Chapter 5 #3
Emily looked at Jake. He was looking back, and his expression was one she hadn't seen before. Not vulnerability, exactly, but the absence of the thing that usually covered it. Anna had pulled back a layer he hadn't offered to remove, and he was letting it stay removed.
"I wanted her read on things," he said. Simply. Directly. The way he handled everything that mattered to him. "Anna's judgment is better than mine."
"And what's your read?" Emily asked Anna.
Anna paused. Looked at her with the full burden of a woman who'd raised a son she'd lost and loved a shop she'd kept and watched enough people walk through her door to know the difference between the ones who stayed and the ones who didn't.
"I see someone who's paying attention," Anna said. "That's enough. For now."
She collected the plates and disappeared into the kitchen. Jake watched her go, then turned back to Emily.
"She's protective," Emily said.
"She's earned it."
"She didn't say she liked me."
"She sat down." Jake's eyes warmed. "That's more than most people get."
Emily considered that. A woman who'd watched Jake come and go for nearly twenty years. Who'd fed him and listened to him and built a bond deep enough to make him drive across town for a sandwich he could make at home. A woman who didn't sit down for just anyone.
"She sat down," Emily repeated.
"Yeah, she did."
The sun was angling west when they pulled out of Anna's, painting the streets in that late-afternoon gold that made even strip malls look worth remembering.
Emily watched the city pass and took inventory.
She'd spent the day following Jake Walsh around Tampa.
Watching him work. Learning how he moved through the world.
The patience, the attention, how he made the complicated look like common sense.
She'd eaten a sandwich that had fundamentally altered her understanding of bread.
She'd been assessed by a Greek woman who may or may not have approved of her.
And somewhere between the warehouse and Anna's, she'd stopped pretending this was about the case.
"Jake."
"Yeah."
"We confirmed Vance's people don't know where Costa is. That's useful intelligence."
"It is."
"And we identified a staging area with documentable surveillance."
"Also true."
"So, the day wasn't wasted."
"Nobody said it was."
"I'm building a record." She looked at him. "For when Ray asks what I did today instead of answering his motions."
Jake grinned. "Tell him you were in the field with your investigator conducting surveillance on known associates of a federal target. It's accurate. It's documentable. And it sounds better than 'I rode around in a Range Rover eating sandwiches.'"
"I also ate a sandwich that I'll be thinking about for the rest of my life."
"Anna has that effect."
"Anna has a lot of effects." Emily paused. "She told me things about you that you didn't choose to share."
"Yes, she did."
"And you're not bothered by that."
"I brought you there," he said. "I knew what she'd do. Anna doesn't perform. She doesn't have a version she puts on for company. What you saw is what there is." He glanced at her. "I wanted you to see it."
"Why?"
"Because I can tell you who I am all day, and you'll listen and process it and file it away the way you file everything. But if you see where I come from, the people, the places, the parts that aren't in any file, that's different. That's evidence you collected yourself."
Emily felt the precision of that. He'd used her language. Her framework. Not as a technique, but because he understood that Emily Callahan trusted evidence she gathered over testimony she received. He'd given her primary sources instead of a closing argument.
"You're very strategic," she said.
"I'm very honest. Strategy is what it looks like from the outside."
He turned onto her street and slowed, and Emily saw Claire before Jake did.
She was sitting on the front steps, phone in hand, the posture of someone who'd been waiting long enough to move past worried. When she saw the Range Rover, she stood.
Emily knew this look all too well. “Uh oh."
Jake glanced at her. "She looks like she has questions."
"I haven't checked my phone all day."
He pulled to the curb, killed the engine. "If I were Claire, I'd have questions too."
He got out and came around to open her door.
Claire was walking toward them, and Emily watched her best friend's face settle into the expression she knew better than any other.
The one that meant she'd been worried and was now deciding whether to be relieved or furious.
Claire's eyes moved from Emily to Jake and back, cataloguing the same way she'd catalogued every bad date, every hard case, every situation that had put Emily in a position Claire couldn't control.
But this was different, and Claire knew it. She'd spent an evening at The Anchor watching these two orbit each other. She'd seen how Jake looked at Emily and how Emily forgot to look away. She knew exactly what happened today. She just needed to hear Emily say it.
Jake raised a hand. Easy. Unhurried. The wave of a man who understood he was being assessed and welcomed it.
Claire held the look. Then Jake's openness cracked her resolve. She shook her head and waved back.
"Goodnight, Em." Jake smiled. "Best Tuesday I've had in years."
He got back in the Range Rover and pulled away. Emily watched his taillights until they rounded the corner, standing on the sidewalk in the last of the afternoon light, making no effort to move.
Claire closed the distance between them. Arms crossed. Studying Emily with the diagnostic precision of a woman who'd known her for a decade and could read her as fluently as Jake read rooms.
"Where have you been?" Claire's voice was controlled, but Emily could hear everything underneath it. "I've been calling you. I texted. I went by your office and Maria said you left this morning with some man and never came back."
"I was in the field."
"For twelve hours."
"It was a long field day."
"With Jake Walsh."
"He's my investigator."
"Emily." Claire's voice shifted. The worry was still there, but it was making room for something else.
The recognition of a pattern she'd been watching for and had maybe stopped believing she'd ever see.
"You haven't checked your phone in twelve hours.
You don't not check your phone. You check your phone during movies.
You check your phone during my birthday dinners.
You once checked your phone during a pedicure, and the woman had to ask you to stop moving your feet. "
Emily didn't have a response to that.
Claire looked at her. The flush that hadn't faded. The brightness behind her eyes. The way Emily was standing on this sidewalk without any of her usual form. No defenses, no deflection, no meticulously constructed distance between herself and whatever she was feeling.
"Oh my God." Claire's voice dropped barely above a whisper. "You're gone."
Emily didn't deny it.
She couldn't.
"He calls me Em." It came out small. Not the way she said things in courtrooms or conference rooms or any of the rooms where words were instruments of precision. This was different. A confession she hadn't known she was carrying until it found the air. "Nobody calls me Em."
Claire watched her the way she always watched when something real was happening underneath everything Emily used to keep real things from happening.
"I want to be that girl," Emily said. "The one he sees."
Claire stared at her. Then her face broke open, and she pulled Emily into a hug that held.
"You looked like you swallowed the sun."
"Tell me everything."