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She wishes she hated him.
In the cold light of day, when the lies run into the shadows and the truth casts its most harrowing glow, she still thinks she can find a glimmer of who he was. It’s desperate, she knows, as pointless as her explanations as to why they became this. It was fun. Fun—since when did she let her life be defined by joy? She thinks of being pulled out of her bed at two a.m., the gnawing chill of Nebraska at her heels as her mother told her they had to leave.
She left. She left him. She walked through life with one foot out the door.
The rain roars in her ears when she steps into his office: gaudy and garish like the ties she used to undo, grinning against his mouth, listening to the slip of silk fall from his shirt. He barely looks at her when she signs the papers, but when their stares finally meet, she realizes she’s never seen his eyes so dark. Inky and faded like the ocean on a stilted night, tearing the waves from the shore. It frightens her to see the light leave.
She wants to despise him, sharpen his name between her teeth the way he does to her. His facade is building into a wall right before her, a brick stacked with each letter of her signature.
His hair is longer than the last time she saw him, its brown tendrils licking down the back of his neck in a thoughtless manner. She remembers an evening months ago, when she finally got her cast off and they were back to where they were supposed to be: he stepped into the bathroom with a pair of scissors and shared a tilted smile, “I don’t have time to go get my hair cut. Could you, um, I don’t know, help? If it isn’t crossing another line.”
It wasn’t. She found his hesitance endearing, picturing what he would have been like as a boy. He let out a soft hiss when the cool metal of the scissors touched his neck. Slowly, surely, as planned as everything in her life, she trimmed his hair. Shaped him into the man that stepped into court, ready to win, his greatest costume. Their eyes met in the mirror, an intensity as sweet as intimacy between them, with a blade against his skin and a gentleness to her touch. Her lips brushed his temple then, swift and subtle, and she wondered if anything could ever be this simple.
She thinks she will love him less as the years roll on. His commercials do not air in Florida; she’ll never turn on the radio and hear him, worrying if it was a call to customers or a call for her to come home. Her house is quaint, and the humidity is suffocating, but it will never as tight of a grip as his fingers laced between hers, telling her this was the happiest he’d ever be.
Affection comes back as fiercely as the day she left their apartment when news of Heisenberg’s lawyer crosses every major news station. He’s a man wanted by people beyond her. She pushes her car keys into her palm until the skin almost breaks; she shouldn’t go, she shouldn’t run after him. If her boyfriend was here, kind in a way that makes her itch to leave, he’d worry about the tears crossing her eyes. Press and pry, asking why she was so upset. What was she to say? That it is possible for her to love, but only if there is consequence?
She calls Francesca. She doesn’t get a clear answer—and that’s how she know he’s safe. Even if Francesca holds contempt for Kim’s ex-husband now, birthed by Saul’s callous cruelty, she saw what their marriage once was. What it could have been. When the crack in Francesca’s voice never comes, Kim breathes a sigh of relief into the receiver. Her love is still too strong to be buried in a desert.
His call comes later. She wants it; she doesn’t. It’s been six years, but his voice brings her back. To her, to him, to their lives shared. To the minty taste of his lips after they brushed their teeth and decided the courthouse didn’t need them for five more minutes; to his hands on her shoulders, kneading out her stress; to their TV buzzing with an old film she could recite and he watched her more than the screen; to everything that became nothing.
Their last words could be a fight, she thinks. Not like when they broke up, when he begged and begged and begged and she pushed back. But this, sharpened with the iron of their blood and the metallic of their tears, armor built after years apart, pushing and demanding to be cracked. It’s his fiftieth birthday, and she offers him the worst gift of all: silence.
Months pass, and Albuquerque calls her home. Everything is orange: the sunset, the sand, the prison uniform he is forced to wear. In the courtroom gallery, she grips onto the bench until her knuckles turn white. The judge calls out every crime he’s committed, his voice ringing in utter indifference. Kim wants to leap up, cry that she deserves it too. Somehow, there is no greater punishment than going unpunished.
There’s a moment between his trial and his shuffle back into holding that she pulls aside his lawyer, a former colleague: “Please. Just one moment. He’s my ex-husband.”
The lawyer acquiesces with a nod, like he takes pity on her for caring about a soulless man.
“Jimmy.” Her hands grab his.
“No one calls me that,” he replies.
“I do. I did. Saul was act. He wasn’t you. I know you.”
His eyes never reach hers. “You don’t.”
“I do. It’s why I could never call, and it’s why I had to leave. Because if I stayed, I would always see you as the man I married.”
Jimmy tilts his head up. “Kim.”
Her arms wrap around his back. Pulling him close. This she remembers; this she recognizes. “Jimmy.”
“I’m going away for the rest of my life.”
“I’ll fight for you.”
“Kim—”
She tugs herself away and balls her hands into fists, pretending to land a punch. “I’m Kim Wexler... pow! I fight for you.”
It makes him laugh, and she wants to cry. Oh, how she missed that sound.
She knows their time is almost up, can see it in the eyes of Jimmy’s lawyer. She wishes they could stay like this for just a little longer, like how they used to walk these hallways, a unified front that they didn’t dare believe the world would shake.
Quietly, he says, “I always did love you, Kim. Even after everything I did.”
She swallows. “I did too.”
And somehow, it’s crueler than any sentence served.