Page 156 of Never Alone
His thumb again. The small claim.
"And the money. The way I handled the money. That was for you. You don't know what you don't know about money. I was protecting you from yourself."
"I know."
His face had not changed shape since he had sat down. Calm. Patient. Sure.
"And the friends. The ones I asked you not to see. Those women were not good for you. They put ideas in your head that you couldn't manage. I did that to keep you whole."
He took my other hand.
He held both of mine across the table.
He looked at me the way he had looked at me at our wedding.
"Everything I did was because I loved you."
I thought of Cole. I thought of the word love in his mouth and the word love in this mouth and how the same word could be made into two different things by two different men.
I held my face still.
I felt the wire at my sternum.
I held my face still.
I watched the lobby in the mirror over the bar. I had been watching it since the moment I sat down. The lobby was the exit I had picked. The lobby was the door I knew would open if it was going to open at all.
The door opened.
Detective Wilson came through it with two uniformed officers behind him.
I saw him before Nicholas did.
Nicholas was still holding my hand when Wilson reached our table.
"Mr. St. George."
Wilson said it the way he said everything. Flat. No embellishment. The voice of a man who had been doing this for thirty years.
Nicholas looked up.
His face moved through three things in half a second. Confusion. Recognition. Calculation.
I watched it move. I had seen it move before. The last time had been the morning I had told him I was leaving him for the first time, and he had needed half a second to decide whether to make it bad or worse.
He let go of my hand.
The release was the first thing his body had given me in ten years that I had asked for.
He stood up slowly. The way a lawyer stood up when he was being arrested in a hotel bar.
"Detective."
"Mr. St. George, you're under arrest."
"On what charge?"
He asked it the way a lawyer asks. The way he had asked it on a hundred calls for other men.
