"He took a new assignment. Corporate, very boring, very well-paid. He's happy."
"And you?"
"I have a new assignment too. Less interesting. Also well-paid."
"I hope it's better than mine was," she said. Dry.
"Mine didn't come with someone trying to kill me, so yes, better in that sense." He paused. "Worse in other senses."
She looked at him over her cup. Then she set down the cup and said: "I want to talk about those other senses."
He had known this was coming. He had, in the twelve days since the assignment closed, done the correct professional accounting of the situation: feelings developed for a client during a protective assignment were the kind that professionals handled by acknowledging the complication and then not acting on it, and when the assignment was closed you reassessed from a distance and determined whether what you had been feeling was the product of the intensity of the situation or something that would exist without the intensity.
Twelve days of distance had not changed anything. Which was, he had concluded, the data point.
"I said I would talk about it when it was done," she said. "It's done. I know there are professional complications. I'm not dismissing those. But I'd rather have the honest conversation than the careful one."
"What's the honest conversation?" he said.
"The honest conversation is that I spent three weeks in close proximity to you under circumstances that stripped away most of the reasons people normally have for not saying things, and I found you to be—" She paused. "Someone I want to know better. Not because of the circumstances. In spite of them. The circumstances were terrible. You in them were not."
