2. Alex
Alex
The sedan crawls through Uptown traffic while my phone dials Sebastian Vale.
Sunlight ricochets off the glass towers and cuts through the tinted windows. Three lanes ahead, brake lights burn red. My driver, Sanchez, eases off the accelerator for the fourth time in a block.
Sebastian answers on the second ring. “Tell me you’re calling to apologize for the Meridian closing,” he says. “I have documents on my desk waiting for your signature and an investor in Taiwan who apparently thinks time zones are a myth.”
“It’s not about Meridian.”
“Right. Because, that would be too easy. I’m billing you twice for whatever this is.” Ice clicks against crystal on his end. Ten in the morning, so it’s sparkling water in a whiskey glass. Sebastian likes the glass more than the drink. I hear him sigh, “what is it then?”
“Luis Moralez.”
A beat. “The doctor.”
“Arrange representation for Luis Moralez. The best available. Keep my name out of it.”
For four seconds, the receiver carries only the clink of ice.
I check the time on the dashboard. “Sebastian.”
“Between you and Huntington, I’m either going to have a stroke or a heart attack.”
Sebastian likes to complain about his wealthy clients, conveniently forgetting that we are the reason he can afford to complain from a leather chair in a corner office.
“I didn’t know Huntington hired you.”
“He didn’t. I have a piece of the Rhodes pie now.”
I frown. “Because of the plane crash?”
“Exactly. Papa Rhodes made Hunt guardian of little Rhodes, which means I’m currently buried beneath enough paperwork to qualify as a natural disaster. So whatever insane scheme you’re cooking up will have to wait.”
“This can’t wait.”
He lets out a long, deeply put-upon sigh. “I’m wondering whether a head injury could explain this.”
“It can’t.”
“Are you bipolar then? You already sent one of my best sharks after him. Now you want me to play for the opposing team? There are a hundred conflicts of interest in this request.”
“Find counsel outside your firm.”
“My ethics board will be relieved." Papers move on his desk, the sound of a man clearing space for a problem he didn’t order. “Walk me through this. Last week you call me and say, make a small-town physician’s life complicated. I make it complicated. Because, I’m excellent at complicated.
This morning you call and tell me to hire him, the cavalry. Pick a side, Alex.”
“Just get him out of it.”
“You mean get him out of the mess you asked me to create?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“Now I know you’re unwell.”
“I have my reasons.”
“And they are?”
Traffic advances half a car length. The driver brakes, and I brace my palm against the leather seat while a delivery truck noses into our lane. I give him silence.
“Fine. Keep your reasons. God forbid the men who pay me tell me anything. Does Moralez get to know who paid for his defense?”
“Make the introduction,” I say. “Guarantee the retainer through a third party. Hartley name does not get flagged, no connection to our office, nothing gets back to me.”
“That’s a lot of secrecy for a good deed.”
“I’d hardly call this a good deed.”
“Of course.” A pause. “Anything to avoid developing a conscience.”
“I don’t pay you for commentary.”
“You’re going to get it, anyway.”
I watch the delivery truck inch ahead and say nothing.
A page turns at his end of the call. “Do you need the case gone?”
“No.”
“Of course you don’t, where would be the logic in that?”
“Get him competent counsel. Tell our side to stop pressing every procedural advantage. Agree to reasonable extensions. The claim stays alive.”
Sebastian does not answer for two full seconds.
“You’ll reduce the pressure,” he says, “but still keep him awake at night.”
“Yes.”
“You’re controlling both outcomes.”
“Yes.”
“You hear yourself, don’t you?”
“I hear you wasting my time. I need you to handle this quickly.”
“You need therapy, is what you need.” His chair creaks. “Do you know what I do to opposing counsel who tries to run both sides of a chessboard? I bill them into the ground and send flowers to the funeral.”
“Then it’s fortunate you’re on my side.”
“Who’s paying on paper?”
“A foundation you’re going to form this afternoon. Health-access litigation support, rural Texas. Make it boring enough that nobody reads past the mission statement.”
“Boring is my middle name.”
“How fortunate for the women in your life.”
He laughs once. “You know, most people say thank you when I commit fraud before breakfast.”
“It’s not fraud.”
“That confidence is why I keep my own lawyer.”
“You are a lawyer.”
“Exactly. I know better.”
Ice knocks against the glass again. Then his voice loses the amusement. “You understand this is insane. I’m asking as your friend, not your attorney.”
“By noon, Baz.”
“You’ll have names in an hour. I reserve the right to call you an asshole.”
“Wouldn’t expect any less.”
“Fine," he says, and then, quieter, with the needle tucked inside it: “Whoever she is, I hope she’s worth the billable hours.”
He ends the call.
My phone remains in my hand while the sedan inches forward. Luis gets room to defend himself. I keep the claim active.
Yesterday, the moment she said Luis’s name, the color left her lips.
She had built another family in Pinehaven, and I had barely pressed a finger against one of them before she came apart.
For him.
What made Luis Moralez worthy of that kind of concern? Why did his pain reach her when mine never had? And why did the thought of him holding any place inside her make me want to take everything from him?
Softness killed your father. You’re not your father.
Edward’s voice fills the back seat though he is two thousand miles away. My molars grind until pain pulses at my temples.
By the time I enter the office, Sebastian has sent four names.
I choose the most expensive one.
The Pinehaven profit-and-loss report is four pages long. I’ve read the first page three times. If Danny asked me what any of it says, I’d have to lie.
This morning, I caught the smell of vanilla in the hallway. Vanilla and rose drifting from the guest wing at six fifteen.
I just stood there with my finger hovering over the elevator button.
Ridiculous.
It’s my house. I shouldn’t be standing there listening for movement as though I’m the guest and she might catch me somewhere I’m not supposed to be.
There was a mug on the drying rack in the kitchen, set slightly crooked instead of lined up the way my old housekeeper used to leave everything. One of the cabinets hadn’t been shut properly.
I hear the sound of water behind the guest bathroom wall. Normal sounds. Normal signs that another person lives here.
There’s a paperback lying facedown on the arm of the chair beside the north window. The spine is cracked, and one corner of the cover has started to curl.
Nobody had used that chair before Belle.
I bought it because the decorator said the room looked empty without something in that corner. It sat there untouched since the day I moved in. Now there’s a dent in the cushion where she folds herself into it to read.
I tell myself these things bother me because Belle is careless. She leaves traces everywhere. A cup on the wrong shelf. A book in a room nobody uses. Her scent where there used to be nothing but wood polish and air-conditioning.
She is changing the rhythm of my home without permission.
I resent it.
That is the word I settle on.
She has been here for two weeks.
I spent ten years looking for her. Ten years with nothing but old photographs, reports, and the certainty that one day I would find her.
That was easier.
Back then, she stayed where I put her. In a file. In a memory. In every promise I made to myself when I couldn’t sleep.
Now she is only a few steps away from my office.
She walks through my rooms. She cooks food I remember from my mother’s kitchen. She sits across from me at dinner and pushes food around her plate while pretending she doesn’t notice me watching.
She is close enough to touch.
I don’t.
I absolutely will not.
Those are not the same thing, and lately I need to remind myself of both.
I look back at the report. Line four covers the projected margin on the Phase Two parcels. I read it again.
Nothing sticks.
All I can see are Belle’s hands around her coffee cup this morning, both palms wrapped around it as though the kitchen was cold. A strand of hair had fallen across her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear and looked up.
I turned to the elevator before our eyes could meet.
Two seconds.
That’s how long I allow myself to look at her when she doesn’t know I’m watching. Any longer than that, and I start remembering things I have no use for.
The sound she makes when she laughs without trying to hide it. The weight of her asleep against my chest. The way she used to reach for my hand as though she never questioned whether it would be there.
None of that matters now.
That sentence used to be enough.
Today, it sits in my head beside the numbers I’ve read multiple times, and I don’t believe a word of it.
Her bedroom door is sixteen steps from mine.
I know because I counted them last night.
I count them again now, staring at the Pinehaven report on my screen while my thumb drags across the center of my palm.
Yesterday, that hand rested against Belle’s back. I only touched her because she was in my way. Because she had gone rigid beneath my hand, and moving her aside was faster than asking.
That is what I am telling myself. My palm still itches from that contact.
The hard line of her spine beneath her clothes. The slight dip above her waist. How easily my hand covered it.
My cock presses against my zipper before I finish counting the steps.
“Fuck.”
I slam both hands on the desk.
Ten years should have been enough to forget the exact feel of her waist. The weight of her hips beneath my palms. The small sound she used to make when I pulled her against me in her sleep.
She always slept cold.