Empire of Ashes — Season 2, Episode 68: One Ordinary Evening

0:00 Empire of Ashes. Episode 68. One Ordinary Evening. Written by Mia. Lena. I don't want to wait for an anniversary to have one ordinary evening, Dario said, over breakfast. Three days after the conversation, we hadn't quite finished the night Pharaoh brought back that grainy photograph. I keep thinking about what you said. About what this is costing us. I don't want to solve it by talking about it once and calling it handled.

0:29 Neither do I, I said, setting down my coffee, giving him the whole of my attention the way I've learned this year a real conversation actually deserves. I think I've been treating the costs like a debt will settle properly once Falcone's dealt with, once Vasco's home, once all of it's finally over. I don't think that's fair to either of us. I don't think it's even true. We could win everything we're fighting for and still have spent this year the way we've spent it, and that's not nothing either. Then let's not wait, Dario said. Tonight. Nothing on the agenda, except each other. No folders on the table. No phone calls were braced for. I know we can't promise Falcone or Pharaoh or anyone else won't call.

1:14 I'd like to promise ourselves we won't go looking for reasons to let them. Just this once. I'd like that, I said, and meant it more than I'd expected to. feeling something loosen in my chest that I hadn't fully noticed, had been clenched. I keep the locks checked twice and the window watched and the folder open on the table more nights than not lately. I miss simply being your wife instead of your partner in something dangerous, some evenings. I don't think those two things have to cancel each other out. I think I've been letting them, out of habit, without deciding to. I think I have too, Dario said. I catch myself sometimes measuring a good evening by how little went wrong in it instead of by how much actually

1:58 went right. That's not the same standard I used to hold myself to before this year. I don't like how easily it replaced the old one without either of us noticing the swap happening. When did you notice? I asked. The swap, I mean. Was there a specific night? Or did it simply happen slowly enough that neither of us could point to it?

2:19 Slowly, he admitted. I think that's what makes it dangerous, honestly. A single bad night you can name and recover from. A year of small, reasonable adjustments, each one making sense on its own, is considerably harder to catch until you're standing in the middle of a life that looks nothing like the one you meant to build. Then that's exactly what tonight is for, I said. Naming it so it stops happening to us by accident. Then tonight we decide not to. Dario said, and reached across the table for my hand, not with a fierce, bracing grip we've both gotten used to this year, but something slower, something closer to the way he used to hold it before any of this began.

3:02 What does an ordinary evening even look like anymore? I asked, half laughing at the question even as I asked it. I'm not sure I remember how to have one that doesn't eventually curve back toward a folder or a phone call. I think I've forgotten the shape of a night. That's simply a night. Then we find out together, Dario said.

3:23 I don't think either of us needs to remember the exact shape of it. I think we just need to decide, deliberately, not to let anything else claim the evening the moment it gets the chance. Everything else has been claiming our evenings by default all year, simply because neither of us has said no to it out loud. Say it then. I said, out loud. So it's a real decision and not simply a nice thing we said over coffee that dissolves by six o 'clock. Tonight belongs to us. Dario said, plainly, the way he says things when he means for them to actually hold weight.

3:58 Not to Falcone. Not to Vasco. Or any letter or trustee or name we're still chasing. Us. Starting now. Starting now. I agreed and felt the words land somewhere real. the specific relief of a boundary actually being drawn instead of simply wished for. Dario I cooked, which I do rarely enough now that Lena laughed outright when she found me at the stove instead of the kitchen table, sleeves pushed up, the same recipe my mother taught me badly, and I've never quite perfected, a simple fish stew that always comes out slightly too salty, and that Lena has sworn, for two years running, that she genuinely prefers that way. You're doing the thing where you narrate the recipe out loud like it's a hostile witness,

4:46 she said, leaning in the doorway, watching me argue, quietly, with a pot of broth. I'd forgotten how much I missed watching you lose a fight with garlic. The garlic started it, I said. I'm simply finishing what it began. I let her steal a taste off the wooden spoon. Watched her face do the thing it always does, a real, unguarded flinch at the salt, followed immediately by reaching for more. You don't have to keep pretending you like it too salty. I've known for a year you're simply being kind to me about it. I'm not being kind, she said, indignant, stealing another taste to prove it. I like it exactly this wrong. I think I've decided the saltiness is the point.

5:29 It tastes like you trying too hard and refusing to admit it, and I find that considerably more charming than a stew that turned out perfectly. You're humoring me, I said, setting two bowls down at the small table, steam curling up between us and the candlelight Lena had lit while I wasn't looking. You've been humoring me about this stew since the second month we were married. I have not, she said, entirely unconvincingly, already reaching for a second piece of bread before she'd finished the first spoonful. I'll admit the first time, I genuinely thought you'd meant to make it that way, some old family recipe passed down deliberately over -salted for reasons I didn't understand yet. It took me four months to realize

6:12 you simply cannot taste salt properly past a certain point in cooking, the way some people can't hear a particular pitch. That's a professional diagnosis I never asked for. You got it anyway, free of charge, the same way you get most of my opinions. She laughed properly then, the sound of it loosening something in my chest that had been tight for longer than I'd let myself notice.

6:37 I love it precisely because it's imperfect and entirely, recognizably yours. I don't think I'd trust a version of you who made a flawless stew. It would feel like living with a stranger who'd learned to imitate my husband very convincingly. We ate at the small table by the window instead of the large one where the folders usually live, and for a while we simply talked about nothing that mattered in any tactical sense, a shipment I was still negotiating, a book she'd finally finished after abandoning it twice, the ridiculous ongoing feud between two men at the yacht club that Sophia had relayed secondhand and found endlessly entertaining. It felt, for almost two hours, like being 28 and 31 again, married less

7:22 than a year, before any of this had found us. I forgot how much I like simply talking to you. I admitted, somewhere near the end of it, watching the candle Lena had lit without either of us commenting on it burn down toward the holder. Not processing anything. Not carrying anything together. Just talking. The way strangers on a good date talk, except I already know everything about you, and I still don't want the conversation to end. I forgot too, Lena said quietly. I think that's the actual cost, Dario. Not the fear itself.

7:57 The forgetting that there's a version of us that doesn't require it. Lena. The phone rang a little after nine, and I felt the old reflex rise before I'd even looked at the screen. The fast, practiced bracing, and made myself breathe through it before I answered, the way I'd promised myself earlier I'd try to. I know it's late, Sophia said, and I heard, underneath the apology, the specific carefulness of someone who's learned this year exactly how much a phone call can cost the people receiving it. I wouldn't call tonight of all nights if it weren't something I thought you'd actually want before you slept on it. Tell me, I said. and felt Dario's hand find mine across the table, steady, present, not pulling either

8:43 of us fully out of the evening we'd just had, simply making room for whatever came next alongside it. I sent someone, not me, exactly the way we agreed, to spend a few afternoons near Calloway and Pierce's Block, canvassing the shops the ordinary way, nothing that would draw attention. A dry cleaner two doors down remembers a regular customer, always the same day, second Tuesday of the month, who leaves his car in their loading zone for 20 minutes at a stretch and always tips the attendant generously enough to be remembered fondly. They don't have a last name. They have a first one, written on the valet slip they use for regulars who don't want to wait in a formal line. What name? I asked, hearing my own voice

9:27 go very still. Vincent, Sophia said. Just Vincent. No last name on the slip, ever. In 11 months of records, the manager let my contact glance through under an entirely unrelated pretext. Paid cash every time, same as Callaway's ledger. Never chatty, according to the attendant, but never unkind either. The kind of customer service people remember warmly without ever actually knowing anything real about. Dario. Vincent.

10:00 I repeated. testing the shape of it out loud, the way Lena tests a number for the sound of wanting it to mean more than it does. That's not nothing. It's also not a name, not really. Half the city could be a Vincent. I know, Sophia said. I want to be exactly as careful with this as I was with the initial. A first name from a dry cleaner's memory is not a confirmed identity, and I'm not going to let hope round it up into one before it's earned that. But it's the first thing anyone's actually heard this man called out loud by another human being, rather than read off a ledger or a trust filing. That's a different category of information than anything we've had on him before. Can your contact ask

10:44 more carefully? A description, a car, anything beyond the name itself. Already did, gently, over two separate visits, so it wouldn't read as fishing. Fifties, well -dressed but not flashy. Drives an unremarkable dark sedan, always alone. Nothing that rules anyone in or out definitively. I wanted you both to have the name tonight, rather than wait for me to build a fuller picture first.

11:10 I know how much smaller pieces have mattered to both of you lately, even the incomplete ones. Should we do anything with it tonight? I asked. Or does this wait until morning the way the Slate Street find once did? It waits, Sophia said. There's nothing urgent about a first name that sat unexamined in a dry cleaner's memory for 11 months. I'd rather all of us look at it clear headed tomorrow than chase it half -asleep tonight and miss something obvious because we were too eager to finally have a name to hold on to. Agreed, Lena said. Tomorrow, we start carefully cross referencing. Any Vincent connected to Falcone's circle, the Yacht Club, Corvus, anywhere the other names in this have already touched. Tonight,

11:57 it simply exists. It doesn't have to be solved in the same hour it arrived. Thank you for calling, Lena said, and thank you for not calling an hour ago. I think we needed the hour first. I could hear it, actually, Sophia said, something warm entering her voice for the first time in the conversation. You both sound different tonight.

12:18 Lighter. I'm glad, whatever tonight actually was. Don't let me be the reason it stops being that just because I had to call eventually. You're not, I said. You're simply the reason it gets to keep going tomorrow, instead of stalling out entirely. There's a difference, and I don't think we've thanked any of you enough this year for being it. Lena. Sophia's call ended gently, without the particular dread that usually clings to the end of these calls now. And Dario... and I sat together afterward at the small table, the candle nearly gone, one new word, a first name, unconfirmed, possibly meaningless, added to everything else we were quietly carrying. Vincent, I said again, turning it over. I keep waiting to feel the same

13:08 cold I usually feel when a new piece lands. I don't quite. I think it's because tonight already happened first. I got the ordinary evening before the investigation found its way back in, instead of the other way around, for once. I noticed that too, Dario said. I think that might actually be the answer to what we were trying to solve at breakfast. Not choosing between the marriage and the fight. Simply refusing to let the fight always go first anymore, even when it wants to.

13:39 I'd like to keep doing that, I said. Not perfectly. I don't think either of us is capable of doing this perfectly, most nights. Just on purpose. The way tonight was on purpose, instead of by accident whenever the phone happens to stay quiet long enough to let it. We could make it a standing thing, Dario said. Not an anniversary. Not a milestone we have to earn by surviving something first. Simply a night, every so often, that belongs to us before it belongs to anything else. the way we said it would at breakfast. I'd like that a great deal, I said. I think I'd like it best if neither of us announced which night it was going to be in advance. I don't want it to become one more thing on a schedule we manage around

14:25 Falcone and Vincent and everyone else. I want it to simply happen the way tonight happened, because one of us finally said it out loud at breakfast instead of waiting for permission. Then that's how we'll do it, Dario said. No schedule. Just the two of us, deciding, whenever it's needed most. On purpose, I said again, testing how it felt to say the phrase like a promise instead of simply a wish. Dario blew out the last of the candle himself, the small domestic gesture of a man closing one kind of evening gently before whatever tomorrow decided to open instead. Vincent and a dry cleaner's memory, and a first name that might mean everything or might mean nothing.

15:09 Tomorrow we find out which. Tonight, we already had what we actually came down here for. Outside, the harbor ran its ordinary schedules under a sky holding no particular opinion about a first name overheard by a dry cleaner, or a fish stew too salty on purpose, or the specific, considerable grace of two people who had remembered, if only for one evening, exactly what they were actually fighting to keep. To be continued. That was episode 68 of Empire of Ashes. If this one has its hooks in you, the next episode is already waiting.

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