Chapter Six
Dane
I KNOTTED THE TIE IN Jenna's bathroom mirror at six-fifteen on a Thursday morning, and the man looking back at me was someone I recognized.
The suit was charcoal, decent cut, the only one I owned.
I'd worn it to depositions, sentencing hearings, three funerals, and one wedding I'd left early.
It fit the way it always fit. The shoulders were right. The knot was clean.
The man wearing it was a stranger and had been all week.
I adjusted the collar and checked the line of the jacket over the holster I wasn't wearing today.
Courthouse security would handle that. My sidearm was locked in the case in my truck, and the absence of its weight against my ribs felt wrong — the jolt of a missed step.
Muscle memory reaching for something that wasn't there.
I heard her in the kitchen. Coffee maker, cabinet door, the particular rhythm of Jenna moving through a space she'd memorized down to the inch.
I'd memorized it too. Every morning for a week: the cabinet, the mug, the pause while the machine worked, the drawer for a spoon she didn't use because she drank it black.
I knew the routine the way I knew sightlines and exit routes, which was the problem, because sightlines and exit routes were supposed to be professional information and the sound of Jenna Darby making coffee had stopped being professional somewhere around Sunday and I hadn't done a goddamn thing about it.
The enforcer had been in custody since Sunday.
Hebert had confirmed the arrest. The threat was resolved.
The detail was functionally over. And I was still here — still sleeping in her bed and eating at her counter and watching her get ready for work, still driving her to the bar and sitting in my corner and driving her home.
Neither of us had said the word that would've made it real or the word that would've ended it.
I pulled the knot tight and left the bathroom.
She was at the counter with her back to me. Black jeans, boots, hair down. The leather bracelet on her wrist caught the overhead light when she reached for the cabinet.
"You clean up," she said without turning around.
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm documenting." She turned, and her eyes moved down the suit and back up with an expression I couldn't read. "For the record, I didn't know you owned a tie."
"For the record, I own two. This is the one without the barbecue stain."
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile.
Close enough that I caught it and filed it in the place where I'd been filing everything about her for a week, which was full, which had been full since Saturday, which I was going to stop thinking about in approximately forty-five seconds because we had a courthouse to get to.
"Coffee's ready," she said.
"Thanks."
We stood in her kitchen and drank coffee and didn't talk about what was happening in two hours or what was happening after that.
The apartment was quiet. Thursday-morning quiet, the city finally hollowed out after Fat Tuesday, the brass bands and the beads and the noise gone, replaced by the flat, tired silence of a town cleaning up after itself.
Through the window, a city truck rumbled down the block.
I set my cup in the sink. "We should go."
"I know."
She grabbed her bag off the hook by the door. I held the door open. She walked through without looking at me, and I pulled it shut behind us, checked the deadbolt, and followed her down the stairs.
I DROVE. SHE SAT IN the passenger seat with her bag in her lap and her hands still.
Jenna's hands were never still. In a week I'd watched her pour, wipe, organize, fix, clean, rearrange, and handle every object within arm's reach when her brain was running fast. Her hands were how she processed.
Stillness meant she was holding it in, and whatever it was, it was heavy enough to lock down the whole system.
I wanted to speak. I had nothing to say that wasn't the professional script or the truth, and the truth would've cracked the day open in a way neither of us could afford before she walked into a grand jury room and told twelve strangers about the worst night of her life.
So I drove. St. Charles to Poydras, the live oaks overhead catching the early sun.
The route was clear. I'd driven it twice this week, once Monday and once yesterday, mapping the approach and the parking and the walk from the lot to the entrance.
Old habit. The Marshals had drilled it: know the route, know the building, know where your client is every second they're not in your line of sight.
Except she wasn't my client anymore. She hadn't been since Sunday.
And the route planning and the building recon and the suit were all part of the protocol I was running because the protocol was the only thing I had left, and if I stopped running it I'd have to decide what came next, and I didn't have a playbook for that.
"You're quiet," she said.
"Thinking."
"You're always thinking. You just usually talk through it."
She was right. I did. The charm, the easy line, the humor that kept the air moving.
I'd been running that program since I was twenty-three and it worked on everyone.
It hadn't worked on Jenna since Thursday night a week ago, and I'd kept running it anyway because the alternative was silence, and silence with her was dangerous because silence with her meant I could hear my own head.
"Just running through the building layout," I said.
She looked at me for a long second. Then she turned to the window and didn't push it, and the fact that she didn't push it was worse than if she had.
THE ORLEANS PARISH courthouse was concrete and columns and the kind of institutional air conditioning that turned every hallway into a walk-in cooler.
I parked in the lot, came around, opened her door.
She got out without comment. We walked in together and I cleared the security check and stayed three steps behind her while she checked in with the clerk.
The grand jury room was on the second floor. A bench in the hallway outside with a view of the elevator bank and nothing else. I stood. She sat. The fluorescent light was doing nothing for either of us.
"Dane."
"Yeah."
"Stop hovering."
"I'm not hovering. I'm standing."
"You're standing in a way that constitutes hovering." She looked up at me. Her face was composed, the red lipstick in place, and underneath it she was scared and handling it how she handled everything, which was by looking you dead in the eye and daring you to mention it. "Sit down."
I sat. The bench was hard and too short and my knee was three inches from hers.
"When I come out," she said, "I don't want the debrief face. I want normal."
"I don't have a debrief face."
"You have seven faces and I've catalogued all of them and the debrief face is the one where you look professional and distant and it makes me want to throw something at you."
I looked at her. She was studying the opposite wall with the focus of someone who was not going to let her voice crack in a courthouse hallway.
"Normal," I said. "Got it."
The clerk called her name. She stood, straightened her jacket, and walked toward the door. Halfway there she stopped and looked back at me.
"Don't go anywhere," she said.
"I'll be here."
She went in. The door closed. I sat on the bench and stared at the wall. The silence settled in and filled every corner of my skull.
FORTY-THREE MINUTES.
I counted because counting kept the part of my brain busy that wasn't replaying the last week on a loop I couldn't stop.
Forty-three minutes of fluorescent light and the distant sound of the building's ventilation system and my own pulse, steady, controlled, because the body held the line even when the rest of it was coming apart.
I'd done this before. Waited outside rooms while clients testified, gave depositions, identified suspects.
I'd sat on benches and in hallways and in government-issue chairs, waited with the patience the job required.
Then I'd brought the client out, given the handshake and the nod and the speech, and driven away.
The speech went: The detail is concluded.
My firm will follow up with paperwork. If you have concerns going forward, contact our office directly.
Professional. Clean. Complete. I'd given it forty times.
The client thanked me. I thanked them. I left.
Whatever had built up over the days or weeks of proximity dissolved in the rearview mirror, and by the time I hit the highway I was already thinking about the next assignment.
Forty times. Forty clean exits.
I sat on the bench and ran the words in my head, and they were right there, every one of them, in the right order. The detail is concluded. My firm will follow up.
The door opened.
Jenna came out. She looked tired and fierce. She'd been crying and had stopped, and her lipstick was bitten half off, and her eyes found mine and the speech dissolved.
I stood. "How'd it go?"
"It went." She shouldered her bag. "I told them everything. The prosecutor said it was strong. Let's get out of here."
I walked her out. Held the door. Didn't touch her back how I wanted to. We were in public. She wasn't my client and she wasn't my girlfriend and she was something I didn't have a category for, and I couldn't put my hand on her in a courthouse lobby without knowing which one it meant.
The sunlight hit us both when we stepped outside. She squinted and I pulled my keys out as we headed for the truck.
I DIDN'T DRIVE TO THE apartment.
She didn't ask why. She watched the streets pass and said nothing when I turned onto Bourbon instead of heading home, and when I parked across from Proof, engine off, the bar's front dark at eleven in the morning, neither of us moved.