they glance out the door again. Kim feels a smile mirrored on her own lips at the transparent curiosity. “And they’re wondering about you.”

When she looks back at Jimmy, his face is pale.

She wants to swallow the words. “Not like that.”

But he’s staring at the empty table, at his scrunched napkin.

“Not like that.” She rests her palm over his hand. “Jimmy. Do you know what people say in Colorado about Saul Goodman these days?”

His fingers tense beneath her hand, as if wanting to tense into a fist.

Kim takes a breath. “They say: Who was that guy again?”

Jimmy looks up, meeting her eyes.

His are pale in the sunlight. He checks the restaurant doorway again anyway. The waiters have moved on, now. The younger one will be boxing up their leftover pizza.

But Jimmy shakes his head. “Some people will remember.”

She knows he’s right. “Some people will,” she says. “I don’t think they’d see him in your face.” And Kim smiles gently. “Things have changed a lot in twelve years, Jimmy. America’s got more to talk about than your old commercials—even if they were catchy.”

He does almost grin at that. A trace of the old pride.

“The waiters aren’t wondering about Saul, anyway,” Kim says, sitting straighter and glancing inside. “They’re just wondering why I suddenly have a man with me.”

And from the shadows, she can see their waiter carrying the pizza box. Kim smiles at him as he approaches. His name is Robbie, she knows, and he’s worked here for six months, and he’s finally settling in.

She thanks him, accepting the box of leftovers and asking for the bill.

When she looks across the table again, Jimmy is studying her carefully. “You live near here, don’t you?” he says calmly.

She nods. “I live near here.”

“Just a few minutes away.” His voice is soft and steady.

Another nod. “A few minutes away, yeah.”

Jimmy swallows. He’s staring at the street again, at the people and the cars and the buildings and whatever’s down there, whatever else has gathered here in the cradling palm of the foothills of the Front Range. “I thought you lived in Denver.”

“I live near Denver,” Kim says, and she shrugs. “It’s just easier to say that. Don’t let any of the locals hear me though.”

Jimmy meets her eyes. He picks up his folded glasses but he doesn’t put them on. He turns them in his palm. “You’re not a local?”

Kim just smiles. She remembers the woman in the bookshop in Buena Vista. Time happens fast. Maybe Kim really is a local by now. When the waiter brings back the bill, she pays, and she hands Jimmy the box of leftover pizza.

As they sten, she turns.

Down in the direction Jimmy’s been facing for the entire meal, the street of restaurants continues wide and slow. Trees rise from huge planters, their trunks surrounded by clusters of flowers: purple and yellow and blue. Banners flutter along restored shopfronts from hundreds of years ago. On the side of a building, above the lower rooftops: the silhouettes of cowboys on horseback. She always imagines a sunrise behind them.

And a sign curves over the street. Welcome to Golden.

They drive the few minutes further—barely two minutes, really. Down shady and quiet streets whose trees catch the dipping sunlight. Fall has settled comfortably here over the three days she’s been gone: the cooling weather lighting fires among the branches and gathering warm, crunching colors around their trunks.

Kim makes a turn past a house with fake cobwebs strung along the fence. Lopsided pumpkins lead up to the front door. Carved faces smile from the porch of the next house, too.

An orange leaf lands on her windshield and then flutters away. And Kim pulls into the driveway of the house on the corner.

She can feel Jimmy in the passenger seat. She can feel him without looking, without thinking about it. Even if she was back in Titusville, she thinks, she could feel him here in the passenger seat of this car in this driveway.

She wonders if he remembers the front of the house from the listing she showed him years ago. Split into uneven halves, white and blue, the appearance of two different places.

She’s not in Florida. She’s not in Albuquerque. They’re not in a motel or up enormous dunes. She’s here, and Jimmy’s beside her. She’s driven him here from a cold room in the south. Weekend after weekend, a sum of uncountable numbers that in the end were nothing, were just yesterday.

So she opens her door and steps out of the car.

Jimmy steps outside, too. He looks up at the house and she watches him look at it. She can feel the soft eyes of the house on him, the windows with the drawn curtains behind them. Giving him time, waiting for him to be the first to speak.

When he does turn to her, she smiles.

Dappled light falls on him through the trees. It falls on her, too. Shifting rays from just above the roof. She can smell the dry leaves in the air.

And the sunlight seems to settle inside her, finding a gap. As if it’s been waiting here, as if she’d left it here without realizing it—some piece of herself that belongs to this city, somehow, and it’s slotting back into place.

A car goes by, its engine slow.

Kim nods to the other door, the other front walk. “That’s the office,” she says. “It used to be a split rental. Then the old owner tried to use it as a tailoring business. Separate entrance.” She smiles gently. “I’ll show you later.”

Jimmy nods.

The keys are heavy in her hands. She moves forward, up step after step, into the shadow of the house. She unlocks the front door.

The entryway smells of trapped sun.

Kim moves inside, slipping her shoes off, hanging her coat on the empty hook.

Along the right-hand wall: a staircase, rising with worn steps. To the left: a door to the kitchen. Through an open archway: a glimpse of the living room. The edge of a TV and the side of the DVD cabinet. The curve of a rug on the wooden floor. A houseplant with pink-veined leaves.

Kim turns back.

Jimmy is just standing in the doorway.

She folds her lips inward, pressing her teeth down.

“Birds,” he says.

Kim tips her head.

“Birds,” Jimmy says again. He points to the staircase.

The bird paintings are there, the old ones from so many bedrooms of her past. Amber squares climbing the wall up the staircase. Staggered like step after step. “Yeah,” she murmurs. “The birds made it to Golden, too.”

Jimmy blinks quickly. His hand drifts to his stomach, brushing his pullover. His fingers flex and flatten and he shakes his head. “You said it was small.”

The wedge of the living room. The glimpse of the tiny kitchen. “It’s one house divided into two,” she says. “It’s smaller than anywhere else on the street.” But as she speaks, the words get quieter, her voice dropping like falling leaves.

The entryway crackles as the words settle.

“Wait until you see it tomorrow,” she says. “The windows in the kitchen—”

“—get the morning sun,” he finishes, as if he’s been reciting those words to himself for hours. Maybe he has.

Kim swallows tightly.

And Jimmy breathes out with a shuddering breath that sounds loud here in the entryway—as loud as a landslide, as earth moving.

She lifts a hand. “Do you want something to drink?”

But Jimmy’s expression doesn’t change at all. He takes a step inside. He slips off the tennis shoes given to him by the prison and steps onto the wooden floor in socked feet. His head dips, looking at his own feet there. White socks.

“Jimmy?” she murmurs.

His gaze rises. “Hey,” he says. “Sorry.”

“Do you want something to drink?” she repeats, but the question feels silly.

He gives it real thought anyway. “Maybe soon,” he says, finally.

“Whenever you like,” she says. “The fridge is always there.”

And somehow it’s that more than anything that hits her. That their fridge will fill with food for him, too, and drinks for him, and their wardrobe with clothes for him. And the living room with movies he wants to watch, and books he wants to read, and all of it finding space in here.

It’s so big. It’s so big, everything ahead of them.

Kim presses her lips together. Tighter than before. Not tight enough. She reaches for him, stepping closer, wrapping her arms around him again, pressing her forehead into him.

(She’s back outside the prison, hugging him, and he’s crushing a plastic box filled with penciled pieces of himself against her back, and he’s holding the fabric of her as if he needs to hold on forever.)

His collarbone is hard against her brow. She can feel her chest trembling. Fracturing movements that seem to come from outside her own body.

“Hey,” Jimmy murmurs. His voice is low near her ear, careful. “Hey.”

But her chest shakes more with the word. His palms rub her back, smoothing out the aches in her spine, the pain in her neck, the exhaustion of the long journey. She feels a new kind of tiredness, instead, as if her entire body is empty. As if she’s been awake for eighteen years and now she can finally close her eyes again.

He’s right. It’s not small here it all.

And he doesn’t have to go back. She keeps thinking that as if she’s thinking that for him. He doesn’t have to go back. The thought turns in a groove. Because maybe part of herself is expecting it, too—expecting another drive down those highways, expecting the fall colors to vanish and the world to become colorless with snow again. Another winter, another year, another year.

Kim draws back, inhaling deeply.

He scrunches his face at her. A little worried look.

She’s cut in half. She presses her palm to his cheek, holding back the expression, or trapping it there, she doesn’t know. She can’t look at it.

So she kisses him. It’s a soft kiss, nothing new, but when she pulls away, he blinks as if he could never have expected it. As if he could never have expected any of this.

She’s surprised him again.

Got him, she thinks. Like she used to.

Chapter Text

Words stick to her eyelashes. Batin v. State and entrustment proof dropping back to the page every time she blinks. Warmth creeps along her skin—the warmth of the coffee, of her head in her palm, of her breath as it slips from her, so heavy and so slow.

Kim reads. She reads and reads—and then she blinks and finds herself back at the start again. The letters are black bars. The letters stick up from the white page: the dead stalks of cornfields after a heavy snow.

She breathes out. The wind brushes the corn. The sentences fall from her again.

Entrustment proof, she reads, and rust and roof and tenement.

Behind her, the sky changes. Purple and blue and gold. Stalks of gray corn poke from the white like the skeletons of ancient sea monsters. The clouds gather above the prairie, so deep and blue it feels like she’s underwater, and her lungs fill with it.

It’s too heavy to move through, the water. It coats her and it carries her under. Around her, the house can feel things coming. The floorboards creak and the wind creaks and the door creaks—

—and bright lights crash like thrown-open shutters—

—like a hand landing on her shoulder.

Kim starts, chair digging into her back. She grips her coffee cup and the breakroom lights burn into her skull and she can feel her pulse sluggishly dragging itself back to the present moment.

The owner of the hand steps back from her, raising his palms and apologizing.

She squints at him. “Yes?”

He’s nobody she knows. He says simply, “You were asleep.”

“Jesus,” Kim hisses. As she rubs her eyes, she can feel the words stuck there, the lost sentences from a Criminal Law textbook borrowed from the third floor reading library. She drops her hand to the table. “What time is it?”

He checks his watch and hair spills over his forehead. “Nearly six-thirty.”

“Oh, thank god,” she says, gathering her loose notes and the textbook. She downs the rest of her cold coffee, then stands. The lost man is still watching her, but she doesn’t stop to give him directions.

If she hustles now, she still has time. Time to return the book to the pristine HHM library, time to stash her study notes in her car and force down half a sandwich for breakfast. Time to assemble the binders for Gurnstetter Limited v. Parsons and get ahead of the day so that she can leave by five o’clock and make it across to the campus and—

Kim jabs her finger on the elevator call button. She glances over at the breakroom. The lost man hasn’t followed her out, thankfully. He did call after her (“Give ‘em hell!”) but now she just hears the clunk of the coffee machine.

The elevator hums beyond its doors and she closes her eyes.

She has time, she thinks. She has time.

She’s drifting forward, on and on through the dark. Past old farmhouses and tuning fork trees. A low ringing echoes in her ears. Maybe from the car. Maybe from the falling-down houses or the yellowing trees or maybe from something else, something all around her.

The steering wheel is smooth under her palms, and the road gets dark and darker. It’s warm in the car, floating above the freeway. The momentum dips and rises and then settles around her like a heavy blanket.

Kim breathes, and the air comes slow. She breathes, and oxygen drags through her lungs like wind through hanging cloth. The freeway turns. She doesn’t want to keep driving, but the journey hums through her anyway. A great engine of movement, never ceasing.

Her neck is stiff. She lifts her hand to massage the knot there. Her fingers rub the top of her spine. The pressure of them spreads to other pressure: pressure along her right side, against her cheek. A mattress beneath her, a heavy duvet over her shoulder. She digs her forehead deeper into a pillow, inhaling warm air.

She’s awake. Her body aches.

She can never sleep through the night anymore.

The room is quiet and patient, and Kim lifts her head. She pulls hair from her mouth and squints at the alarm clock. It’s just after three in the morning. The green numbers hover in the dark air.

She exhales slowly, sinking down again.

She was almost comfortable thirty seconds ago, but now her entire body is stiff. She huffs, and rolls onto her back. The ceiling is dark. She settles a hand on her chest and the weight of it is reassuring there. She takes another long breath.

The heaviness of her hand is like an anchor, willing sleep to draw her under again—

—a creak. A footstep. The shift of a floorboard.

Down by the window, she thinks. She holds her breath in her chest, half drawn. The pillow scratches her neck and the room is quiet.

Streetlight catches on floating glass, a yellow flare, and then a dark shape shifts before the open blinds.

And Kim lets out the rest of the breath. “Hi, Jimmy,” she whispers, out into the black.

The shadow turns now. His voice comes soft and reassuring. He’s caught the question in her greeting. “Yeah,” he says, “it’s me.”

Kim sits up, sliding her legs out of the bed. She rubs her palm over her face. “Can’t sleep?”

“I slept.” Humor runs beneath the surface of the response. They’d both crashed soon after walking through the front door, after showering the journey off them and lying down to rest.

A flash of trapped streetlight again. It’s a glass of water in his hand.

Kim stands, the covers falling from her. She pads over to him and the floor is cool under her bare feet.

Jimmy offers her the water silently.

She takes it, and his fingers are warm as she brushes them. She can make out his shoulders now, vivid in a white undershirt bought for him a lifetime ago at Target.

She used to have this dream. In the low-ceilinged, Florida house she would see him like this at night. And in the dream he was dressed the same: the white undershirt, the blue boxers.

In the dream, he never heard the door opening.

Now, Kim drinks. The water is cold down her throat. It brings the room into clarity. Blurriness hardening into clean lines, into a white t-shirt split by open horizontal blinds. Outside, the streetlamps glow along the street, bleeding up between the rippling trees. Enough light to sculpt Jimmy’s shoulders, his cheeks.

She knows she could reach through the blinds and open the hinged window and invite in the darkness. Invite in the earthy smell of the dry leaves, of the fallen leaves. And with the window open, with the darkness granted passage, she could throw this glass out into the yellowing night. Out through the branches and onto the sidewalk, where it would shatter the quiet like fireworks.

An old impulse. It feels distant to her now, like an artifact from long ago. Something she could hold and study and turn under a light.

Jimmy’s gaze tracks from her hand, to her window, to her eyes.

She offers him the glass of water and he takes it back. In his irises, the lamps make pinpricks.

And she can see more of his face now. Her eyes are adjusting. His expression spreads over his skin, wary and thoughtful, as if his vision is adapting to her, too.

He stares at her like he’s back on the hillside near the prison—or like he’s back in that visitation room, light-years away. It’s one of the early visits. Maybe it’s the first visit. He’s holding something out for her to see, holding it in his eyes, holding it in the center of their hands. It was fragile then, but it’s almost as hard for her to grasp now: that he’d found his way up from underwater. That he’d done it for her.

Jimmy’s pupils shiver back and forth.

She sees more and more of him, like shadows brightening beneath his pale skin. He’s awake earlier than her one morning, in a white undershirt and boxers, getting dressed to leave before dawn to steal ice for his brother. He’s glancing over at her, wearing heavy sleep in a courthouse hallway. He’s yelling at her beneath neon salon lights, and she wants to spare him, wants him to take the deal and be happy.

But she couldn’t save him then.

Soon, he’s pale-faced in a sickly green hospital room, his hand on her shoulder. She curls her fingers around his thumb. And she knows he must have been so scared, and she sees that old fear in his eyes, and his fear becomes her fear, and now he’s kneeling in their doorway with a bleeding flag on his shirt and blood on his skin.

He’d made it home to her, then, alive after the wreck.

The shadow of the horizontal blinds cuts his forehead in half like ancient sunburn, and his pupils flicker in the strip of light. His eyes trap old smiles. He’s sharing a sandwich with her out in the sun. He’s grinning at her, and he’s covered in flecks of dark red paint. He’s lying under her and she’s running her hands down his bare chest and he’s gazing up at her as if he doesn’t know what she’s made from.

He’s standing before a draining sink like he’s scared something vital is draining out of him, too. She rests her palm on his back. But soon his fear becomes her fear, and she can feel him slipping deeper and deeper, and she’s reaching for him with her fingertips and yelling at anyone who’ll give her the first excuse.

There’s nothing you can do, she screams. She hopes she’s not screaming at herself. There’s nothing you can do, just stay away.

Jimmy blinks. He’s turning to face her in a courtroom, and it’s the first time she’s seen him in six years. He blinks, and he’s turning to face her in a courtroom, and a judge is reading them their vows.

And then he’s looking at her from a sofa with orchestral music playing, and Thai food getting cold on the coffee table, and deep down she knows he’s scared she’s going to leave him. She rubs her thumb into the back of his wrist—but then his fear becomes her fear, and she’s awake on the sofa with tobacco in her lungs and a chair against the door, she thinks that if they ever come back down to Earth again, he’ll run from her.

The streetlights hover, yellow visitors to the upstairs bedroom. Jimmy drains the water and sets the empty glass down on the bookshelf near his shoulder, nestling it in an empty space. He turns back to her. His gaze flicks down and then returns to her eyes.

And it’s not just streetlamps in here now, she thinks. Something as bright as sunlight has found its way up the staircase. She can see down to the deepest layer of him, down past the lines of age and time—but maybe this is a layer she’s never stopped seeing, not even in a strip mall office, not on billboards or in flashy commercials.

He’s sitting in their living room with a monster between them—and he’ll die for her. You shouldn’t know that about a person, that they would die for you.

But she knows it about him.

Kim swallows around the knowledge. She can never keep it down. She can hear the crack of it in her ears. It’s deafening.

Jimmy’s gaze drops again, then rises. His eyes are the darkest thing in the bedroom. They study her with storms in them. Old things are amassing near the surface again, like she’s pulling something up out of him, too. A dead body lies between them. A house fire. A call about a girl who overdosed, something for him to help clean up. He knew the murders were happening, he says, turning to face her in that courtroom again. He knew they were happening and he did nothing.

But he’s alive, and the rest of them—dead.

The storm clouds in his eyes are purple and blue and gold. They form cold and beautiful along the horizon, holding life and death in them. They smell of ash on San Cristobal Road. They turn like Cheryl Hamlin’s silhouette across a courthouse hallway, her neck curved downward like a swan’s.

But the storm clouds hold smashed bottles, too. They hold laughter set loose into the bright night from a balcony, they hold laughter set loose into the spangled reflections of a pool. They hold whispers beneath sheets and añejo tequila and his fingers latching a dagger necklace around her neck.

Jimmy’s gaze trembles. Surely he can feel it, too. This old darkness, glittering here between them in the safety of their golden bedroom. Something they can study together under the light.

Kim exhales shakily. She’s not used to breathing like this.

And Jimmy shifts closer. His hand rises. He tucks her hair behind her ear, his fingers spreading as if tracing the gray threads. She leans against the touch. She’s wide awake now, in this daylit room at three in the morning. Jimmy’s gaze drops to her lips, and the pinpricks of the streetlamps wink.

He leans in and kisses her.

His lips are cooler than she expected, like he’s been standing here beside the window for a long time. He tastes like sleep in a familiar way, in a half-forgotten way. Her mouth moves with him slowly. She tugs him closer, her fingers hooking in his white shirt. Her mind is hazy with the feeling of it.

And Jimmy grips the back of her neck, and his elbow knocks the blinds—and the blinds sway, clacking on the glass, shifting the striped shadows.

Kim pulls back.

The lights wash over him, back and forth with horizontal bars. He’s breathing heavier than normal already. His fingers drop from her. She draws him backwards through the swaying lights like they’re water reflections from a distant pool.

She brushes her palms over his shoulders, over his upper arms. She sits him on the side of the bed. He grimaces and hisses as his knees bend, and the mattress dips with his sudden weight.

She ghosts fingertips up and over his jaw. “Sore already?”

But Jimmy just shakes his head. He widens his legs and she moves closer to him between them. His voice cracks, “Can’t feel a thing.”

Kim chuckles softly. She lowers her forehead to his and closes her eyes. Their breath is warm between them. She runs her nails up around his ears, and then she kisses his brow. “Not this?” she murmurs.

Jimmy almost manages to shake his head as she draws back, his mouth hanging open.

And Kim trails her left palm down his jaw again, flattening it along the curve of his throat. Her skin scrapes over his skin. She descends gently and slow, down over his Adam’s apple as he swallows.

When she reaches his undershirt, she tugs it upwards. Jimmy helps her, huffing as he stretches, as she pulls the shirt over his head and lets it fall, ghostlike and white, onto the floor.

His skin wears old marks, new marks. Her fingers trace dim patterns down over his ribs. He holds still, and every part of him she touches feels like another brushstroke of reality in the pale room. His collarbone, his stomach. His boxers, scrunched up around his thighs.

She trails her left fingers further down, over soft skin to his knees. She used to be able to see the surgery scar here. She can’t see it anymore. Some things fade.

Jimmy makes a low noise, reaching for her. His hands push up under her shirt and he kisses her. His mouth is hot against hers now, steady and insistent. His fingers curl up into little fists at her sides.

She shivers with it, and his knuckles scrape her waist.

“Horses,” Jimmy says, his voice tight.

She pulls back and checks on him, but he’s just staring at tonight’s pajama pants. Little palominos gallop over turquoise fabric. His palms drop to greet the horses.

His fingers spread apart as he drags the pajamas up her thighs. He hooks the waistband and then stills, his hands frozen there.

Kim traces a path up his left forearm, squeezing reassuringly.

Jimmy exhales. “This is usually when I’d wake up.” And he tips his head back, studying her with hollow cheeks.

“You’re not asleep,” Kim murmurs. She squeezes his hand again, and then she draws her t-shirt over her head. The blue fabric washes over her and she lets it fall away, and when the room returns, Jimmy is staring up at her in wonder.

“You sure about that?” he croaks. But his hands come back to life at her waist—his fingers curl into the fabric, slipping over skin. He draws her pajamas down, and Kim bends to help, stepping out of them.

And then she’s bare before him, there in the dark bedroom, with the streetlamps finding all the lost shadows of the past. Jimmy’s hands hover, and then he settles them on her, and he presses his thumbs into her hipbones, steady and familiar. He shifts to the edge of the mattress and tugs her even closer, and his hands drag up to her breasts. He palms them, and Kim gasps, sensitive and electrified.

Jimmy mouths up her stomach, lips buzzing as he hums. He seems to want to touch every part of her at once, his fingers splaying and raking over her. His mouth climbs, finding one breast, then the next. Warmth spreads like lightning over her whole body, radiating outward, and Kim digs her nails into the nape of his neck.

She pushes against his hands, trying to find more of him, too.

But Jimmy’s palms are erratic, touching her like it’s his turn to paint her back into clarity, like he’s trying to make her real to him in this room. His teeth ghost her nipple and Kim makes a low, urgent noise.

She kicks the tangle of clothes free from her feet. Jimmy wipes his palm over his mouth and blinks. Kim shoves back the tangled covers and he clicks into action, helping drag them over to one side. The sheets are pale, and the right-hand side of the bed is marked with the ends of the shadowed blinds.

The bars of light rise in fading stripes up the wall, too. They ripple over Jimmy as he slips his boxers off.

Kim lies back on the bed, cool air brushing her bare chest. She can feel exactly where he kissed her, the skin tightening there. She wants his hands on her again, and she waits for him to join her again.

But Jimmy just stares at her.

He’s here, she thinks. He pulled himself back up from underwater. He came home to her. “Jimmy,” she says.

He swallows, head dropping. When he looks up at her again, his stomach tenses. Like he’s surprised to see her here, like he hasn’t just had his hands all over her.

Kim sits up, tugging pillows behind her, and she reaches for him. Her hand hovers between them, and she softens her eyes. “Jimmy,” she says again. “We’re awake. We’re here.”

Words rise from somewhere at the back of his throat, raspy with so many years. “We’re here.”

Her hand waits, dipping into the light. Her fingers curl, impatient—and then his hand finds hers again, and she draws him closer. He climbs onto the bed stiffly, avoiding his bad knee, grunting as he settles on his side.

And Kim pulls him closer, closer and closer. She wants him against her, his body nestling into her body, skin on skin. He’s heavy, and the bends of his joints dig into her, but she curls her limbs through his. She folds her arms over his back and wraps her legs around one of his legs.

If she felt him returning to reality earlier as she painted him with her fingertips, it’s nothing compared to this. Kim closes her eyes and tightens her arms and she can feel the undulating ripple of his breath, his chest rising and then his stomach rising, his chest falling and then his stomach falling.

He’s here; they’re here. Her whole body can feel it.

The shadows strip away from them, peeling up and catching in the wind.

When they kiss again, it’s even slower than before. Jimmy lies along her left side, his limbs notching into her curves. He cradles the back of her head, fingers spreading through her hair, and he brings her closer. Kim rakes her nails down his back, and he can’t quite hold her steady.

She slides a hand lower, down between them, over his stomach—but he pulls it back up again.

Kim exhales, and he swallows the sound of it. She tightens her thighs around his thigh and rocks against him.

“Fuck,” Jimmy manages. “Careful.”

She shakes her head, there in the cradle of his palm, and his fingers tighten in her hair in response. Not careful, she thinks—not then, and not now. She rocks on his leg again, and Jimmy makes another low noise, and he bucks his hips into her, too.

The friction is hot, and a little painful, and Kim’s whole body aches. She grinds against his thigh, and a hole opens wider inside her chest, a screaming emptiness that spreads out through her body. Dark and impatient and burning.

She marks the skin available to her—his throat, the damp corner of his jaw. She unwinds her arms from his back and pushes him up. The cold air gasps over her hot skin, and she rolls onto her right side, stretching for the end table. She opens the drawer and fumbles for the bottle of lube inside.

The mattress dips. Jimmy presses up along her back, sliding his right arm under her neck. He’s hard at the apex of her thighs. She can feel his breath through her own lungs.

Kim huffs impatiently, but she finds the bottle. She doesn’t bother closing the drawer. She crushes back against him, and he takes her whole weight, like a wall, pushing back into her with equal measure.

Jimmy runs his left hand up over her shoulder and brushes her hair off her neck. He kisses her pulse point under her jaw, and down her neck, like a firebrand marking her with burn after burn.

Kim settles her cheek on his right bicep. Muscles flex beneath the surface as he bends that arm, bringing his hand up to cradle her breast. His palm is damp, now, and his thumb strokes her nipple and Kim hears a high whine realizes it’s coming from her.

His other hand snakes down, over her stomach and lower. She lifts her top leg, and Jimmy drifts down, and the ache inside her screams with it, thudding in her ears. She grinds against his fingertips, but there’s the same almost-painful friction of earlier.

She presses into his palm, and he dips his middle finger inside her, and then brings it back up. Then again, the same motion, and Kim squeezes her eyes shut—but then Jimmy rises behind her, and she feels a terrifying bolt of loss—that he’s drawing away, that he’s leaving—

She reaches back to hold him there. “Stay up here,” she manages, twisting into him, finding his eyes. Her shoulder is crushing his chest.

He nods. The arm under her neck flexes, and she turns to kiss it, pressing open-mouthed shapes along his bicep and then straightening her head again. She finds the bottle of lube on the sheets, and passes it to him.

Jimmy shifts. She hears the click of the cap—tangible and snapping, a piece of reality anchoring her again.

His fingers return, slicker now. They rub her, a little unsteady, a little off-rhythm. His middle finger presses into her again, and she exhales—it’s better—and then his middle and ring finger. He can’t get very deep from this angle, but he works her into pieces anyway, sliding inside and then gliding up over her and then back down.

She wants more. She snakes an arm behind her again, urging him closer. Scrabbling over his side, his hips. He’s holding off, she knows he’s holding off.

“Jimmy—” she gasps. “Please.”

He makes a low, helpless noise. His fingers vanish from her. Another crack of the bottle cap opening. His forearm is unsteady against the small of her back. She brushes her hand over his hips. Reassuring, maybe. Maybe desperate.

Then he helps lift her top leg again. The angle’s a little off, and she arcs her back, and Jimmy huffs into her skin. He’s lining himself up, fingers brushing her. A knuckle presses the soft skin of her thigh.

She can feel how tightly he’s holding his breath.

When he slips into her, the air shudders out of both of them, like the emptiness inside her is rushing through her, the pressure equalizing. An explosive rush of breath.

Jimmy is a trembling wall behind her. His arm clenches under her neck, and fingers tighten on her breast, and Kim braids her fingers with his. She reaches the other hand back to find whatever part of him she can—his hips, the top of his thigh, and she digs her fingertips into the taut muscle.

She bears back against him, curving her spine again.

Jimmy groans, thick in his throat. “Careful,” he repeats, but she can hear the smile in it.

And she moves again, and she knows he can match her, like he’s always matched her. As she arcs back this time, he presses her into him, too, his hand firm between her legs. She mouths at the tense arm beneath her. Swallowing him, dragging him into her with a bruising grip on his upper thigh.

They’re alive, and they’re here, and he came back to her.

And she came back to him. She squeezes her eyes shut. She hears shattering glass over the city, but it’s just her pulse in her ears, it’s just the sound of his skin hitting her skin, the two of them shattering here together. Some electric piece of them both that’s still crackling, a pilot light still burning.

Jimmy’s fingers are slick against her. She grinds into the heel of his palm, his thumb. He rocks with her, steady and firm—and then he slips out, and she exhales with the loss. She hears her own ragged noises as he ruts slick between her thighs, as he teases her with his fingers, holding out longer and longer.

He’s making it last, but she needs him inside her. Her fingers guide him back into place, and she urges him deeper. Her nails carve the flesh of his thigh.

And Jimmy shifts behind her, changing the angle. He lifts her top leg up again, and she pushes his other hand between her thighs—and he works her with more surety now, with old familiarity.

Tightness builds inside her, winding higher and higher. The void inside her is filling with him, filling and filling, but she wants to feel him everywhere, and she presses her forehead into the arm beneath her, crushing her cheek and the bridge of her nose into the tensed muscle—and she climbs and climbs and then she’s frozen, waiting—

—and he drives into her again, crushing her against the heel of his hand, she comes in shattering sparks, blue behind her eyelids. Her nails dig into his forearm, her thighs flexing.

She’s stuck there, taut and frozen, pulse fracturing her eardrums—and then gradually she sinks. Down into the mattress, into Jimmy’s body, into the trembling wall he makes. Breath spills from her, out over the white sheets. She has trouble catching it.

Jimmy’s breathing hard, too. Gasps brush her skin. He keeps his hand still between her legs until she moves her own fingers away, and then he runs his palm up her side. Light and burning.

He thrusts a little, weak, but he slips out again, and Kim aches with the loss. She reaches between their legs.

She guides him back inside her.

Jimmy groans, the sound cracking and shuddering from his lungs. He doesn’t move for a long time, and then when he does, it’s so slowly, like it took him everything to get this far. She presses against him, weaving her fingers with his hand and guiding it back to her breast, arching her back to let him get deeper again.

He huffs, rasping and almost inaudible. She thinks he won’t last another second, but he does—and then another one, and another. But he’s still so much quieter, like the night in the motel. She squeezes his thigh, his hand, urging him deeper, firmer—

—and he shakes as he comes, muffling low noises into her shoulder, swallowing his groans before they find air.

But Kim feels the sounds through her body again anyway. She feels them trembling, like the struck skin of a drum.

Jimmy curls his arms around her. His breath is hot on her neck, and he tucks his forehead against the top of her spine. Her hair tugs down, like he’s nestling in it. Trapping threads between them.

Kim tries to hold him inside her for as long as she can. She doesn’t want to move. She could stay here forever. She weaves her fingers with his again and presses their linked hands to her stomach.

A lock against her chest.

As he breathes, her entire body moves with it. First uneven, and then steadier. His breath come slow and slower. Slower and slower until she can hardly feel it at all.

But she matches him, in and out, steady.

Kim wakes, a gradual swell of warmth along her body. Jimmy’s arm slung over her bare waist, his chest against her back. The room is soft, and quiet, and faintly light now with the dawn.

She lets her eyes drift closed again. She knows she needs to open the office today, but she’s got time. The sun is only just rising.

So she lingers there, in the warmth between the sheets, as the room bleeds into brightness. This isn’t the last time, she thinks. This isn’t the last time.

This is life.

But minutes slip through the blinds, finding their way into the bedroom. Kim inhales, biting her lip and holding the moment—but then she moves. She slips out from beneath his arm. Out into the warm morning, into the awaiting life.

Jimmy doesn’t stir as she leaves the bed, and she’s surprised. His face is slack and sleep-filled, half lost in the pillow. He looks young and unshadowed.

Warmth spreads through her, unfolding in soft piece after soft piece until she’s full of it.

She slips on the palomino-covered pajama pants in the muted light. His white t-shirt is a pale bundle near the foot of the bed. Kim smiles, and she bends to pick it up. She pulls it on and it smells like Jimmy and like her own body wash.

Her phone waits on the nightstand, and she grabs it. Jimmy’s shoulders rise and fall beneath the covers. She hears every creak of the floor as she moves to the door, as she inches out into the hallway, but the stairs are quiet on her descent. The bird paintings watch her, unchanging in amber.

Sunlight hovers with the dust in the kitchen. Morning greets her from the window above the counter.

Kim finds the jar of coffee grounds. She frees a new paper filter and gets the machine brewing, her fingers moving thoughtlessly. The coffee machine hums a greeting, soft and familiar.

She opens a cupboard and pulls out a mug. Her fingers are pale on the blue ceramic. She cradles it, then sets it down on the counter and finds another one—not quite identical, this shade a little more green. When the coffee is ready, she fills her own cup and sets it on the table, then moves past to the living room. She opens the blinds and the room brightens with warmth.

Kim sits. She drinks the coffee, catching up on missed emails on her phone. It’s not too much, nothing too bad. She lets TJ know that she’ll be in the office today, like normal.

Like normal, she repeats to herself. Yeah, just like normal.

And then there’s a noise from the staircase, and Kim smiles. She hopes she never gets used to hearing him.

Jimmy appears around the corner, scratching his neck. He’s just wearing last night’s boxers, the pale blue ones stolen from a dream.

“Morning,” Kim says softly.

He grins at her, eyes dropping to his white t-shirt on her chest. “I was wondering where that went.” He pads into the kitchen, squinting in the light. “You been awake long?”

Kim shakes her head. “Not long,” she says. “Go back to sleep. Take as long as you like.”

Jimmy just shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep through this.” He waves a hand. She doesn’t know what he’s gesturing to. Herself, the kitchen, all of it.

“There’s coffee,” she says, nodding to the machine.

She watches his shoulders as he fills the slightly greener mug. He joins her at the table, hissing a little as his knees bend. When he sips from his coffee, his eyelids drift down.

“World’s best coffee?” Kim murmurs, barely a breath.

He nods, his eyes crinkling at the edges. “It should say that on the mug.”

Kim smiles. Sunlight filters through the blinds, splitting into new piece after new piece. It’s warm in here, and the streets are quiet. It’s still early.

But the real world is seeping into the kitchen, too.

“I have to work today,” Kim says, and she flattens her lips apologetically.

Jimmy nods. He’s not surprised.

“But our caseload is small at the moment,” Kim says, “and I’ll be done by five.” She tips her head sideways. “I’m too old to read over cases until midnight now.”

He nods again. His gaze wanders over the living room. Kim folds her fingers into the crook of her hand on the table. In his eyes, she sees a shadow of fear again, shifting through shower mist.

She squeezes his hand. “You can come to the office,” she offers. “Or stay here, catch up on daytime TV. Or go for a walk—explore Golden, buy whatever you’d like.” She brushes her fingers over his bare shoulder and smiles. “Maybe clothes?”

Jimmy chuckles lowly, soft and gentle, but he’s still staring off at nothing in particular.

She can’t choose for him, she knows. Not anymore. But right now she wishes she could—wishes she could take away some of the enormity of the wide open choices. Choice after choice, every day.

But they sit there for a while in silence, waking up. Drinking coffee together before the world is awake.

It’s brisk outside, a cool wind finding them on the brief walk from her front door to the adjoining office. A fresh cup of coffee warms her palm and she exhales, and her breath is fog in the air.

“It’s been snowing high up,” Jimmy murmurs, and she glances at him. He jerks his head to the west. “You can see it on the mountains.”

She smiles. She hadn’t noticed. She turns back to the blue office door and unlocks it. “You know,” she says, “Buffalo Bill is buried up there.”

Jimmy makes a humming noise.

“Up on Lookout Mountain,” she says, and she pushes the door inward. “Don’t worry, they love cowboys in Golden.”

She flicks the lights on, and the office warms. She opens the first set of blinds in here, too, letting sunlight seep over a couple of messy desks and filing cabinets. Two worn sofas face each other in a small waiting area. Archive boxes sit at the foot of the stairs, waiting to be carried up with the others.

Kim moves down to the next set of blinds and opens them, too. The walls are heavy with papers, as heavy as the desks. In the waiting area, colorful drawings are pinned haphazardly. Women with shoulder-length hair. Men with big beards exuberantly rendered in orange crayon or red marker—a dozen smiling TJs. Most of her clients are old enough to be too embarrassed to draw, but some older kids write letters, and the shorter notes are pinned to the wall, too.

Jimmy moves up to study the art. He chuckles, and he points at a wiggly line with a big coat on. “Is this you?”

Kim smiles. “I think so.”

“I knew it,” he says, nodding sagely. “She’s beautiful.” The squiggly, purple line looks cozy in her green coat.

Kim heads down to her desk, setting her coffee among her papers. Here, the decorations on the wall change, the art making way for newspaper clippings and articles. Most of these are older. The juvenile cases she works these days aren’t the kind that get articles written about them.

It’s an eclectic selection of headlines, pieces of a fragmented history, stuck there to remind her of the fragments. The pieces stretch back to long ago. PLEA REACHED FOR FORMER TREASURER, says one. A headline about the win they got on an employment discrimination suit during her time at M&W, those first couple of years here in Colorado. A postcard from Honolulu with Francesca’s name on the back.

But she knows exactly where Jimmy will be looking.

There are a couple of headlines from eleven years ago. APPEALS COURT SAYS NEW TRIAL FOR GOODMAN, or, sensational and a little inaccurate: APPEALS COURT OVERTURN GOODMAN CASE. One has smaller text, as if already reflecting how much the media had stopped caring once he’d seemed less guilty: Deal Reached for Goodman, 24 Years.

Kim looks from the black letters to Jimmy’s eyes. He seems to shrink there, before these records of the past. “I can take those down,” she says.

But Jimmy frowns as if he hasn’t heard her. He shakes his head, baffled. “You kept these?”

Kim just shrugs lightly. “My biggest legal victory, right?” She glances at a screaming headline. “Anyone would want the lawyer who proved Saul Goodman innocent—or a little bit innocent.” She pinches the air. “A smidge innocent.”

Jimmy studies her with dark eyes. “What do people say?”

“Nothing,” she says gently. “Usually they’ve got a lot else on their minds.” She softens her gaze. “I can take them down.”

He shakes his head. He swallows, and then his voice comes lighter again. “Maybe you should sign them instead.” A gesture towards the waiting area. “In crayon, like the art.”

When she catches his eyes, she feels the warmth there, the reassurance.

He passes behind her and slows, and then she feels the heat of his fingers over her shoulder. Electricity sparks down her spine, and she feels him back there last night, the entire weight of him, skin on skin—and she exhales shakily, and his fingers drop.

She brushes her hand over her mouth, then draws her chair back and sits.

Jimmy moves to the row of filing cabinets, scanning the labels. Her old labeling system, she thinks. The office is quiet between them, the silence thick.

—and then heavy footsteps scuff outside the door, kicking the mat. The handle turns, and the door groans inward.

TJ pushes through, already unzipping his jacket. “Morning, Kim—hi, Jimmy—” A glance behind her, and he’s hanging his coat on the hook. “Kim, thank Christ you’re here. Everything’s fine, but wait until you hear the shit Murphy’s trying to pull with this new arraignment.”

He sets his shoulder bag on his desk with a thud, then rifles through it for a case file. He brings it over to her, and then he keeps moving, past her to the back corner.

Kim flips open the file automatically, but her entire attention is on the two men. They shake hands, and then TJ claps Jimmy on the shoulder like someone he’s known for a lot longer than half a minute.

Jimmy introduces himself, and TJ brushes it away.

“I know, I know,” TJ says. “Now that you’re here, maybe this one will finally shut up about you.” A twinkling glance at Kim.

And Jimmy’s brow flickers, a crease appearing.

“Just kidding,” TJ says. “Actually, I worked with her for two years before she finally revealed where she was going every weekend.”

A smile spreads over Jimmy’s face.

“That was years ago, and I’m still trying to get her to give up her middle name,” TJ says, eyes narrowing as he studies her, pretending she can’t hear them.

Jimmy glances at her, and she smiles gently with permission, and so he says, “She doesn’t have a middle name.”

“What?” TJ groans.

Kim inclines her head.

And TJ slaps the filing cabinet, huffing out air, and beside him Jimmy chuckles softly. Kim brushes the smile down off her own face.

“She won’t tell me how you met, either,” TJ says, though he’s never actually asked her that. But he nudges Jimmy, warm and familiar. “You can tell me over a beer on Friday. How about it?”

Jimmy nods. His eyes stay on Kim with the gesture, and his smile lingers. She wonders if he, too, is seeing a morning in the breakroom, a morning a very long time ago.

And her memory of it, she thinks, is nothing like the real moment at all. In her memory, she sees him like she does in this room: someone she can’t help but know, someone who’ll weave through the rest of her life.

TJ is right, in the end. There’s not too much for her to catch up on, and she doesn’t have any appointments today. They go through what she missed, and chase down a couple of law firms who appointed them as private GALs but who haven’t paid their invoices yet. Nothing monumental, nothing life changing.

As afternoon falls, Kim starts glancing at the shared wall between the office and the house. Jimmy had left that morning after all, going for a walk, but about an hour ago she’d started to hear movement beyond the cladding again. A drawer opening. Footsteps.

And now, a door closing.

Kim feels the smile on her lips—and then she catches TJ’s eyes across the office. “Shut up,” she murmurs.

But TJ doesn’t laugh. “I’m not making fun,” he says. “Twelve years, right?”

Kim glances down at her keyboard.

“So, you gotta go,” TJ says. “I’ll finish all this up.”

But Kim shakes her head. “I’ve already left enough on your plate the last few days.”

TJ just scoffs. “Well, when the man I love gets out of federal prison, you can make it up to me.”

Kim grins. “Did David get arrested while I was gone?”

“He did,” TJ says dryly. “The cops finally got him for talking in the movies.” He stares at her, unrelenting, and then waves a hand. “Now, go.”

And Kim breathes out. She dips her head, and tucks her hair back behind her ears. She shoots off a quick email, then shuts down her computer. She’s spent years of never leaving this place first, always insisting on working just as late as him, and now it’s the middle of the afternoon and she’s heading for the exit.

She doesn’t care. She slides her chair under the desk. The newspaper clippings watch her go, the ones with Jimmy’s name on them. New trial, a deal reached, and she thinks of the meetings with Viola and the federal prosecutors.

She was right, eleven years ago. They can live with this.

The sliding door rolls over its rails. Kim steps out onto the back porch. Jimmy’s sitting on the long wooden bench, tucked beneath the overhang. It’s the only piece of furniture out here, but she’s always wanted to do more with the space.

He’s bent over, sketching, a painful stoop to his neck. A blue pencil rasps over the paper. As Kim closes the door behind her, he looks over at her, shading his eyes with a hand above his glasses. “You’re early.”

“TJ shooed me away,” Kim says. The afternoon sun soaks through her, cutting warmly through the air. “Too early for a beer?”

Jimmy smiles. “Just right,” he says, and he looks back down at his paper.

Kim heads back inside. She gets a couple of bottles from the fridge door and opens them, then wanders back out. She settles beside him on the bench, and Jimmy sets his drawing pad down and takes the offered bottle.

He raises the beer to his lips, staring out at the empty yard.

Kim sips her beer. The cold bubbles seem to rise up from inside her, and she studies the top page of Jimmy’s sketchpad. He’s drawn a fragment of the Front Range. Lookout Mountain, she thinks—or a piece of it, at least.

“I couldn’t figure out how to add the dead cowboy,” he says, glancing westward to the peaks.

Kim chuckles. Her beer is cool in her palm, and the sun brushes her cheeks. She sips it again, studying the hillside. “I still haven’t actually been up there.”

Jimmy twists to look at her, sunlight flashing on his glasses. He lifts his bottle to her, just slightly. “We’ll go together, then.”

Kim inclines her bottle in response. A silent cheers. She sets it down on the arm of the bench, leaning back against the wall. “You found clothes,” she says, pinching the sleeve of his shirt.

It’s flannel, purple and blue, threaded with thin red lines. Jimmy’s shoulders rise and fall. “Yeah,” he says, head dipping. “Pretty much just hiking clothes and sports gear out there, but I got a couple of shirts.” He grins. “Better than gray, right?”

“Looks nice,” Kim murmurs.

He glances down at himself again. “Yeah,” he says assessingly. “I like it.” He leans back beside her, exhaling with it. “How was work?”

“Good,” Kim says. “All caught up.”

He nods. “That’s great,” he says, quiet and sincere.

But beneath the words she feels a deeper layer: a hint of sadness, of loss. She lifts her hand and rests her fingers against his cheek. Soft and featherlight, and then she trails them down again. He’s still here.

The sadness washes from him again, water sinking into white sand. “You looked really good in there,” he murmurs. “It suited you.”

He says it so simply. An inarguable truth.

“Seeing you as a lawyer makes me remember I only ever liked bits of it,” he says. “I made it fit me best I could, but it wasn’t for me.” He smiles again, eyes crinkling around deep lines. He sips his beer and taps his finger against the glass. “I’m gonna find something for me.”

Hope spreads out in Kim’s chest, nesting there. “Yeah?”

Jimmy shrugs. “If there is anything for me.” When he turns to her, she holds his gaze. His eyes soften. “It’s okay. I was thinking about that when I was walking.”

Kim frowns, waiting for him to fill the spaces with words.

“I always thought there was one big thing you were supposed to do,” he says. “I guess because Chuck always knew.” His eyes scrunch, and he shadows them from the sun again. “But I’m not him.”

She shakes her head.

Jimmy turns again, looking out at the yard. “And I’m not you.”

Kim exhales. Her falling breath feels like the ropes of old fears being loosened from her: all the choices he had made because he’d thought she wanted him to be more like her, or more like his brother.

“Maybe I will go panning for gold,” he says, lighter now. “Or deep sea diving.” He takes a long drink of beer and swallows. “Or I’ll see if an ‘Experienced Baker Wanted’ sign includes people whose experience is twelve years in prison and a few months at a Cinnabon. Or… or…” He exhales, and a smile drifts over his face. “Or I walked by a local playhouse, too.”

Kim tucks hair behind her ear, studying him. “Yeah?”

Jimmy nods. “Mhm, by the big mural,” he says, as if she’ll know the one in a town of murals and public art.

She thinks she does, anyway. A history of the town. Mountains and a copse of yellow aspens with tall, white trunks.

“Or maybe I’ll do something different every month,” Jimmy says, his voice lifting. “And I can just keep changing.”

She hears the question in the final phrase, so she nods. “You can keep changing.”

Jimmy breathes out slowly, comfortably.

Kim settles back against the wall again, watching the yard beyond. There’s an old tree in one corner. A garden bed that she’s never used for anything. Empty space after empty space.

They could fit a smoker back there, she thinks. Right on the tiled area beside the fence.

And the wind sweeps down from the mountains as if in agreement with them both. You can keep changing, it says, as it catches smoke from the neighbor’s chimney, as it shivers through the tree. You can keep changing, it says, and it sends orange leaves tumbling over the grass.

The leaves beckon with golden points, like glowing stars.

Kim curses. The television has signed her out of every app again for no reason. She huffs, and she fights with the remote, trying to input whatever magic password it wants tonight. She’s stumped.

Jimmy looks up from The Shining to the screen, and he chuckles lowly. “This seems like a step backwards from DVDs.”

“It is,” Kim says sharply. “It’s awful.” The TV beeps angrily and she grits her teeth—and she tosses the remote to the coffee table.

Jimmy just meets her eyes, wordless.

“I’m going to give it a minute to think about it,” Kim says. She leans back into the sofa and exhales, closing her eyes, and then she laughs at herself. She brushes her palm over his shoulder. “We have ice cream. Do you want ice cream?”

Jimmy sits forward immediately, tossing his book aside like the remote—and Kim laughs brightly.

He stands, offering a hand to help pull her upright. She tidies up a box of leftovers on her way through, food from a Thai place she’d never ordered from before. The boxes had arrived filled with shatteringly crisp spring rolls and gai pad khing that had spread warmth right through her.

She tucks the leftovers in the fridge and then opens the freezer. Chocolate ice cream and an unopened tub of mint chip. She sets them both on the counter, then gestures to Jimmy. “There’s sprinkles in the drawer there.”

Jimmy slides the drawer open. He pulls out a little shaker of sprinkles and curls his fingers around it. He stares down at his hand.

Kim watches him study the colorful tub for a moment. His brow creases, and then she slips past him. She finds a couple of bowls and a barely used ice cream scoop. “The chocolate might be a bit iced over,” she murmurs, but when she pops the lid it looks all right. She pries the lid off the mint chip, too. The surface is unmarred, pale green. “How many scoops?”

Jimmy clears his throat. “Two.”

Kim digs the scoop through the green surface. “Two of each?” she adds, glittering.

And his face breaks with a smile. “All right, twist my arm,” he says, chuckling. “Where do the spoons live?”

Kim nods to another drawer, and he finds the spoons as she scoops the ice cream. She carves up one chocolate and one mint chip for herself, then she goes to rinse the scooper in the sink. Over her shoulder, she adds, “I’ll let you do the decorative honors.”

Jimmy gives a soft chuckle, and there’s the rattling rhythm of him tapping the sprinkles out over first her bowl, then his. Falling colors. “Beautiful,” he murmurs, clicking the lid closed again. “Maybe I’ll work in an ice cream parlor.”

“As long as you wear the little red and white hat,” Kim says, taking her bowl from the counter and heading back to the living room.

And against all odds, the TV has decided to remember her password on its own. Rows of new shows and movies wait for her in ribbons. Kim returns to her spot on the sofa, and Jimmy settles beside her, the spoon clinking against the rim of his bowl.

She scrolls through the lists, and Jimmy eats a spoonful.

He makes a low noise in his throat and leans back, pulling the spoon out. “It’s sweet,” he says thickly. “Has it always been this sweet?”

Kim tries some of her own ice cream. The mint chip is cold and achingly familiar on her tongue.

Jimmy takes another mouthful. He breathes out longingly, as if he doesn’t have a whole bowl left in his hand.

“Nothing like that in Montrose?” Kim asks, a gentle, floated question.

He shakes his head with the spoon in his mouth, then draws it out by the handle. “Nothing like this, either,” he says, waving at the TV. “Unless you count half an Arnie movie in the dayroom. I think I could recite all of Red Heat from memory.”

Kim chuckles. “Don’t make promises you won’t keep.”

He glances at her, eyes crinkling.

Warmth sinks into her, and Kim digs her spoon into the mint chip, wedged between colorful sprinkles. “I have to catch up on things, too,” she says softly. She scrapes the spoon through the bowl, gathering ice cream, dragging up sprinkles, and then she lets it rest against the side. “I don’t think I watched a single movie down in Florida.”

Jimmy becomes almost imperceptibly stiller, as if he’s holding his breath.

And Kim smirks. “I used to stick to American Ninja Warrior.”

She hears the click of a swallow. Jimmy leans forward and sets his bowl down. He scratches his cheek, and then he looks back, his eyes pale. “I had this big flat screen for years. Biggest one in the store. Couldn’t bring myself to watch any movies on it.”

Kim reaches for his shoulder, brushing over the fabric.

He smiles at her, soft and a little sad.

But she lifts her arm to the back of the sofa to make space for him beneath it. It takes Jimmy a moment, but then he nestles against her. They stare at the television, at the patient lists of films and shows.

On the table, their ice cream melts in their bowls, the sprinkles bleeding through the pale green. Kim grabs the remote again. She hunts through TV show after TV show until she finds The Terror.

The first images start playing to the dim living room. The flickering lights of a fire and then the bright white of a fracturing ice sheet. Ships carve passage through half-frozen water, and men in dark coats stride beneath the pale, Arctic sun.

“I missed the cold in Florida,” Kim says suddenly, surprising herself. “Albuquerque had just enough of it, but Titusville? It felt like time wasn’t passing properly. I was always waiting for the cold.”

Jimmy makes a soft noise at the back of his throat. His fingers shift in his lap, flexing and thoughtful. “It was so cold during the winters inside,” he says finally. “They’d lie about the heating being broken so the warden could pocket more of the budget.”

Kim drops her arm from the back of the sofa to his shoulders. He’s warm now, he’s as warm as if that had never happened to him. He presses his cheek to the side of her chest and wind cracks white sails and men eat below decks on a swaying ship.

Jimmy’s breathing slows. He lies there against her until he’s so quiet and steady she thinks he might have fallen asleep. She rubs her thumb idly on his arm, tracing little nameless patterns and shapes. Initials and monograms.

Jimmy makes another low sound. “I was right, by the way.”

Kim hums questioningly.

“About The Shining.”

Her gaze falls on the curling paperback there on the table among the ice cream bowls and papers and her own half-read book.

“It didn’t end like the movie,” Jimmy says. “The book ends different.” And he reaches for her hand, and she squeezes gently.

A man vanishes beneath blue-black water, leaving nothing but fractured ice. Men shout on the decks but know enough not to join him down there in the cold.

And Jimmy draws her hand closer to him. She lets him study it, examining the bends of her fingers like he had in the shower at the Slackwater Inn, like she used to study him thirty years ago.

“Find any secrets in there?” Kim asks.

“Hm?”

She flexes her fingers a little. “In here.”

His smile drifts through his words. “Not yet,” he says. “Gonna keep looking, though.” The pads of his thumbs brush the lines inside her palm as if there really is something written there, as if he’s wiping something from the surface and revealing black text beneath.

It’s night up on deck. The only light in the living room is blue with the moon’s shadows. Ice sheets crack and boom, ethereal, a little muffled from the speakers at the back of the TV set. “Maybe we could get one of those surround systems,” Kim says. “Watch things in style.”

Jimmy’s thumbs still. He curls her fingers up around him, closing her hand on his hand.

She squeezes lightly. “And we could get an ice cream machine,” she says. “Homemade mint-chip.”

Jimmy lets out a little half-laugh, a wondrous noise. “For my ice cream parlor,” he says, and she nods, and the wooden ship creaks and groans through the cold. “And we could get fish.”

Kim laughs, the sound spilling brightly from her lips. “For the ice cream?”

“No,” he says, turning to meet her eyes. “To protect the place when we’re not here.”

She smiles crinklingly.

“Or a little cat. Or a yellow dog,” he murmurs, turning back to the dying men on the ice sheet. “I always kind of wanted a yellow dog.”

Kim brushes her palm up his arm. The fabric is soft and new against her skin. Brand new. He exhales slowly, and he feels so warm and slow.

“Tell me something else about Montrose,” she says gently.

And so Jimmy offers her another piece of himself, another fragment of colorful cloth. He talks about the guy who ran the kitchens, the guy who put in the supply orders and skimmed all the good stuff off the top. And Kim gives him a fragment in return: how she’d only unpacked half her things in Titusville, how the boxes from Albuquerque had gathered dust in her garage for six years.

A man is lowered on winches down into the blue depths. Kim tells Jimmy about the claustrophobia of Paul’s Smokehouse. He tells her about wrapping telephone wire between his hands in an old woman’s kitchen. Pieces of each other that pass between them as if cradled in their linked hands. Small pieces, fragile pieces. They illuminate the world like pencil sketches.

It might take them another eighteen years to fill the gaps.

She likes to think it will.

Light brushes her eyelids. It’s Sunday, she thinks, or maybe Tuesday. Footsteps move somewhere downstairs, and a cupboard closes in the kitchen. She thinks she can smell coffee.

The bedroom is brighter than normal. Oddly bright, like sunlight bouncing off fresh snow when the sky is clear. Like a summer sun settling above the hillsides, higher than usual in the sky.

Kim turns her head into the pillow and breathes in the warm, familiar fabric. It’s Monday, she thinks, or maybe Saturday. She doesn’t know what day it is.

It could be any day.