“How’d you get this scar?” she asked, her finger on his left eyebrow.

He laughed.

“Back when I was still an assistant DA, I was out at a bar one weekend with some friends, and some people near us got in a fight. I, very stupidly, jumped in to break it up, and got hit with a broken beer bottle. I probably should have gotten stitches, but once everything died down, I just wanted to relax and see the end of the game. I had a black eye for like a week afterward.” He kissed her softly. “Most people don’t even notice it anymore.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder while he picked up the remote and flipped among all of the possible streaming services for a silly movie for them to watch. For the next hour, they sat there together, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her, snacking, drinking wine, occasionally giggling softly at the movie, until he pressed pause.

“Are you ready for pie?” he asked her.

“I was arrested when I was a teenager,” she said.

He stopped halfway through leaning over to get the pie, and sat back down.

She hadn’t meant to say it. And she definitely hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. She hadn’t meant to tell him this at all. She almost never told people about her arrest; not because she was ashamed of it, but because it always made them look at her differently, and she hated that.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked.

She nodded slowly.

“It was stupid, just one of those teen things. There was this guy I liked, and he wanted to break into the school one weekend night just to prove he could, and I thought if I went along with the group, maybe he’d like me back, so I did. We got caught, of course, and we all got arrested. It was … terrible.” She flashed back to that moment the police had come in, that call she’d had to make to her parents, the look in her baby sister’s eyes the next morning. “It ended up okay—community service, it got wiped from my record, et cetera, and I’m fine about it now, I have been for a long time, but it was really awful at the time, and for a while later.”

She rarely thought about that year anymore. She told her story occasionally, but it was more of a recitation at this point, an uplifting little story about survival and triumph. She never touched on the actual hard parts; how she’d disappointed her family, how she’d disappointed herself, how she’d worried about her future, so much so that it made her sick to her stomach for months on end.