Eighteen months after Paige's arrest, Everett asked Naomi to dinner. Not a courtroom appointment. Not a custody discussion. Just dinner.
She said yes. On one condition. "No talking about the case," she said. "Not once, all night."
He agreed.
They talked instead about the county fair where they'd first met. About the pies she used to sell. And the fifth one she'd given him for free. "You still owe me for that one," she said. "I've been paying interest on it for seven years," he said. She laughed. The real kind. The kind he hadn't heard in longer than he wanted to admit.
They didn't rush anything after that. No dramatic reconciliation. No sudden remarriage.
They had their first real argument about six weeks in, over something small and ordinary. Everett showed up twenty minutes late to pick up the twins, no call, no text. Naomi's old fear surfaced immediately, sharp and unreasonable even to her. "You don't get to just disappear on me again," she said, voice shaking. "I was stuck behind an accident on Route 9," Everett said. "I should have called. I'm sorry." It wasn't about the twenty minutes, and they both knew it. It was about every unanswered call from the year before, all at once. They sat with that argument for a long time before either of them softened. It was the first time either of them had fought fair in years.
