Chapter 2
No. No, no, no.
Emily Callahan walked down the eighth-floor hallway with the velocity of a woman trying to outrun whatever she felt that wasn't actually behind her.
It was inside her. It had been inside her since a man in a backwards cap had looked at her across Ray Crawford's office and said he didn't mention you were beautiful like he was correcting an error in a briefing document.
Her office was forty-seven steps from Ray's.
She'd counted once, early on, the kind of useless data her brain collected when it needed to feel in control.
Forty-seven steps. She could make it in thirty if she didn't slow down, if she didn't stop, if she absolutely did not think about how Jake Walsh's hand had felt around hers or how his voice had sounded when he'd said yes like asking her out was the simplest decision he'd made all day.
She made it in twenty-eight.
Her door was glass. She hated that right now. Glass meant visible, meant Claire Harper could see her face from across the bullpen, and Claire Harper could read Emily's face as well as Emily read case law, with precision and an irritating refusal to accept the first interpretation.
She closed the door. Set her coffee down. Opened a file. Stared at it.
The words were in English. She was reasonably certain of that.
They appeared to be arranged in sentences.
Beyond that, she had nothing. Her brain had locked into a continuous loop of a man putting a DEA agent on hold, looking at her with those blue eyes, and saying I'm dealing with something important.
She was the something important. He'd said it in front of Ray. In front of Claire. While a federal agent waited on his phone. Like choosing her over the call was so obvious it didn't even register as a choice.
Emily pressed her palms flat against the desk. A courtroom trick. When the verdict's coming and you need to be still, you press your hands against a solid surface and let it do the work your nerves won't.
It wasn't working.
A knock on the glass. Emily didn't look up.
"I'm busy."
"You're staring at an upside-down brief."
Emily looked down. The brief was, in fact, upside down. She turned it over with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was none.
Claire opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind her with the care of a woman who'd just watched a controlled detonation from across the bullpen.
She had two coffees. She set one on Emily's desk, which meant she'd gone to the break room, which meant she'd given Emily exactly enough time to compose herself and was now here to watch the composition fail.
"Don't," Emily said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You're thinking it."
"I'm thinking many things." Claire sat in her chair she claimed a year ago, the chair across from Emily's desk. Crossed her legs. Sipped her coffee. The picture of a woman who had absolutely nowhere else to be and was prepared to wait. "Would you like to narrow it down?"
"I would like to review the Costa file and prepare for the motions hearing on Thursday and pretend the last forty-five minutes didn't happen."
"Okay." Claire nodded slowly. "And now the real thing you'd like to do."
Emily didn't answer. She was looking at the window, at the sliver of Tampa skyline going bright in the mid-morning sun, and she was thinking about how Jake Walsh had stopped walking away.
He'd been halfway out of the office. He'd had every reason to keep going.
And instead he'd turned around and looked at her like the rest of his day had just become negotiable.
"Emily."
"Claire."
They stared at each other across the desk. Ten years of friendship compressed into a silence that said more than either of them was willing to speak out loud.
Claire broke first. Not because she'd lost, but because she'd decided to stop playing.
"You're not going tonight," Claire said. "That's what you're telling yourself right now. You have work. You have responsibilities. The Vance case needs attention. Going to a bar in Clearwater to see a man you've known for one hour would be irresponsible."
"It would be." Emily didn't look up from the file she wasn't reading.
"Tell me what happened when you walked in."
"Nothing happened. Ray introduced us. We discussed the case. He left."
"Emily."
"What?"
"You put your hand on the doorframe."
Emily's pen stopped moving.
She hadn't realized Claire had seen that.
The half-second when she'd walked into Ray's office, looked at the man in the chair by the window, and reached for the doorframe because her legs had done the one thing they'd never done in a courtroom, in a deposition, in any room she'd ever entered with the intention of commanding it.
They'd gone uncertain.
"That was balance," Emily said. "The floor is uneven."
"The floor is federal marble, and you walk on it in heels every day without touching anything." Claire set her coffee down. "I've watched you walk into courtrooms with hostile judges and circumstantial evidence and I have never, not once, seen you reach for anything to prop yourself."
"He surprised me."
"He did more than surprise you."
Claire stood. Walked around the desk. Sat on the edge of it, close enough that Emily had to look at her.
"Do you remember junior year?" Claire said. "The Springsteen concert. Sold out. You convinced security you were the drummer's girlfriend."
"Max Weinberg. And I said I was his niece."
"You talked your way past three checkpoints and ended up six rows from the stage." Claire's voice had shifted. Softer. The voice she used when she was reaching for a version of Emily that had been put away a long time ago. "That girl didn't need to hold herself up in doorways."
"That girl grew up."
"That girl shut down. There's a difference."
Emily turned the pen in her fingers. A nervous habit she thought she'd trained out of herself in law school.
A professor had told her once that fidgeting was the body's confession of an unprepared mind.
Her mind was not unprepared. Her mind was running seventeen simultaneous assessments of Jake Walsh and every single one of them was returning results she didn't know how to file.
"He called me beautiful," she said. "In the middle of a briefing. In front of Ray. Like it was a fact he thought I should know."
"And?"
"And then he spent the next thirty minutes being exactly as smart as I am, which shouldn't be attractive, but apparently it is, and then he put a DEA agent on hold to ask me to drinks."
"While looking at you."
"While looking at me."
"What did you say?"
"I said I'd think about it."
"Which we both know is Emily Callahan for 'I want to say yes and I'm furious about it.'"
Emily turned back to her files. The sentences blurred, refusing to assemble into argument or analysis or anything resembling the work she'd built her identity around.
She could still hear his voice in the hallway after he'd left, laughing, talking to Rodriguez, like the last hour hadn't rearranged anything for him.
Except she'd seen his face when she'd smiled.
The grin that started before he gave it permission.
He was rearranged too. He was better at walking away from it.
"Tell me I'm wrong," Claire said.
"You're wrong."
"Tell me you haven't thought about him since the meeting ended."
Emily didn't answer.
"Tell me you didn't walk back to this office in thirty seconds flat because you needed to be behind a closed door before your face did what you couldn't explain to the bullpen."
Emily's hand stilled on the file. She wanted to argue. She wanted to point out that she'd walked at a normal pace, that her face had been perfectly composed, that nothing about the last hour required a closed door.
She let it go. Because Claire had watched her leave, and Claire didn't miss things.
"He reads people," Emily said instead. "Like it's nothing. Like seeing what you're hiding is no different than reading a weather report. He looked at how I was holding my file and told me the case mattered to me." She paused. "Nobody does that. Nobody looks at how I hold things."
"Jake Walsh does."
"Jake Walsh does." She repeated it like she was entering it into evidence. A fact she couldn't dismiss. A piece of data that changed the shape of the case she'd been building against letting anyone in.
"He also rearranged his entire afternoon for you," Claire said. "Not after the meeting. During it. While you were standing right there. He didn't even hesitate."
"I'm aware of the sequence of events."
"Are you aware of what they mean?"
"They mean he's impulsive."
"They mean you're his priority, and he doesn't care who knows it." Claire picked up her coffee. "Emily. That man has been in your orbit for one hour and he's already reorganizing around you. Not next week. Not when it's convenient. Right now, today, in front of your boss."
Emily didn't have a response for that. She had responses for everything.
She had arguments prepared for motions she hadn't filed yet, counterpoints to objections that hadn't been raised, closing statements for trials that were months away.
She had an answer for every question a courtroom could throw at her.
She didn't have an answer for Jake Walsh.
She looked down at her hands. At the desk beneath them. At ten years of curated choices stacked like case files in a career that had never once asked her to be brave about anything except the law.
"I've spent ten years building this," she said. "A career. A reputation. A version of myself that makes sense. And he looked at me for three seconds and none of it mattered."
"That's not fear, Emily. That's possibility."
"Same thing."
"It really isn't."
They sat with that. Claire didn't push. She didn't need to. The silence did the work, filling in the spaces that words would only complicate.
"So what do you wear to a bar in Clearwater?" Emily said.
Claire blinked. Then everything about her shifted. The patience dissolved into a brightness, knowing and deeply, annoyingly satisfied.
"The blue dress," Claire said. "The one you keep saying is too casual for anything."
"It's not a dress occasion."
"It's exactly a dress occasion. Trust me." Claire stood. Gathered her coffee. "I'm picking you up at seven. We're getting ready at mine first."
"He said eight."
"I know what he said. Seven. My place." Claire opened the door, then turned back. "And Emily? Stop pretending you haven't already decided."
She was gone before Emily could respond.
The office eased into silence. The air conditioning hummed.
Emily looked at her files. At the window. At her own hands, still on the desk in front of her.
She thought about Jake Walsh turning around in that doorway. Not the phone call, not the agent, not the professional calculus of what he'd interrupted. Just the turn. The decision in it. The way his whole body had committed to the choice before his mouth caught up.
She thought about the smile she'd let slip. The one Claire had seen. The one that had felt, for half a second, like the truest thing she'd done all day.
She picked up her phone. Typed a text to Claire.
Which blue dress?
Three dots. Then: You know which one. See you at seven.
Emily set the phone down. Looked at the ceiling.
One hour ago she'd been a federal prosecutor with a clear trajectory and a five-year plan and a life that made sense. Now she was going to a bar she'd never heard of to see a man she'd known for one morning, wearing a dress she'd been telling herself was too casual for years.
She should be furious.
She wasn't.
She was reaching for a word and couldn't find one big enough to hold it.