A long moment passed, his wife staring into the empty space in front of her. "You are so cynical."
"Life makes smart people cynical," he said. "It's a sad but true fact."
"Not all of them." Frannie let out a deep sigh. A shadow of distaste crossed her face.
"Cynical's not so bad," Hardy said. "It saves a lot of heartache down the line."
"Right. I know. That's what you think." She closed her eyes for a second, drew a heavy breath, weariness bleeding out of her. "I guess I'm just worried about you."
"Me? Moi? I?"
Tightening her lips, biting down against some strong emotion, she said, "Never mind," and turned away from him.
"That was a little humor, Frannie. Just trying to lighten it up."
Her chest rose and fell twice. Finally, she faced him. "That's what I'm worried about. Everything being a joke."
He tried to keep it light, josh her out of whatever it was. "That's funny," he said, "I wish more things were jokes."
When suddenly, none of it was a joke at all anymore. She threw off the covers and was out of bed, nearly running across to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. The lock clicked.
Hardy stood stock-still, his head down. After ten seconds, he went over and knocked. Whispered. "Fran? Are you all right?"
He thought he heard a sob.
"Whatever it is, I'm sorry." He waited a moment. "No more joking if you come out. Promise."
Finally. "In a minute."
It was more like ten.
He was lying on the bed, hands behind his head. He barely dared look at her, afraid he might scare her off. The two of them hadn't had a cross word since before the shoot-out nearly a year and half ago. He didn't want anything to be wrong between them now. He said nothing while she got into her side of the bed, pulled the blankets up over her. "I didn't mean to be so dramatic," she said. "I'm sorry."
"You can be dramatic anytime you want."
He waited for another minute, perhaps two. A very long time.
Finally, she sighed. "I don't mean to be critical of you," she said. "It's just that I am so worried about you."
"You don't need to be. I'm fine."
"Maybe you are, but you're not the same person you always said you wanted to be." She shook her head. "I'm not saying this right."
"Okay. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere."
She wrestled with it for another minute or more. Finally, she sighed. "I just don't know if there's anything you care about anymore."
"I care about you. And the kids."
"No. I know you love us, but I mean with yourself, with your life. Are you happy with your life?"
A million glib answers, the usual grab bag, sprung to his mind. But that, of course, was what she was getting at. He sat up and half turned away from her. "Am I happy? What makes you think I'm not?"
"It's not what I think."
"But something, just now, made you ask."
She reached over and touched his back. "It's not just now. And maybe it's the same something that's making you not answer."
He shifted to face her. "I honestly don't know what that is, Frannie." Then: "I don't feel like I'm doing anything different."
"You don't?"
"No. Not consciously anyway."
"No? What about this boy Amy just called you about? Andrew?"
"What about him?"
"You're happy with him going to jail for eight years?"
Another shrug. "It beats the alternative, which is life in prison. It's also the deal Amy made. It seemed like a good one."
"If he's guilty."
Hardy shrugged. "Amy says he's admitting, so he probably is. Either way, though, the deal gets him out not much later than if he went to trial and got acquitted anyway."
"So eight years for an innocent person is okay with you?"
"Well, first, as I said, he's probably not innocent. And second, he's already in the system. So he's looking at a year or two, minimum, before anything shakes out anyway."
"Which leaves six years. In six years, your own little boy is twenty."
Hardy ran a palm over his cheek. "So this is about Andrew Bartlett?"
Frannie shook her head. "It's about…" She started over. "It just seems everything you do nowadays has to do with manipulating the rules somehow. It's all just cynicism, and money, and cutting the deal."
Hardy's voice hardened perceptibly. "Maybe you don't remember last year too well, Frannie. When you and I tried to play by the rules, and got Polaroids with gunsights drawn on over our kids. The experience hasn't quite paled on me. So yeah, I guess I've gotten a little jaded on the whole play-by-the-rules concept. If I'm good at bending them and that makes life easy, I'm a sap if I don't."
"That's what you tell yourself?"
He turned now, frankly glaring. "Yes, it is. And I do very well at it."
Frannie glared back. "And that's also why you drink all the time now? Because it helps you forget how you're living?"
"What I'm doing is supporting this family, Frannie. The best way I know how."
Frannie watched a muscle twitch in his jaw. "Look," she said, "you cut a deal on this child molester guy the other morning, when you know there was a time you wouldn't have gotten within a mile of him."
"That was fifty thousand dollars' worth of-"
"Stop. Then you go to lunch, have a few drinks, and make a deal for your firm to help elect the DA. Then you have some wine at your partners meeting and try to cut a deal to make poor Gina come back to work when you know that her heart's gone out of it…"
"Let me ask you this, Frannie- tell me someone whose heart hasn't gone out of it, especially after…" He let it hang.
Frannie waited until he met her eyes again. "I don't mean to make you mad. I just don't believe that the person cutting all these deals is who you really are."
"Who I am." His laugh rang dry and empty. "Who I am is a guy who's lost faith in the process. But the bills keep on coming, the kids' college is around the corner. What am I supposed to do? Just stop?"
"Maybe you could do something you care about." She moved over toward him, put her arms around his shoulders. "Here," she said, "lie down with me. Close your eyes. You don't have to make any decisions right now, tonight. But a blind person can see how unhappy you are, how it's all frantic and manic and going going going just to keep busy."
"Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
She kissed him. "You're not going to die tomorrow."
She felt him growing calmer next to her, his breathing more regular. He put his arm around her and she lay up against him. After another minute, he said, "I think maybe I am drinking a little too much."
She noted the repetition of the disclaiming qualifiers-"I think," "maybe," "a little." But it was nevertheless an admission of sorts and, she hoped, a start.
After another couple of minutes, his body seemed to settle next to her. Sleep trying to claim him. "I'm tired," he said. Then, "I'm worried about Abe, too." The words were a barely audible mumble.
Then he was asleep.
Back at her apartment, Wu changed out of her lawyer clothes and chose a black leather miniskirt, a diaphanous red shirt over a skin-colored bra, a heavy leather jacket against the cold wind. Fifteen minutes after she'd hung up with Dismas Hardy, she was among the packed bodies at Indigo's, another bar at the triangle. At a dinner-plate-sized table, twirling her first cosmopolitan of the night with a well-manicured hand, she perched herself on a high stool and showed a lot of leg. The volume of the music- an endless bass and drum loop- made conversation impossible, but she didn't mind.