Chapter 7 #2
"Yes," I say. "But I'm not saying you had a bad inspection report.
I'm only telling you all this because it explains why I walked into that remediation meeting and then started making decisions with Reyes before talking to you first. I saw something familiar and I reacted to it before I stopped to think about whether it was actually my place. "
She lets out a slow breath. She doesn't look angry. More like she's working through something more complicated than anger. "You've been carrying their deaths for six years," she says.
I nod my head.
The silence that opens between us doesn't have the same charge as what's been between us the past four days. It's the kind of quiet that exists between people who've decided the other person is allowed to take up space in a room.
She reaches over and picks up her mug, realizes it's gone cold, and sets it back down.
She breaks the silence the way she does most things, precisely and from an angle I didn't anticipate.
“You looked at that panel this morning but didn't show me the black cable ties behind it.”
She studies my face for a second longer.
“If I didn't trust you, which I do, I'd think you had something to do with it.”
I look at her.
“That feels aggressive.”
Her mouth twitches. “I said I trust you.”
“Yeah.”
I nod once.
“You just also worked surprisingly quickly through accusing me of arson.”
I'd been sitting with the conversation I had with Jonah.
The way he'd said that if I was in with Avery then I needed to actually be in, otherwise I needed to stay away from her.
The impulse I'd had earlier, reflexive and twenty years deep, to call him and tell him to come out here, tell him to handle this, and get her out of the perimeter before she gets any further in.
I could still do it. But I keep the phone in my pocket.
Avery shifts forward in her chair and faces me fully, her arms loose at her sides. She isn't demanding anything. She's waiting, which is somehow harder to sit across from than a demand. "Callum. Is there something about my building you're not telling me?"
I look at her for a second too long.
"No," I say finally. "Not about your building."
She studies my face like she's deciding whether that answer counts.
I lean back slightly and drag a hand across the back of my neck. "Another reason I brought up Kellerman tonight is because I wanted you to know that about me. The real version of it. Not the cleaned-up article version or the version people in Ventura County repeat."
The room goes quieter.
I think about Jonah. Twenty-odd years, his kid sister, the line that was never a rule because it never needed to be. I set that aside and let it stay set aside.
“I like you, Avery,” I say, giving a small shrug. “Which, in hindsight, explains some historically embarrassing behavior.”
Her expression shifts in a way that's small enough that I almost miss it.
“What kind of embarrassing?” she asks.
I look at her and almost smile. “Ask Jonah. He’s probably got examples organized by year.”
Her mouth twitches and she looks down at her mug before lifting her eyes back to mine.
I drag my thumb across my palm and let out a breath. “And after yesterday, whatever this is between us and wherever it goes from here, I’m following your lead on it.”
She holds my gaze for a second before looking down at her mug.
“That’s inconvenient.”
Despite myself, I almost smile. “Strong opening.”
Her mouth twitches and she looks back up.
“No, I mean I do like you.” She lets out a breath and drags her thumb along the handle of her mug.
“I’m also currently one failed inspection away from becoming one of those women who sells handmade bookmarks at farmers markets and says things like ‘the universe provides.’”
I nod. “I’d support your small business.”
She points at me. “That’s not helping.”
Her expression softens a little.
“I just think maybe we let things happen however they’re going to happen while I make sure my business doesn’t sink into the ocean.”
The way she says it is reasonable and grounded, the kind of answer someone gives when they’re trying not to make a complicated situation worse.
I nod once like it lands cleaner than it actually does.
“Okay,” I say, pushing to my feet. “I’ll pretend that answer didn’t completely derail my week.”
She gives me a look that says she wants to argue with that and decides not to. “You’ll recover.”
I pick up my keys. “Unknown.”
I think about the storeroom anyway, the way her fingers had closed in my shirt, and the way she'd said you can leave like it hadn't rearranged something structural between us. I stand up before I can read too much into any of this in either direction.
She walks me to the door. Pancake, who has been asleep under the coffee table with the total commitment of an animal who finds emotional conversations profoundly tiring, lifts her head to confirm that we are, in fact, leaving, and then drops it back down onto the floor.
“She can stay,” Avery says. “If she wants.”
I look at Pancake, who has already repositioned herself deeper into the living room with the confidence of someone who believes this discussion is procedural, not binding.
“She doesn’t get to make that call.”
Avery opens the door and glances back at me. “Interesting position from a man whose dog clearly runs his household.”
I pick up the leash. “That allegation remains unproven.”
She gives me a look that suggests she disagrees but is willing to let me keep my dignity.
By the time I get home, the quiet feels louder than it should. I end up standing at the kitchen counter with the Shane-Stein filing open in front of me and not reading any of it while Pancake conducts a slow inspection of the baseboards for crumbs she believes I’ve hidden from her.
That’s when Jonah calls.
"Are you sleeping with my sister?"
“That feels invasive,” I say, as Pancake noses something under the stove.
"That's a yes," Jonah says.
"After tonight, no."
He exhales the long, resigned exhale of a man who has known both of us for decades.
"She's the most stubborn person I've ever met in my entire life," he says, "and you are the second most stubborn person I've ever met in my entire life.
I want you to understand that I'm saying this as a disaster forecast, not a blessing. "
"I know."
"That doesn't sound like you're stopping."
I don't say anything. I reach into the treat jar and hand Pancake a bone.
She carries it across the kitchen to her bed with the slow solemnity of someone transporting an item of significant value, stepping on my foot twice on the way there. I don't think it's accidental.
"Just," Jonah says, and then stops. He tries again. "Don't decide what's best for her without her input and final say so."
The problem is that I can already name three times I'd done exactly that.
Too late for that. I'd already walked into the remediation meeting that morning and started making decisions for her before she'd even had the chance to make them herself.
I think about it for the rest of the night.
In the morning, I take the street that runs past Why Knee Me Books & Brews on the way to Oxnard, adding eleven minutes I account for without admitting why.
If someone is watching the block, this is where they'd be sitting, this is what they'd be looking at, and I need to see what she looks like from the outside.
The lights are already on at seven in the morning, warm gold against a grey sky.
Avery is in the window rearranging the Fall In Love, You Coward display.
She's moved the face-out titles and shifted something at the back and she's standing there now looking at the result with the posture of someone who has been at it for a while.
She looked completely absorbed in it. Like the display mattered. Like getting it right mattered. The realization sat heavier than it should have that someone else might be looking at the same building and seeing nothing worth keeping.
I watch her for a few seconds and then I keep driving. I have no reasonable explanation for why watching her rearrange a display shelf at dawn feels as quietly comforting as it does, and I haven't finished working through what that means by the time I'm at the office.
Jonah had said not to decide for her what she could handle and then call it protecting her.
What Jonah doesn't know, what I haven't told him and can't tell him, is that her world is already inside the investigation.
Her building is already on the target map.
The most trusted person in her store is Marvin Stein's nephew.
Whatever chance there was to keep her outside this has already passed. The only question left is whether I'm the thing that gets her through it or what makes it worse.
What I'm also sitting with, and haven't decided what to do with yet, is the specific quality of her not pressing me.
She heard something I didn't mean to say last night and she stayed in the room with it and didn't ask me to explain it.
I haven't been handled that carefully by anyone in a long time, and carefully isn't quite the right word, and it's the closest one I have.
I take the elevator up to the office with coffee gone cold in my hand and three missed messages from Pham waiting on my phone. By the time I unlock my office door, she's already sent over the Harbor View surveillance stills, updated parcel maps, and the latest notes from the arson unit.
I spread the Shane-Stein filing across my desk beside the access logs and open the video call link. Her face appears first, followed by two investigators from the arson unit.
The property map is open in front of me. Six storefronts, two commercial lots, one mixed-use parcel, all laid out in clean survey lines across the page.
Why Knee Me Books & Brews sits circled in red ink, pressed heavier into the paper than the marks around it, the kind of pressure that comes from someone who went over it more than once. In the margin, in handwriting that doesn't belong to Stein, someone has written a single word: expedite.
I keep my eyes on the circle because the surrounding parcels don't matter in the same way.
Those make sense. Stein wants the block and he wants all of it.
But someone pressed harder over her store than anywhere else, then went back over the same place and wrote one word in the margin like they were tired of waiting.
The block is the project.
Her store is the problem.