He's watching her carefully as she speaks, perfectly silent, almost without blinking. Every word, every expression that flickers across her face is noticed, measured, weighed against everything else she does or has ever done. He doesn't interrupt her, and when she tugs on his hand to have him sit, he obeys without hesitation. It was a crucial part of hierarchy of their home, that she be in charge. That she be right. He'd never told her that, wouldn't know how to put it into words. Something that had been drilled into him so thoroughly from such a very young age. Obedience was something he'd always been willing to give her. Submission.
But not trust. No, he hadn't really trusted her anymore than she'd trusted him. Not really. That was true. So he can afford her the same courtesy that she does him. She doesn't deny the bag (and, oh, what a mixed hurricane of emotions that causes him... that she'd really consider abandoning him, stealing his son away from him...), so he doesn't deny the cameras. There's no point.
In truth, he'd never denied anything. Lies by omission were still lies, but he'd never spun a story for his wife. If she had asked about the bugs, he'd have confessed to them. But she'd never asked. Just as he'd never asked for details about her overnight visits at the med center.
She wasn't at the med center. No, no she wasn't. She'd met up with him. Her brother. It was hard to imagine his Adelaide amidst a group of bikers. Difficult to picture her in a filthy camp, surrounded by tattooed criminals doing God-knows-what. He'd imagined her with other men. Another thing he'd never confessed to her, couldn't imagine confessing. But they'd been clean men. Golden specimens of masculinity, heroic paragons.
Not unlike his brother.
Self-hate gnawed at him. God, if her bags hadn't already been packed, the perversion of that particular thought would have urged her to do it. He could certainly empathize with not knowing what was and wasn't safe to share. Thus summed the entirety of his existence.
His mouth quirks into a self-deprecating half-smile, more pained than amused. "He's been showing your picture... He found you." Their security holes were worse than he thought. No question, then, about whether she'd been recognized by the Rafferty girl. If she'd only told him she'd wanted someone found... He could have found her damn brother for her. Her parents. Second cousins. A favorite grade school teacher.
But why would she have known to ask? He'd offered her jewelry. Bubble baths. Not once had he thought to offer to comb the earth for lost loved ones, or find a way to exile her enemies. It was just something he'd assumed she'd known he'd do.
He sits in silence a moment, picking apart her words, dissecting the sentences for hidden meanings. Just in case. When he does speak again, it's straight to the point. "And that somehow makes me your enemy?"
That she said nothing he can accept. That she loves her brother... even with a criminal background, is also not surprising. He'd loved his mother, even with the nagging certainty that she'd had something to do with his father's death. He loved his own brothers, even as much as he resented them. There wasn't a scenario he could imagine that would lead him to abandoning his wife in a Texas shithole and erasing her from their son's life.
Yet, Charlie's clothes were missing, too, so she'd been preparing to do just that, to him.
There was a natural conclusion there; a sharp, piercing answer that hits hard and suddenly. He has to struggle to maintain control of his expression, force himself to keep breathing under the weight of realization. He should be raging, really. Ranting or sobbing or something. But why break the lifelong trend of burying emotions? All he does is close his eyes, breaking contact so that his voice doesn't crack when he adds: "Ah. I see."