Jasper
Enough time had passed since I’d asked her to dinner for it to have settled from something terrifying into something that was merely, constantly, in the back of my mind.
Enough to know that Cara Darlington had said yes and had meant it, and that I had been carrying that fact around with me like something I kept checking my pocket for, just to make sure it was still there.
So now I was out on my deck, Friday was two days away, and I was thinking about flowers. Some mornings, the cabin felt like the right answer to a question I’d been asking for years without knowing what it was. This was one of those mornings.
My jacket wasn’t quite enough for the temperature, but I didn’t go in for another one.
I’d been standing there a while already, turning Friday over in my mind—the restaurant I’d booked, what I was going to wear, none of which I normally thought about.
I’d been thinking about all of it for three days.
I was in a good mood. It felt fragile in the way good moods did when you weren’t used to having them, like if you paid too much attention to it, it might reconsider.
My phone rang on the table behind me. I picked it up without checking the screen, expecting Paige about a shift change.
“Yeah.”
“Hey.” Emmett’s voice came through clear and warm and immediately familiar. My shoulders dropped half an inch before I’d decided to let them—the automatic response to hearing him, unchanged since we were small enough to take naps on mats in the same room.
Emmett Harrington had been in my life since we were kids.
Our parents had been friends before we were born, which meant we’d been put in the same playpen, graduated to the same backyard, went all through school together, and eventually ended up on the same bus to the recruitment office at eighteen.
We’d gone through basic together, served together, watched each other through things neither of us talked about in polite company.
When I’d been medevaced out, and he hadn’t, he’d called me from wherever he was within twelve hours, and I’d heard in his voice the strain of a man who was relieved and guilty about being relieved in equal measure.
I understood it. I’d have felt the same.
He was out now, too, had been for two years, and he’d been on me about coming to work with him since before I’d even finished the discharge paperwork, with the patient persistence of someone who knew better than to push but also knew what I needed.
“Emmett.” I leaned against the deck railing. “You’re up early.”
“Been up since four. Case ran long yesterday, and I’ve got a client call at eight.” A brief pause. “How’s the knee?”
I looked down at it without meaning to. “Getting there,” I said, which was true and easier than the longer answer, which was that it worked until it didn’t, that the good days were good enough that I almost forgot, and the bad days reminded me in ways I was tired of being reminded.
That the word functional had started to feel like a cage I’d built myself and kept climbing back into because it was easier than admitting I was angry about it.
“So not great,” Emmett said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say it was good either.” Another pause, this one with more weight in it.
I could hear him working up to something.
I’d known that quiet since we were ten years old, and he’d broken his mother’s ceramic bird and spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to tell her about it.
“You sound different this morning,” he said.
“I’m outside. Probably just the connection.”
“No.” He said it simply, without argument. “I’ve been calling you from bad connections for years. That’s not what that is.” He let a moment pass. “Who is she?”
I huffed a quiet laugh and looked out at the water.
“You might not think so, but that laugh is an answer, Jasper.”
“It’s not.” I deflected.
“It absolutely is. I know what your voice sounds like when there’s a woman in the picture, and your voice sounds like that right now.
” He said it without satisfaction, just as a plain observation.
He didn’t gloat—had never gloated, not once in all the years I’d known him.
“I’m not going to push you on it. I’m noting it for the record and moving on. ”
“Moving on to what?”
I felt the change on his end. “I’m calling because I need to ask you something serious, and I need a real answer this time.
Not just a temporary job, like I offered before.
The partnership.” He gave me a few seconds before he continued.
“I’ve been holding it open for you. I’ve been patient because I knew you needed time to figure out what you wanted your life to look like.
But I’m running out of room. I’ve got a client backlog I can’t handle on my own, and it’s getting worse every week.
I need a partner—not a subcontractor, not someone I have to train from the ground up—a real partner.
Someone I can hand half the caseload to and trust them to get it done.
I’ve wanted that to be you since I heard you were back.
I’m giving you two weeks, and then I have to start looking elsewhere. ”
I set my coffee down on the railing and looked at the river without answering. The water was moving fast and brown after the rain, carrying sticks and debris along the far bank.
“Let me lay it out properly before you say anything,” Emmett said. “I want you to have the full picture, because I know you and I know you’ve been building your own version of this in your head for weeks, and some of it is probably wrong.”
“Go ahead.”
“The practice is in Willowmist Falls. Office above the old feed store on Main Street—you know the building. Two rooms upstairs, a small reception area. I’ve got someone who comes in a few mornings a week for the paperwork and billing.
Rent is cheap, the space is mine on a five-year lease, and I’m two years in.
The money is good—enough to live on without thinking about it, enough to put some away.
Your cut would be an equal split of what we bring in minus overhead.
I’ll send you the numbers this afternoon so you can see it written out. ”
I gripped the coffee mug in my hands, feeling the cold ceramic. “Okay.”
“Now the part you’re not going to like.” He paused for just a moment.
“The work is not the bar. The work is surveillance. Sitting in a truck for six hours watching a building. Long hours when a case runs long, nothing when it doesn’t.
I had a case last month that kept me on the road for nine days straight, and another a few weeks before that, which I wrapped up in an afternoon.
You can’t plan your week the way you can at the bar—the cases eat the week, and that’s just how it is.
There’s travel. Mostly regional, a few hours in any direction, occasionally further.
Nothing that would take you out of state for more than a day or two at a stretch; it’s rare, but it happens, and when it happens, I need you to be able to go. ”
“Understood.”
“There’s a mental load that doesn’t go home when you do.
You’re going to carry three cases in your head at once on the bad weeks.
You’re going to come back from a long surveillance, and your head will still be at the apartment you were watching, not at your own kitchen table.
I do the best I can with it, and I’m not always good at it.
” He stopped. “I’m telling you this because I know what you’re actually going to ask me, and I want to give you an honest answer before you ask it. ”
I pushed off the railing and walked to the far end of the deck, looking downriver where the water curved out of sight through the trees. “Does it get physical?”
“Not often. Nothing like what we dealt with overseas. But it happens—a subject spots you on surveillance and comes to see what you’re doing parked in front of his house, a client turns out to be lying about which person in their case is actually dangerous, and a process service goes sideways.
I’ve been punched twice in three years and drawn my weapon once, and never fired it.
I’m telling you because you deserve to know it’s not a desk job, and your knee is going to have opinions about it sometimes, and the people in your life are going to notice when you come home with your shoulder iced. ”
I stood there for a moment with the phone against my ear and the river moving below me. The mallards had drifted further down the bank. The light had come up a little more through the trees, gold deepening toward something warmer.
“How much of you does it take?” I said. “When you come home. How much of you is still there?”
Emmett was quiet for a long moment, taking the question seriously enough not to answer it fast. “All of it, on the bad weeks,” he said finally.
“That’s the honest answer. Not every day.
But enough days that you feel it. You’ll have stretches where you’re fully present and stretches where you’re not, and the stretches where you’re not are real, and they don’t respond to just deciding to be different.
” A pause. “I’m telling you this because I know what you’re really asking.
And I’m not going to pretend the answer is a simple one. ”
I walked back to the railing and stood there, one hand on the damp wood, looking at the water.
I’d been circling the real question since he reached out.
I’d been circling it since the night Emmett had first called, and I’d stood outside the bookshop window watching the light in the apartment above and told myself I wasn’t in deep enough for it to matter.
I was past that now. I’d been past that for a while.