She told me three days later that she'd made the call. In July, two weeks after that conversation, we drove to a government building that didn't have the dealership's polish or even much paint, to a room with a seal on the door and a folding table inside it. Nadine had been there before, alone. This time she'd asked that I be brought in, and whoever she'd asked had apparently agreed, because a young-looking person in a gray suit was waiting for us when we arrived.
"Rowan Kessick," they said, shaking my hand with a grip that was trying to be reassuring and mostly succeeded. "I work with your wife on the logistics end of things. I want to be straight with you about what I can and can't say today." I appreciated that more than I expected to. I had pictured, without quite admitting it to myself, someone who would promise me answers and then not deliver them.
"Nadine has agreed to cooperate with an investigation," Rowan said. "I can't discuss its substance, its targets, or its methods with you, and I'd ask you not to ask her those things either, for her protection and yours. What I can tell you is that it involves people capable of real harm, and that it will not be short." "How long," I said, because that was the question I had come with, the one I thought I could get a plain answer to.
"I don't know," Rowan said. "Could be months. Could be longer. I won't promise you a date, because anyone who promises you a date right now would be lying to you, and I'd rather you trust what I tell you than feel good about it." I looked at Nadine. She was watching me with an expression I recognized from arguments we'd had over the dealership's books — the look of someone who has already made the decision and is waiting to see whether I'll make it harder.
"I'm not asking what you're doing," I told Rowan. "I'm asking who tells me if something changes that touches my daughters. If we need to move, if school changes, if there's danger in this house that I don't know about. That's the thing I need a name and a number for." Rowan nodded like they'd expected the question, maybe hoped for it. "Me," they said. "You call this number, and if I'm not the one who answers, you say Nadine's name and mine together and they'll find me."
"And if it's just — administrative," I said. "Rescheduling, that kind of thing." "Through Nadine," Rowan said. "I'm not going to be your family's calendar. I'm here for safety, not convenience." It was a fair line, and I told them so. Nadine reached over and put her hand on my arm, the first time she'd touched me since we got there, and I understood it as something like gratitude, though she didn't say the word.
On the drive home I told her I would agree to whatever household changes the safety side required — new routines, maybe a different route to the girls' school, whatever Rowan's office decided was necessary. What I would not do, I said, was agree in advance to changes I hadn't been told about yet. "That's not the same as trusting you," I said, when she looked like it had stung her. "It's the only kind of yes I've got to give."
She didn't argue the distinction, which told me she understood it better than I'd expected her to. We didn't talk much the rest of the way. I kept turning over Rowan's sentence — it will not be short — the way you turn over a stone to see what's living underneath, and I didn't like what I found there, which was simply that I had no idea yet what it would be asked of me to carry, only that an end date, the thing I had come for, was the one thing nobody in that building was willing to give me.