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16
David

‘Not … by … choice.’

When those words emerged from Emma Fairfax’s lips, as I first met her two and a half years ago, a little more, they opened a door. A door I’d been waiting for my whole life, without even knowing it. She became a revelation, and a revelation only for me.

She’d been admitted to the ward nine days before her first interview with Dr Marcello, and she’d already gone through the usual battery of psych evaluations that accompany every arrival. Even when one is committed by law, rather than choice – when there’s at least the legal assertion that the individual has substantial psychological problems – there’s a routine that has to be gone through in order to arrive at a formal diagnosis. Intake interviews, broad-level diagnostics, then assignment to an appropriate ward for specialist interviews prior to the prescription of treatment. She’d come to Dr Marcello only after the first few rounds of those had already been accomplished, ready for the diagnostic comb to be finer and the focus of treatment more precise. And I sat at his side, as I always did in those days, watching, learning, taking notes, offering thoughts. The pharmacy wing always had a representative at consults like this, to counsel the doctor on options to form part of any treatment, and to receive instructions in turn on the precise drugs a patient’s regime would require.

So there we were. The system, in its glory.

All this had fallen upon Emma Fairfax because of the day she got into a car. A blue Chevy Malibu with a custom JBL ten-speaker sound system, still blaring Coldplay, of all things, at full volume when the emergency services unwrapped its wrinkled metal frame from a tree trunk in Santa Cruz. There would probably have been an arrest following her hospitalization in any case, given the nature of the crash, but a stomach filled with a nearly lethal combination of Valium and Xanax, stirred together with most of a bottle of cheap tequila, changed things. Attempted suicide always gets a psych eval.

Attempted suicide. With pills. At first, an innocuous case. Later, that feeble attempt at taking her own life would make so much more sense.

The tree Emma had hit stood in a front yard in a residential neighbourhood inhabited by twelve children under the age of fifteen (the prosecutor had been insistent to identify the exact number and ages, even though none had been injured in the crash), and that meant Emma had been labelled ‘psychologically disturbed with criminal liability’, which in turn meant she’d ended up in DHS-Metropolitan, the Department of State Hospitals facility in LA County, rather than in a cell in the women’s prison in Chowchilla or Valley State.

Which meant she came within the scope of my vision.

It took days for her conversations with Dr Marcello to open up beyond the blank stares and occasional mutterings that had characterized the first encounter. Part of that was due to the sedatives forcibly delivered to her in a little paper cup each morning, but part went beyond the medications. Something was haunting this young woman. I could see it, even from the side of the room. And my interest grew, because there was something there that was familiar. Something that stirred at memories. Something that made me want to … help her.

‘You know, you can talk to me.’ Dr Marcello said this almost every morning, usually towards the beginning of the prescribed thirty-minute sessions. It was a truth that needed to be gradually absorbed by the patient, softening up the clay that had hardened into her rock-solid defences. She’d eyed him each time he said it, sometimes glancing over in my direction as well, but usually little more than that. Only in the fifth session did she finally begin to open up.

‘It’ll help if you talk, eventually,’ he added that day. ‘You’ve been here two weeks now, a little more. Time’s got to come to speak, Miss Fairfax.’

She grunted. We weren’t to be believed. Her look was momentarily all revulsion, peering up and down at Marcello, then at me. Then the emotion evaporated. The doctor jotted a note down on his pad, just visible to me on his knee. Resistant to authority. Maybe to men.

‘Though I suppose, from another perspective,’ Dr Marcello added, ‘we could say you don’t have to speak at all.’ He laid down his pen over his notes. ‘You can stay silent, if that’s what you want, and we can just sit like this. You’re going to be in here for a while, in any case. You know that.’

‘Not long enough.’

I barely caught the words. She barely said them. But the whisper made it to my ears, and my shoulders rose, encouraged by the first sign of a real communication.

‘What does that mean, Emma?’ Dr Marcello asked. ‘Is it okay if I call you Emma?’

She shrugged, dismissive and annoyed. It was ‘I don’t care’ and ‘fuck off’ in a single, well-practised thrust of the shoulders. But it was also a solid sign of comprehension, and a concrete response.

‘You can call me whatever you want,’ she finally answered. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

I was startled at the strong accent with which she spoke. With her first full sentences it came out noticeably, and the elongated vowels and reassigned consonants of country bumpkin drawl clashed with her simple beauty. Her ‘whatever’ came out ‘wat-evuh’ and her ‘doesn’t matter’ was a punctuated ‘don’t mattuh’. I couldn’t immediately tell whether it was authenticity or affectation, but Emma had the motions to go with the sassy tones. There was a tedious roll of the eyes and a dismissive flick of the head. Ain’t much for ya, fukkuh. Piss off.

‘Why is that?’ Dr Marcello asked, keeping his attention focused. If he was as surprised by her voice as I, he didn’t show it. ‘Why doesn’t it matter what I call you?’

‘Nothing matters now I’m here. It’s all done.’ She rolled her eyes again. Her arms remained folded across her chest.

‘Your life isn’t over,’ he said. ‘You were fortunate – you didn’t harm anyone but yourself. The car’s totalled and you probably offed the tree, but it didn’t go further than that.’

When she laughed, the sound was pitiful. Mournful. I remember I was amazed that someone who seemed so determined to be brash could exhibit such a contrary emotion.

‘Didn’t harm no one!’ she jabbed back, her eyes suddenly going glassy. ‘That’s the whole problem. I’ve harmed plenty, and no one knows.’ She swung her head my way, stared into my eyes, as if I might understand what she felt the doctor didn’t.

I lowered my head, unsure how to meet that stare. I had a clipboard across my lap, intended for clinical notes on prescriptions the doctor might require, but I found myself scratching illegible lines across it with my pen. Muscle memory was moving my hands.

‘Is that why you were taking the drugs?’ Dr Marcello asked. Suddenly my own throat caught slightly. The mention of the pills – it wasn’t the first. But the attempt at suicide, it suddenly hit me. Not as simply a clinical fact, but as a memory. One I’d worked so hard to push away.

The pills …

I swallowed hard.

‘Was it guilt?’ Dr Marcello continued. ‘Guilt over the people you feel you’ve hurt in your life? The Xanax, the Valium – you had a lot in your system.’

God, Evelyn. I shoved the memory away. Back into its box. This wasn’t the time. The past was the past. This woman wasn’t my sister.

Emma Fairfax glared at Dr Marcello, her eyes pitying and condemning at the same time.

‘I don’t feel nothing,’ she answered. Her eyes rolled and her arms crossed tighter at her chest, defiant. I escaped the clenched feeling in my chest enough to see Dr Marcello underline the phrase as he transcribed it onto his notepad. A sentence fairly well drenched with possible interpretations.

‘So you feel you don’t sufficiently register emot—’

‘I’m not speaking psycho-shit, Doctor,’ she snapped. But she wasn’t angry. ‘I don’t feel I’ve hurt others. I know it. It’s a fact.’

There was a sob in her eyes and it shook her tongue. She stopped talking, tossing her hair aside in a show of dismissiveness. I don’t care. Nothing can make me care. The forced denial of someone who cares deeply – more than they wish or want.

‘Can you tell me about that?’ Marcello asked. He’d drawn a firm line across his paper. This was a new area, one that hadn’t come up in our brief encounters to date.

My heart was racing. The conversation was taking me in new directions, too. The memories were hitting like a flood.

The pills.

The death.

My sister’s absence.

I could barely stay in the moment.

‘It weren’t supposed to turn out the way it did!’ Emma cried out. There were tears then, streaming down her cheeks and pooling at the curve of her chin before falling onto her lap.

‘What wasn’t, Emma?’ Dr Marcello kept his voice soft.

‘It were bad. We all knew it were bad. But it got out of hand.’

She wasn’t registering his questions, so he stopped asking them.

The sob was back, this time long, vocal and heart-wrenching. A few words fumbled out from between Emma’s lips, but none of them had anything to do with the car accident.

‘Emma,’, Dr Marcello leaned in towards her in a carefully practised, unthreatening way, ‘I’m not sure what we’re talking about. Fill me in. Why don’t you start with where, with when?’ Concrete facts, sometimes easier for traumatized patients to deal with than emotions.

She gazed more through him than at him.

‘You don’t want to know,’ she said. ‘These nice looks you give me, the “it ain’t so fuckin’ bad, you’re a good girl” sentiments, you’re not gonna have ’em for long if I tell you what … what …’

Her throat seized up. She wanted to be defiant, but a sob stopped her.

Marcello leaned forward. Despite the torrent of my memories, my emotions, I leaned forward too.

‘Emma, there’s nothing you can tell us that will cause me to change my desire to care for you.’

It’s a lie he’d been trained to tell. All of us, actually, even if we’re just pharmacists in a prison ward – and we’re taught to believe it, too. Our goal is to help the patient. Nothing can change that. There’s nothing they can say that ought to cause us to look at them differently. No deed a person has done that devalues his worth or affects our duty to care.

But it’s a lie. A terrible, dreadful, hideous lie. Maybe I was never meant to become a man of Dr Marcello’s moral objectivity, maybe my own experiences meant I couldn’t maintain that ruse of unflappable dispassion, but reality’s reality. There are things a person can say – things a young woman can say, in a little room beneath fluorescent lights before an analyst and a pharmacist at a metal table – that should make any human person change their mind radically about them. Things a person can say that show they’re not people at all, but monsters. Monsters whose existence makes the world itself groan, repulsed by more than their actions.

Repulsed by their very existence.

17
Amber

I have to get home. I have to get to my husband.

I’ve managed, somehow, to go through the remaining motions of the day. No customers want newspapers after 3.00 p.m., and if you haven’t caught your glossy copy of Esquire by lunch, chance is you’re not going after it until tomorrow – so the second half of my days tend to be even quieter than the first. There is always a bit of restocking to be done, some tidying up of the reading areas. An attempt at making the periodicals service desk, which I like to think of as my own, slightly more presentable beneath its stacks of papers and magazines.

As customary as the flow of the day is, however, I near its end with anxious relief. Anxious for reasons that are still difficult to understand. The day has been a haze, and every time I exhale I’m propelled through its fog, back into a maze of very different thoughts.

A maze that keeps drawing me towards my husband.

I don’t know precisely what it is I want to tell David, in light of what I’ve learned today. Something happened – last night, this morning, somewhere inbetween. The bridge from yesterday to today involves him.

In my immediate surroundings, Chloe has kept to herself throughout the afternoon. Demonstratively. She hasn’t spoken a word to me since our exchange in the morning, and I linger now with her promise of an email with a few more details before the day’s end. I’m sure it will come, and equally sure that she’s delaying sending it simply to rub in her displeasure with the bizarre nature of my reaction earlier. I’m going to have to apologize to her eventually. Chloe may be a nut when it comes to social skills, but she’s not a liar, and if she says I talked to her about all this, then I have little choice but to believe her. The evidence is there. At least my outburst was minor, more odd than offensive. She’ll get over it soon enough. If she doesn’t, a gift will certainly do it. There are few crises in Chloe’s life that a Mars bar or a pack of Marlboro Reds can’t remedy.

But I’m a different story. My interior state is neither as manic nor as mutable as Chloe’s. My ups stay ups and my downs downs, with a long haul required to change them. It’s always been that way. From childhood. My mother yells at the ten-year-old version of me in a burst of anger – a skill she’d expertly cultivated – and the next two months are sulky, all the weather grey and dismal. My father lashes out and strikes (‘It’s just a goddamn slap, Amby’ – such a deplorable nickname, though linked to one of the few vivid memories I retain of him – ‘Used to hand them out in schools, back when children knew their place’) and I’m down for weeks. I remember those emotional pits. They were always deeper than I’d thought they’d be, their walls made muddier by the betrayal of people who shouldn’t have pushed me into them in the first place. Still, you crawl out eventually. Chloe would probably have coiled up some internal spring and bounced out in an instant, smiling by the time she arced back down to earth. I had to climb, fingers in the mud, dirtied and darkened by it all, carrying the grime with me. But there’s always an upper rim, even to the deepest pit.

Then there are the highs, too, with me just as long in life as the lows and stirred up in their own, unique ways. The kind words from a friend. The gold star on a childhood art assignment. Bumping into just the right man on just the right walk. They catapult me onto mesas, those things. From their heights a person can see the whole world, and on that world the only thing that shines is bright, golden sunlight. It’s all a matter of the right prompt.

The details Chloe brought me, and the bits and pieces I already knew – they aren’t the stuff of mesas or mountaintops. You’d think I might be interested simply by the fact of something out-of-the-ordinary happening in our area, even if it does involve a death. A curiosity. There’s something exciting in that. Instead, the details drag my emotions down, against my will and beyond my control. I can smell the mud of a pit I can’t yet see. It smells of moss and roots and decay, and something about it terrifies and depresses me. I’ve been in pits before, and I remember how dark the world can be.

I’m about to experience it all anew. I can feel it. And once again, I can’t explain why.

18

The second body was a man’s. He was middle aged, slightly overweight but overall in decent form: lean, not too thin, not too fat. His silver hair matched a grey buttondown shirt that wasn’t off the rack. Attention to fashion was visible everywhere. Upturned, contrasting-colour cuffs. Alligator-print belt. Perfectly polished shoes. What looked to have been a good hairdo, before the struggle changed that.

He lay prone on the unyielding tile floor. His skin was already bluing, and his eyes, like hers, were wide open, though they didn’t sparkle with light. They were hollow, sucking in the grey ceiling rather than reflecting the light of the sun or moon.

There was no serenity surrounding him. His end had been violent, and the signs of the violence were everywhere. Rips marred the silver shirt. Bruises that looked like they might have come from fists speckled the skin of his arms. A wild look of recognition was frozen on his face. He’d seen what was coming. He couldn’t escape it.

And a knife-wound flowered at his side, bleeding now only a few remaining drops into the crimson pool that had emerged beneath him.

This was reality.

But it wasn’t the way the story was supposed to go. No story should ever be written this way, with this kind of character, or this kind of turn. They were things to be written out, edit away. So that the real story, the good story, could emerge from their absence.

And so the work had begun, and would continue, until the right ending came.

19
Amber

It’s not so much a commute home as a race that begins as the workday ends. My step out the door is a sprint and I aggressively dodge traffic as I speed down the highway, ignoring my headache and trying as hard as I can to ignore the frustration caused by other drivers. By the time I park on the street outside our apartment I’m already jumping out the door. Feet on the pavement, then the lawn. My laptop and my satchel swing at my side, but I hardly notice them. I’ve become a woman of singular focus.

David.

A few bounds and I’m up to the first storey. The key goes into the lock with surprisingly little fumbling, given my state, and this time I do thrust open the door. Not my style, but I do it anyway: full bore, strong swing. I want to see him, all at once, to share what I’ve discovered and to know what he knows. To find out what it is that’s taking place between us, and how it’s connected to the story at the river.

But the door slams against our corner cabinet and the noise echoes through an empty kitchen. I want companionship and solace; instead, I’ve arrived to an empty home.

It takes me ten minutes and a glass-and-a-half of a poor South African Zinfandel to calm myself. Marginally. I haven’t been this exercised in as long as I can remember, and there’s only so much that wine can deaden the anticipation.

It’s 6.42 p.m. when I glance at my watch.

That mundane reality mingles with expectation and starts to slow my pace. Six forty-two is late enough that if David were coming home as usual at the end of the day, he’d have made it here already. It’s one of the reasons he works a shift that starts earlier and ends at 3.30 p.m.: the commute from San Francisco back to Santa Rosa at the end of the workday is deadly, and San Fran proper was the only place he was able to get a pharmacy to pay him enough for an assistant’s role. The downside is that traffic at the end of the workday never makes it up to the pace of a crawl, so if he’s had to stay late, he’ll go for the norm and stay late enough that the rush has passed before he hits the road. Doesn’t happen every day, but it’s far from infrequent. David’s a hard worker. Late nights come with the territory.

I command myself to take a few deep breaths, and another long drink, finishing off my glass. Calm will come, I insist to myself, by force if necessary.

I call for Sadie with a little whistle, hoping canine companionship might help. She swivels around my ankles for a few minutes, shoving her wet snout into my knees and absorbing my coos and ‘good girls’ like they’re drugs; then, fluffed enough to satisfy her ageing frame and happily in receipt of a milk bone I toss her from a jar on the counter, she wanders to the edge of the room and flops back onto her belly. She’ll want a walk later, but that’s something to be saved for David when he gets home, not for me. Sadie’s trained us well. I do the petting, David the walking, and she the content lollygagging.

So it’s another glass of Zinfandel and a decision to let more alcohol help quell the little freak-out I’ve been experiencing throughout the day. The bottle was already open, cork pushed in loosely and positioned at the front of a little trio of bottles on the counter, when I got home. Inviting. Another one of David’s routine kindnesses, always thinking of me a step ahead, knowing what I’ll want or need.

I sip the wine in draws that are too long. For God’s sakes, Amber, get a hold of yourself.

I’m upset at being so easily thrown off balance. I’m a grown woman. My emotional state should be stronger. But the wine has started to soften my thoughts, and within a minute or two I’m less concerned with age or expectation. Wine will do that to you. The magic of the grape. Just let it rot long enough to become magical in the bottle and …

I giggle. I actually giggle, which startles me, then annoys. Only women who never giggle know how annoying the trait really is. It’s far too girlish for me, in any case, so I do the sensible thing and immediately blame it on the drink. It may be crap, but the wine’s apparently got a kick. And suddenly, I feel I could do with a lot more of it.

I grab my glass and the neck of the bottle in a single hand, my handbag in the other, and head upstairs.

My laptop is out of the bag and on my knees within a few minutes, my body settled into a piece of furniture that David and I have never been able to agree on identifying. It’s either a chair (his opinion) or a beanbag (mine). Ikea calls it a Snorfelbörg. But it’s comfortable, whatever it is, and I’m in the mood for comfort.

The wine is diminishing swiftly in the glass to my left. I’m more at ease, now, that sense coming swiftly. I feel I can sort through my emails without an overload of stress, waiting for David to come home.

It turns out that Chloe did, indeed, send me a few more materials she was able to track down on the Emma Fairfax murder. Despite having no memory of seeking her help, pulling in the aid of a fanatical detective fiction fan was clearly a good move. Chloe appears to have taken delight in proving her investigatory prowess. Her latest email to me contains three attachments. The first is some regional paper’s write-up on the discovery of the body, based on various police reports and calls. I’m impressed Chloe searched long enough to find it; there are a thousand regional newspapers in northern California, and this is from one even I have never heard of – and I work at the periodicals desk. Chloe may look the ditsy ever-child, but she’s done the greats of her mystery genre proud.

And all for me. Without my even knowing I’d asked her for it.

I swallow more wine. The report that Chloe’s sent indicates it had been updated at 4.48 p.m. this afternoon.

LOCAL POLICE CONFIRM DISCOVERY IN RUSSIAN RIVER, SONOMA COUNTY, OF THE BODY OF ONE MS EMMA CHRISTINA FAIRFAX OF SALINAS, CALIFORNIA. MS FAIRFAX, AGED 40, WAS UNMARRIED WITH NO KNOWN CHILDREN, HER SOLE NEXT OF KIN BEING AN AUNT RESIDENT IN PHOENIX, ARIZONA, WHO HAS ALREADY BEEN INFORMED OF HER NIECE’S DEMISE. MS FAIRFAX WAS EMPLOYED AS A RETAIL WORKER, HAVING A FEW YEARS AGO CHANGED CAREERS FOLLOWING A LENGTHY STINT AS THE OWNER OF A SMALL-SCALE HAIR SALON. POLICE CONFIRM HER DEATH IS BEING TREATED NOW AS SUSPECTED MURDER, AND THOUGH THEY HAVE RELEASED FEW DETAILS, OFFICIALS HAVE CONFIRMED THE CAUSE OF DEATH AS STRANGULATION, WITH THE MURDER WEAPON SUSPECTED TO BE A ROUGH ROPE OR DOG LEASH MADE OF SYNTHETIC RED FIBER. PRESUMABLY IT HAS NOT YET BEEN LOCATED BY OFFICERS, GIVEN THE POLICE DEPARTMENT’S PHRASING, BUT NO FURTHER DETAILS HAVE BEEN FORTHCOMING FOLLOWING OUR QUESTIONS.

Regional paper or not, this write-up is decently robust. The beginning traces of a personality are there, together with more details of the woman’s actual death than I’d been able to find before. God, what a way to go. Strangulation. And with a rope.

I have a profound craving to know more, but the article ends there. ‘No further details have been forthcoming.’ The kind of comment that pulls at you. I’ve come to learn we’re wired like that, all of us: the moment we know something’s been hidden from us, there’s little we desire more in the universe than to know exactly what it is.

The second file attached to Chloe’s email is a screenshot snapped from some sort of chat session. ‘Got this from a friend who worked at the bookshop before you came on. He’s over at the Berkeley Gazette now,’ is her only annotation, and I don’t recognize the ‘KL29906’ that’s the chat nickname opposite hers in the image.

KL29906: Yeah, saw a picture of the body on a cop’s desk when I went to interview them at the station this morning. Kinda snuck the glance when eyes weren’t on me. Shouldn’t really even be mentioning it, you know.

Chloe_LUV32: Come on, hon, you know I’m always up for finding out if real-life homicides are as catchy as the ones in my books. I’m sure you can tell me a little about the woman.

KL29906: Just that she’s a looker, or was. Nice hair, pretty face.

Chloe_LUV32: Online it says she was just under forty.

KL29906: Doesn’t look it in that photo, can tell you that much. Would take her for early thirties, tops. A stunner. Looked really peaceful, even with all she’d been through.

Chloe_LUV32: That all?

KL29906: Well, unless you want to chat about lunch tomorrow and—

The screenshot cuts off the conversation from there, and I smile slightly at the thought of why. The wine is making my belly warm.

There’s a picture forming in my mind. This woman, Emma Fairfax, is no longer simply a name and a collection of vital statistics. She’s apparently beautiful, younger than her years. Pretty enough to be captivating, even to someone seeing a photo of her snapped in the morgue after a rope had been wrapped around her neck and her body deposited in a river. For a few seconds, I wonder what that kind of beauty could look like.

She has no family, but she works with others. Not on the exalted plane of a social worker or teacher, perhaps, but still – running a salon is people work, and even a cashier chats over the counter. My mental portrait of her expands to frame in a chatty, friendly young woman (I emphasize the ‘young’ in my mind, since as she’s older than me by a year or so, this implies only encouraging things about my own age). Maybe I’m starting to like this Emma. She’s sounding like the sort of woman that, despite myself, I might have wanted to know.

The final file in Chloe’s email is an image. I double-click and a moment later a nearly full-screen window appears. The image is a satellite photograph, the logo in the corner marking it from Google Earth, and Chloe’s annotated it with a big, bulky red arrow and a single, square-pixel word: ‘Here’.

It’s zoomed into a tight scale, and I don’t recognize the landscape except for one feature that’s unmistakable, snaking through its centre. A river, treed in on both sides, the water a greyish-green rather than blue.

And I know what ‘Here’ means. Just as I’ve begun to get to know Emma Fairfax, I’ve been led to the site of her death.

I stay with my computer for another hour. By the time the facts I’m able to chase up are starting to blur together, the bottle of wine is mostly gone. A coincidence, I’m sure. It’s clear that it’s time to call it a day. The clock above me is perilously close to chiming nine and David still isn’t back, which means I ought to start thinking of supper without him. I’d shopped for a whole box full of organic veggies earlier in the week, thinking a nice stir fry might be fun; but I’m worn out, now, tipsy, and the thrill of cooking just isn’t the same when you’re only doing it for yourself. I’m pondering a frozen lasagne and a packet of microwaveable broccoli as I pry myself out of my seat and head towards the bedroom. Before anything, I need to free myself from a few of the more enslaving garments of the day. I’m wearing shoes that look fantastically better than they feel and a bra with an underwire designed by a masochist, and I’m anxious to be out of both of them.

I step into our walk-in, Loralees already off my heels and dangling from my toes in an awkward little dance all women learn at birth. My balance isn’t perfect with this much wine in me, but I kick them into what is roughly their place along one of the walls, then set about unbuttoning the muted orange blouse that I’ve had for – damn, I can’t think how long I’ve had it. A long time. Old-fashioned, not today’s style, but I love it.

The buttons are undone with a few finger-flicks, and I toss it towards the hangers, and —

— and that’s when I spot it. There, where it shouldn’t be.

David’s briefcase is in the closet.

Where it never is.

Oh God, my heart is stopping. No gentle transition of emotion. No whats or wonderings, just my pulse’s immediate threat to abandon me entirely.

The briefcase is oddly positioned in a little space that’s been fashioned behind his shoes, which is even stranger. A pair of gym shorts is clumsily draped over it.

Despite the tipsiness, I immediately notice the trajectory of my thoughts. The shorts ‘are draped’ over the case, which is so very different from saying ‘he draped them’ over it, which in that instant is something I don’t want to think about.

Because David doesn’t hide things from me. He doesn’t conceal. He’s open, and loving, and caring, and the man I trust more than any other in the world.

And he doesn’t hide his briefcase in the closet.