She bought tea she knew I did not want and placed it in front of me anyway. I looked at it, at the steam rising in the cool terminal air, at her hand withdrawing from the cup, and I understood the gesture for what it was. It was not about tea. It was about care expressed in the only way that felt possible when words had been used up for the day, when questions and answers and dictation had taken everything we had. I did not drink it at first. I let it sit there, warming the small space between us, and I was grateful for it in a way I could not have articulated without making it smaller.
Finally, she said, "You're still going to give the speech."
"Yes," I said.
"With your face like that?" she said.
"My face is fine," I said.
"Your face looks like you argued with a countertop," she said.
"The countertop won," I said.
She almost smiled, then stopped. The almost-smile was there and gone, a flicker, a reminder that humor had not left us entirely, only retreated for a while. Then she said, "Warren."
"I know," I said, because I thought I did, because I thought she was going to tell me to rest, or to be careful, or to let the lawyers handle it, all the things a wife says when her husband has been hurt and is pretending he has not.
"No, I don't think you do," she said.
I looked at her. She stared through the terminal windows at an aircraft pushing away, its engines turning, its nose beginning to move toward the runway, a slow, deliberate departure that made the gate area feel even quieter by contrast. She did not look at me when she spoke next, and I understood that she was not looking at me because she needed to see the plane, or because she needed not to see my face while she said something difficult.
"You turned into a judge the second they found your credential," she said.
Silence sat between us. It was not the silence of the conference room, which had been procedural and tense. It was the silence of a marriage, of two people who know each other well enough that a sentence can sit without needing to be softened or explained away immediately. She knows me well enough not to soften it, and I know her well enough to know that she will not take it back simply because it is uncomfortable.
"I was always a judge," I said.
"You know what I mean," she said.
"Yes," I said, because I did. I had felt it myself, on the concourse, in the moment Doyle crouched and said "Sir," in the moment the questions became precise and judicial, in the moment I began dictating preservation as if I were issuing an order from the bench. Something in me had shifted from a man trying to survive an encounter to a judge building a record, and I had not noticed the shift until she named it.
She faced me then, fully, turning away from the window, turning toward me with the directness that has always been her way. "What happens if Holloway doesn't open that wallet?" she asked.
I had asked myself the same question, in the conference room, on the walk to this gate, in the quiet hour when we had barely spoken, and I did not answer, because there was no answer that was both honest and comforting, and because I did not want to offer her a comfort I did not believe.
"What happens if you're not Warren Foster?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"That's the part you should be thinking about," she said.
"I am," I said.
"No. You're thinking about evidence preservation. You're thinking about reports. You're thinking like this is a case," she said.
"It may become one," I said.
"That's not what I mean," she said.
I waited. I have learned, in court and at home, that waiting is sometimes the most respectful thing you can do when someone is trying to say something that does not fit easily into a sentence. She leaned closer, close enough that her voice would not carry beyond our two seats, close enough that I could see the tiredness around her eyes that she had been hiding since she arrived at the far end of the concourse.
"They were scared after they learned who you were," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"They should have been scared before," she said.