Chapter 14
ADRIANA
Adriana told herself, as she left the office at seven o’clock the following evening with a legal folder under her arm and her jacket buttoned to the throat, that she was going to Sienna’s apartment to discuss the Marcus Reed interview protocol.
Andrew watched her leave from his desk, where he was reviewing a brief for the streaming platform litigation. He looked up when she passed his door, took in the jacket, the folder, the set of her jaw that meant she had made a decision and was not open to discussion about it, and said nothing.
Then, as she reached the end of the corridor: “The interview protocol could have been emailed.”
Adriana stopped. She didn’t turn around. “It requires in-person review.”
“Of course it does.”
The smile was in his voice. Not mocking. Affectionate. The tone of a man who had spent nine years watching his partner make decisions and who recognized, with what looked like relief, a decision that was being made for the right reasons even if it was being justified with the wrong ones.
“Good night, Andrew.”
“Good night, Adriana. Tell Sienna I said hello.”
She drove to Echo Park with the legal folder on the passenger seat and her heart beating at a rate that no professional document review had ever produced.
The city moved past the windows in its usual Friday evening configuration.
The sun was setting behind the buildings, casting long horizontal light through the car’s windows, and the city looked gilded, temporary, beautiful in the way of things that only exist for minutes before changing.
Adriana had not slept well. She had left Sienna’s apartment at six in the morning, driving home through the early dawn streets with the taste of Sienna still on her lips and the impression of Sienna’s body still mapped against her skin.
She had showered, dressed, gone to the office, and spent nine hours in a state of heightened productivity that Andrew recognized immediately as displacement behavior.
“You’re not thinking about the Meridian brief,” he had said at three o’clock, watching her type at a speed that suggested the words were coming from somewhere deeper than obligation.
“I am thinking exclusively about the Meridian brief.”
“You’ve drafted four pages in forty minutes. Your usual pace is two pages per hour. Something is either very wrong or very right, and your face suggests the latter.”
She had not answered him. She had continued typing, and Andrew had gone back to his own work without pressing the point.
At 4:30, a problem arrived that had nothing to do with the Meridian brief or Sienna Ramirez or the tightness in Adriana’s chest that had taken up residence since last night.
One of the documentary’s corroborating sources, the retired awards administrator who had testified to the voting manipulation, had left a voicemail on the firm’s secure line.
His voice was tight, clipped, stripped of the careful steadiness he had shown during his interview.
Burty’s people had contacted him. Not directly.
Through a former colleague, the kind of intermediary who could claim the conversation was casual if anyone asked.
The message was clear: reconsider your involvement or the pension review board would receive a formal complaint about irregularities in his employment record.
Adriana listened to the voicemail twice.
She transcribed it. She drafted a response plan in twenty minutes, a legal shield that would protect the source from retaliatory action and document the intimidation attempt as evidence.
She called Sienna’s office line at five o’clock to relay the information and reached Dani instead.
“Sienna’s at the gym,” Dani said. “She goes when she can’t think straight. I’ll tell her when she gets back.”
Adriana explained the source situation.
Dani’s voice went hard. “Same playbook as the Garson project,” Dani said. “They’re picking off the weakest links. We need to get ahead of this before another one folds.”
“I’m handling it. The legal protection will be in place by Monday. Tell Sienna the source is safe.”
“I will.” A pause. Adriana heard Dani’s chair creak. “And Adriana?”
Adriana’s hand tightened on the phone. “Yes?”
“She’s okay. In case you were wondering.” A pause. “She didn’t sleep much either.”
Adriana hung up and stared at the phone for longer than the call warranted. Then she gathered the interview protocol folder, put on her jacket, and left the office.
Sienna opened the door before Adriana knocked. She was wearing a soft gray t-shirt and bare feet and her dark curls were down, and she looked at Adriana with the warm directness that had been undoing Adriana for weeks.
“You brought a folder,” Sienna said.
“Interview protocol.” She held up the folder as evidence.
Sienna leaned her shoulder against the doorframe. “At seven o’clock on a Friday night.”
Adriana’s grip tightened on the folder’s edge.
“The timeline requires it.”
Sienna leaned against the doorframe and smiled. The smile was knowing, patient, and entirely without judgment. It said: I see through you. I will accept whatever story you need to tell yourself to be here. The important thing is that you’re here.
“You better come in,” Sienna said, and stepped aside to let Adriana through.
The apartment looked different in the evening light than it had in the midnight darkness of their last visit.
Warmer. More lived in. Sienna had turned on two floor lamps that cast pools of amber light on the wooden floors, and the windows were open to the evening air that carried the sounds of Echo Park settling into its Friday rhythm.
A guitar played somewhere nearby, muffled and imperfect and human.
The bookshelves that lined the far wall were visible now in a way they hadn’t been the night before.
Densely packed, organized by a system that appeared to be half-alphabetical and half-emotional, with photography collections shelved next to legal thrillers shelved next to a dog-eared copy of a Maggie Nelson book that had Post-it notes protruding from every third page.
Sienna’s library told her more about the filmmaker in thirty seconds than three weeks of collaboration had.
There were photographs on the shelf between the books.
Sienna and Dani in front of a camera rig, grinning.
A woman who might have been Sienna’s mother, holding a much younger version of Sienna on her hip.
A sunset over what looked like the New Mexico desert.
Private things. The geography of a life that existed outside of the investigation and the alliance and the complicated, charged space between them.
They sat on the couch. Close but not touching.
The distance was intentional on both sides and fooling neither of them.
Adriana opened the folder. She presented the interview protocol with the same thoroughness she brought to client consultations, and Sienna listened with the same focused attention she brought to source interviews, and they maintained the pretense for approximately twenty minutes.
At the twenty-minute mark, Adriana realized she had read the same paragraph of the interview protocol three times because her attention kept drifting to the warmth of Sienna’s thigh beside hers on the couch.
At the twenty-two-minute mark, Sienna’s hand brushed Adriana’s while reaching for a page, and neither of them pulled away.
At the twenty-four-minute mark, Sienna said, “Can I tell you something?” and Adriana said, “Yes,” and Sienna said, “I don’t care about the interview protocol right now.
I haven’t cared about it since you walked through the door with that folder and that jacket and that look on your face that you think is professional and is actually the most transparent thing about you. ”
That was the last professional sentence either of them spoke.
Adriana kissed Sienna first. She set down the folder, turned toward Sienna on the couch, and kissed her. Her mouth found Sienna's with a slow certainty that said she had come here knowing exactly what she wanted.
The couch cushion was warm beneath her palm. Sienna's hand rose to her jaw, thumb skimming her cheekbone, and the gentleness of it opened a place in Adriana's chest that had been sealed since Rachel. Outside, the guitar from the street had gone quiet, and the apartment held only the sound of them.
They moved to the bedroom. Slower this time than last night.
Adriana walked Sienna backward through the hallway with her hands on Sienna's hips, her mouth finding the sensitive spot beneath Sienna's ear that she had already learned made Sienna's breath catch.
Sienna's hands worked the buttons of Adriana's shirt one by one, patient and sure, and Adriana understood that this was not going to be the urgent collision of last night.
This was going to be more dangerous. This was going to be chosen.
She let the shirt fall. She reached behind her back and unclasped her own bra and stood in the amber light of the hallway letting Sienna look at her without hiding or performing.
Sienna's gaze moved over her with a reverence that made Adriana's throat tight, and then Sienna stepped forward and pressed her mouth to Adriana's collarbone and Adriana's hands came up to cradle her head and they stayed like that, breathing together, for a long time.
Sienna undressed herself slowly, watching Adriana watch her.
The dark shirt over her head. Her jeans.
Her underwear last, stepping out of it without looking away from Adriana's face, and Adriana's expression in the hallway light was the least guarded thing Sienna had ever seen on a human face — open want, undisguised, making no attempt to be anything other than what it was.
They moved to the bed.