WHO: Bishop & Amita Haham WHEN: July 17, Evening. WHERE: Their bedroom. SUMMARY: Amita has had something on her mind. WARNINGS: References to drunk driving & Amita disappointing people.
Amita closed the book that she'd been staring at for the last ten minutes without really reading it. She suspected Bishop thought she'd been reading. Or maybe he'd noticed that she hadn't turned a page. She should have turned some pages. Oh well, it didn't really matter. She was distracted and as the shop window was getting back in order and things felt more, well, normal, the abnormality of this particular thing was beginning to stand out again.
She tilted her mouth up slightly, lips pressed together so that it made a sort of horizontal line, before she put the book to the bedside table, and checked the alarm on her phone. For all she hadn't been reading the book, she was pretty certain the characters in it had less of a difficult time using words than she currently was. She sighed, turned so that she was facing her husband, and turned onto her side.
Bishop had been reading as they relaxed toward sleep, still too much mental energy to rest just yet. His reading had been a woodworking magazine, the article about adding shelves to one’s house, a DIY design as you like project. They did not necessarily need a great many shelves. But if they were to adopt a cat, it seemed like the kind of thing a cat might like.
Which was all well and good, but Amita had only been growing more restless beside him, something reading was not enough to help with. When he read too long, sometimes he got like that. But then Bishop got up and walked or ran or exercised until he could sit still again. Amita stayed in bed, though, and looked at him. He sensed perhaps a serious topic, and his heart raced a moment. Things had felt wrong for a little while, but it hadn’t been them, he hadn’t thought it had been them. Whatever it was, it had come to conversation.
He marked his place in the magazine and set it on his nightstand. Then Bishop turned back toward Amita and gave her his attention. “What’s going through your mind, love?” Bishop asked. It could have been a light question, but it was said seriously.
That was the question wasn't it? And whether or not it was something she wanted to talk about, but recently it felt more like something she should talk about whether she wanted to or not. And there were other things that might have been easier, things about the shop, or about what she planned for the summer. But instead there was this other thing.
"I just," she started, and then stopped, breathing out slightly frustrated. "I have a confession to make."
His mind first went, unfortunately, to Moira MacTeer. Bishop found it nearly unbelievable to consider the idea that Amita could be confessing to murdering the woman. He also took comfort that if she had and if she were about to confess as much to him, he could not be compelled in the court of law to testify against her. However, they would have a great many more problems if she had done anything like that. A whole five seconds or so after that line of thought started, Bishop supposed it was possible it would be something more mundane. Somehow Amita having an affair, the most stereotypical of confessions to make in a marriage, felt even more impossible. Was that odd?
That had to be what made it a confession - that whatever this was was something Bishop had not, perhaps could not, anticipate or predict Amita doing. It raised the question of just how well they knew each other (enough Bishop trusted her with his life, his heart, Destiny…). He released his breath and took another one, having accidentally held it. He could not shake the sense ‘everything’ was about to change. “You can tell me,” Bishop said.
Oddly enough Amita hadn't even really thought about where Bishop's mind might jump, or she likely would have stated things quite a bit differently, but that didn't mean that what she had to say didn't have something to do with Moira MacTeer. Just perhaps not the worst case scenario that Bishop might think it, but perhaps the fact that he could not testify against her, was part of what had made her turn here instead of to Lochan, although she had considered speaking with her brother.
She shook her head slightly. "I made a rather stupid decision the night of the party, after you left."
That statement left everything on the table. It was just a matter of what kind of stupid Amita had done. While his mind attempted to provide further possibilities, Bishop knew Amita had come home safely that night. That did not necessarily make whatever happened all right. But they were both here, safe and sound, in their bed. They had the chance to figure it out together. If it got rid of the sinking sensation in his stomach that had begun well before this conversation, perhaps it would not all be blue skies, but rainbows were never possible on a clear day.
“Okay,” Bishop tried not to think about that little shake of her head, “What kind of stupid?” Amita was a good judge of something being stupid or not, so he trusted she was right that it had been. Perhaps whatever it was wouldn’t have happened had Bishop stayed, instead of taking someone home, but he had never believed in having to be with his wife every moment of every social engagement to make sure things happened all right. That wasn’t much of a relationship he wanted to have.
Amita pressed her lips together. She hated admitting this to Bishop, because it felt so ridiculous in context. Of course it had been all right, and she hadn't been so foolish to not realize that she was being foolish. But it could have been something rather bad in the wrong circumstance.
"I told you I was all right to drive," she glanced down at her hands, brow furrowed. "And I think I was when you left," she rushed through the rest. "Obviously, I'd had a bit to drink, but I was going to be there a bit more, so it wasn't a big problem, but I had another drink after you left, and I was definitely a bit… intoxicated when I drove home."
Bishop felt like he stopped breathing the moment Amita said a word more. I told you meant that she had not. He had fallen asleep not long after he had gotten home, but the car had been back. His mind did not like the conclusion just that sentence was leading toward, and Amita took it further. Said it, if in words gentler than they truly were.
He stared at her for a little bit, until his eyes made him blink. Words were difficult to form because all Bishop could think about was Raf, his trips out of town on the anniversary, the important person permanently removed from his life, the life a whole life a whole person who was gone. She could have called the uber. She could have called him. He would have run back if she’d asked. “You could have killed someone,” Bishop said. He was not over that just yet. “You didn’t… it’s not okay even if ‘nothing happened,’ Amita.” He didn’t know how to place that information with everything he knew about her, all the things he loved, but even the rougher bits that weren’t rom com imperfections to love for being imperfect.
“God that was so stupid,” he muttered. But Bishop looked back at her. “Nothing else did happen, did it?” He was fairly sure Moira had not been hit by a car and fairly sure no one else had been killed or seriously injured that night. Everything wouldn’t return to being okay even if that were it. He wasn’t about to walk away if something had happened or if something hadn’t. Bishop didn’t have an idea of what would make him do that, he just knew it hadn’t happened.
Amita bit her lip, and she could feel tears welling up at her eyes. She hated disappointing people, and she could tell that Bishop was disappointed. Perhaps she shouldn't have mentioned anything, or she shouldn't have mentioned this part, but then she would have to explain the rest of it somehow and these pieces locked together. But she'd always been good at presenting the right foot forward and this was not the right foot. This was the wrong foot, and a deeply mangled one at that.
Worse still he wasn't wrong, and she knew it. And she should have called Mia in the Uber, she could have, but she'd also thought she was fine when she left. She'd known she'd had something to drink, but she hadn't quite realized until she'd been actually driving.
"No, I know it was, Bishop," she told him, agreeing, although she didn't know if that would help the situation or make it worse. "And I should have. I just wasn't thinking with everything that had happened, and I thought I was fine, and then I wasn't, I pulled over? I waited for a while, because I didn't want to hurt anyone. It was just so late, I could have…" she stopped. She was rambling and he had already listed all the things she could have done, add to that even calling Lochan, who would have likely come to get her as well. "It won't happen again, I'll leave with you next time. Or, I'll just not drink, that's probably safer really."
Bishop felt blindsided by the conversation. It was late, nearly time they slept (he probably should have turned his light off twenty minutes ago). But it was too important. It mattered. Not just because it had happened - it had happened. But because it could happen again. Bishop was fairly strict himself about drinking and driving, but he was used to running or walking everywhere and was perfectly willing to walk for miles if he needed to, rather than get behind the wheel of a car. Not just for concern with drinking. For anything that needed it.
It was a relief she had pulled over, a relief she hadn’t driven drunk the whole way between the Bellows Inn and their house. It was too damn far. One block was too far to drive drunk. Somehow, it couldn’t happen again. However that went. It wasn’t Bishop’s place to declare how that happened. But he was willing to help, to be someone else touching base with her about it. “Whatever way will work for you,” Bishop replied, “You decide, I’ll have your back.” To support her, to stop her if she slipped, to stop her from making a worse mistake she wouldn’t be able to take back.
She was so damn lucky nothing more had happened.
Amita nodded, and reached her fingers up to her eyes to wipe them. "I'm sorry, Bishop," she told him regretfully.
Of course there was the other bit.
She gathered herself up. The thing was she had been intoxicated, and that meant that her certainty was less than it could have been. And yet.