I noticed the shift before I understood it, the way you notice a draft in a house before you find the open window letting it in.
Law had been quieter for a few days, distracted in a way that didn't match the easy warmth that had become normal between us. Nothing dramatic — he still showed up, still kissed me good morning, still asked about my shifts at Frank's like he actually cared about the details — but something underneath it had gone careful again, the way he used to be before he let the wall come down.
"Everything okay?" I asked one night, lying tangled together on his couch, his fingers tracing slow patterns against my arm.
"Fine," he said, the same word Markus had apparently learned to read as a warning sign, though I didn't know that yet. "Just thinking about work."
I let it go, mostly because I had my own small distractions to chew on. Karen had been different too, lately — calling more often, asking pointed questions about Law that felt slightly off-center from her usual curiosity. Does he ever talk about wanting kids someday. Does he seem happy, really happy, or just going through the motions. Do you think he'd ever consider staying married past the four years, if things went well.
I told myself it was just Karen being Karen — nosy, invested, thrilled to finally have some romance to live vicariously through after years of having none of her own. It made sense, on paper. She'd never gotten the chance to want anyone the normal way, never gotten to date or flirt or build the small, ordinary intimacies most people my age had years to practice. Of course she was curious about mine.
I missed the other explanation entirely, the one that would have made considerably more sense if I'd been paying closer attention instead of just being grateful she was finally healthy enough to be a nuisance again.
"Karen asked if you ever talk about staying married past the four years," I mentioned to Law one evening, mostly as an offhand comment, watching his reaction more out of habit than suspicion.
Something flickered across his face — too quick to name, gone before I could ask about it. "What did you tell her," he asked.
"That I didn't know," I said. "That it's not really something we've talked about directly, even though it's obviously where things are heading."
"Where do you think things are heading," he asked, turning the question back on me with a careful kind of focus that felt different from his usual curiosity.
"Honestly," I said, surprising myself with how easily the truth came now, "I think I want to stay. Past the contract. I think I'd choose this even if the blackmail disappeared tomorrow."
He kissed me instead of answering directly, slow and certain, and I let the moment swallow whatever uneasy thread I'd been about to follow about Karen's questions, about his distraction, about the small, accumulating signs that something underneath the surface of our happy little arrangement had started shifting in a direction neither of us had quite named yet.
I think about that conversation often now, the version of myself who had every piece of the puzzle laid out in front of him and still couldn't see the shape it was forming. I was happy. I think that's the real reason I missed it — not carelessness, not stupidity, just the particular blindness that comes from finally getting something good after years of having nothing, and refusing to look too closely at anything that might threaten to take it away.
It would take considerably longer than it should have for me to finally see what was right in front of me the whole time.