The Last Confession

Darlene Shah pulled into Isobel Clausen's driveway at six forty on a Tuesday evening in late February, and the porch light was flickering like it had a secret to keep. She was forty-three, an office manager, and she had spent the entire drive rehearsing arguments she would probably never say out loud.

She knocked. Isobel opened the door already holding her phone flashlight under her chin, which made her look like a ghost with a grudge.

"You're late," Isobel said.

"There was an accident on the interstate. Hello to you too."

"Come in before the heat gets out. My furnace is doing something creative."

Darlene stepped inside and looked around. The living room was a museum of modern stress: takeout containers stacked on the coffee table, work papers fanned across the couch cushions, a laptop charger coiled like it was trying to escape. Isobel was forty-one, had moved to Toledo two years ago, and Darlene still knew almost nothing about her beyond the fact that she was infuriating.

"So the network's been down since two," Isobel said, leading the way. "Which is when your team pushed that update nobody approved."

"Nobody approved it because you didn't answer the approval email."

"I answered it. I said no!"

"You said 'see my notes.' Your notes were nine paragraphs."

"They were thorough."

They set up laptops on the coffee table, moving takeout containers to the floor with the reluctant cooperation of two women who would rather die than admit the other's organizational system had merit. The lamps dimmed, brightened, dimmed again.

"Is your power okay?" Darlene asked.

"The power is fine. The power is having a moment."

The wifi icon spun. Isobel swore under her breath, which Darlene found, annoyingly, a little impressive.

"Look," Darlene said, "we've been going back and forth on email all day like two lawyers billing hours. Can we just fix the actual problem?"

"The actual problem is your team doesn't read documentation."

"And the actual problem is you'd rather write a novel about a ticket than close one."

Isobel turned to look at her, and for a second the usual smirk wasn't there. "Is that what you think of me?"

"Isn't it what you think of me? You've called me a bottleneck in writing. Twice."

"You cc'd my director on a parking dispute."

"He took my spot."

Isobel laughed despite herself, a short sharp sound, and sat down on the floor across the coffee table, cross-legged, papers everywhere. "God. What are we even doing, Darlene?"

"I ask myself that every Tuesday."

The lights went out.

Not a flicker. Out. The furnace sighed to a stop and the house went quiet in that specific way houses do when everything electric stops pretending to work.

"That's fine," Isobel said into the black. "That's totally fine."

There was a pause, and then a nervous laugh, the kind that escapes before permission is granted.

"Sorry," Isobel said. "Dark rooms. I don't love them. It's stupid."

"It's not stupid." Darlene's voice came steady out of the darkness, low and unhurried, and it did something to the room. "Stay put. I've got a phone light. You got candles? Everyone from the Midwest has an emergency candle stash, it's practically a law."

"Utility room, off the kitchen. There's a box on the shelf. Maybe. I moved in and never organized."

Darlene found the kitchen by phone light, found the utility room, found the box, which contained three pillar candles, a bag of birthday candles, and a book of matches from a bar that had probably closed before Isobel even moved to town. She carried it back and lit two candles on the coffee table, and the room came back in warm, wavering pieces.

"Floor," Darlene said, sitting down across from her. "Might as well. Laptops are dead weight now anyway."

Isobel lowered herself down, pulling her knees up. The candles threw shadows across her face. "Thanks. For the candles."

"Don't mention it. Literally. I have a reputation."

"You have a reputation as someone who alphabetizes the shared supply cabinet."

"Someone has to."

The silence sat between them for a while, comfortable in a way that neither of them acknowledged, because acknowledging it would ruin it.

"I moved here to get away from my divorce," Isobel said suddenly, staring at the candle flame. "Two years ago. In case you were keeping a file."

"Was it bad?"

"It was the slow kind of bad. The kind where nobody yells, you just slowly stop mattering to each other. Nine years. He thought everything I did was a little too much. Too intense. Too interested in things." She shrugged. "I kept turning the volume down until there wasn't much of me left."

Darlene nodded slowly. "Mine went the other way. Three years ago. He couldn't handle..." She paused, choosing. "Certain things about me. I frightened him, near the end."

Isobel looked up. "You? You alphabetize."

"That's not all I do."

"Huh." Isobel was quiet a moment. "What kind of things?"

Darlene considered the candle. Considered the question. Considered how much truth a dark room could hold. "Why are you telling me all this?"

"Because the power's out and you found my candles and I've been fighting with you for eight months and I'm tired." Isobel laughed again, softer this time. "That's a real answer. I don't have those very often."

"Well. Keep going then."

"Can I ask you something instead?" Isobel's voice had changed, gone quieter, careful. "When you said he couldn't handle certain things. What would handling them have looked like? If he'd been able to."

Darlene took a slow breath. "It would have looked like me being in charge sometimes. Actually in charge, not role-playing at it while secretly asking permission. He wanted me fierce in emails and soft at home. I got tired of being a font setting."

Isobel stared at her. The candlelight made her eyes look bigger than they were. "In charge," she repeated.

"Is that shocking?"

"No. Yes. I don't know!" Isobel pressed her palms flat to the floor with exaggerated care, like her hands needed a job. "I've spent two years in a new town telling myself I want an easy, calm, balanced partnership. And I've spent eight months picking fights with the most controlled woman in the building."

Darlene felt something move in her chest that she refused to name. "Is that what I am? The most controlled woman in the building?"

"Aren't you?"

"Sometimes control is the thing people do instead of asking for what they want."

"God, don't do that. Don't be wise. I can't fight you and want you at the same time, it's too much for a Tuesday."

The words landed in the room and neither of them moved to pick them up. The candle on the left guttered and steadied.

"You want me," Darlene said. Not a question, but almost one.

Isobel's nervous laugh came back, smaller now. "Well. This is humiliating. The power outage was supposed to be about the network."

"Isobel."

"Yes. Okay? Yes. Since approximately the parking spot incident, which I know is deranged." She pressed her palms to her face. "Please tell me you didn't bring me here to reject me in candlelight."

"I didn't bring you here at all. The network did." Darlene reached across the coffee table and set her hand flat on the papers between them, not touching Isobel yet, just close. "So I'm going to ask you something, and you can say no and we order pizza and never speak of it. Or you can say yes."

Isobel lifted her head, hands still half over her face. "Ask."

"Come here."

Isobel looked at the hand, at the candle, at Darlene's face in the flickering light.

"Okay," she said, and moved around the coffee table.

Isobel sat down close, not quite touching, and the gap between them felt louder than the furnace ever had. Darlene reached out and took Isobel's hand, just that, and Isobel let out a breath she'd been holding since the parking spot incident, probably.

"Okay," Isobel said. "Now what?"

"Now we figure out what this is. Carefully. Because we still have to share a printer."

"We share a printer already. It's a nightmare."

"So we're used to suffering."

Isobel laughed and shifted her weight, and that was when her elbow caught the edge of the shelf behind the couch. Something tipped. Something clattered. A small wooden box slid off the shelf, hit the floor, and spilled its contents across the rug in the candlelight.

Both of them went still.

Darlene looked down. Leather. Straps. Buckles. Two cuffs, a third one still tangled with them, and something else that she recognized instantly and chose not to name out loud yet.

The silence that followed was the heaviest silence of the evening, and the evening had already had some contenders.

"Oh," Isobel said finally. "That's. That's my."

"Your box that fell."

"Yes. That fell. On its own. By itself."

"Uh huh."

"I can explain."

"Please don't." Darlene reached down and picked up one of the cuffs. She turned it over in her fingers, feeling the weight of it, the good stitching, the solid hardware. Not drugstore junk. Someone had done research. Someone had spent actual money. "Well. Isobel Clausen."

"Don't say my full name like that."

"Isobel Clausen." Darlene held the cuff up to the candlelight. "Is this why you're always so prickly?"

Isobel's face went red, Darlene could see it even by candle, but she didn't look away. That got Darlene. The blush and the stare at the same time.

"Maybe," Isobel said. "Maybe that's exactly why. Maybe being prickly at you eight hours a day is the only outlet I have for the fact that every time you correct my reports in a meeting with that voice, I have to go sit in my car for ten minutes."

Darlene set the cuff down on her knee. "In your car."

"Doing nothing! Just. Breathing. Regulating." She waved a hand. "It's fine. It's very normal."

"It's not normal."

"No. It's not." Isobel pulled her knees up again, wrapped her arms around them, and looked at Darlene over the top of them. "I've never used those. Bought them two years ago when I moved here. Fresh start, new town, new me, new cuffs. The cuffs stayed in the box. The new me got a job and made an enemy."

"You made me first."

"You started it."

"Isobel."

"You absolutely started it, you emailed me at 7:02 in the morning about a semicolon."

"And you replied to all."

"Because I was furious."

"Were you."

"Yes." Isobel unfolded herself slowly. "No. Both.