Chapter 5
The engine ticks as I sit in the car, and I can still feel my hands at her waist, her fingers tightening in my shirt, and the way she told me I could leave like everything between us hadn’t just been blown wide open.
It’s pressure that won’t let go. I let it sit a second knowing I should've stayed and not doing anything about it.
Pancake lifts her head from the passenger seat, looking at me with that slow, specific focus she gets when something’s off and she hasn’t been told why. Then she gets up, steps over the center console, and settles in the back without being asked, fixing her attention on the rear window.
I watch her in the mirror and let it settle. This gets contained, with distance , structure, and no deviations. I know the rules even as I know I’ve just bent them.
"Yeah," I say to no one. "You're very subtle about it."
I pull into the Esplanade garage and head upstairs to my office, because if I’m going to sit with this, I might as well do it while working the case.
I spread the Stein file across the worktable and go over it, pulling comps on the fire at the Surfside Drive warehouse and running the acquisition sequence against the timeline Torres gave me.
I make notes in the margin and cross two buildings out that don't match the pattern. It hasn’t changed.
It’s been the same since I started working with Pham on this.
Still, I go through it again because working helps and sitting around thinking about Avery doesn’t.
By the time my phone buzzes with Pham’s name on the screen, I’ve at least done something with the rest of the morning.
"I'm coming up," she says, when I answer.
"Door's open," I tell her.
Detective Pham arrives at 2:00 and doesn't sit down, which means she has somewhere else to be.
She sets a folder on the table, taps it once, and says, "Stein's team wants a dinner meeting next week.
Reggalo's on Market Street. They're pushing to close before the end of the quarter.
" She looks at me. "I need you at that table. "
"Wearing a wire," I say. "Vintage."
She nods once. "Wire."
"Okay." I tilt my head. "You always bring the fun jobs."
She doesn't smile as her eyes move once across the table, then back to me. "You’ve been spending time on Harbor View," she says, like she's confirming a detail she already has.
"I own buildings there."
"Keep it that way." A beat. "No extras."
She studies me for a second like she's checking for hesitation. When she doesn’t find any, she pulls the folder back and tucks it under her arm.
"I'll have the briefing documents to you by Friday.
In the meantime," she says, "I need you keeping a low profile on the target block.
Nothing that gives Stein's team a reason to look sideways at you before we get to the table. "
"Understood," I say, and I also understand exactly what that covers, including the part where I don't end up in a storeroom with Avery again.
She holds my gaze a beat longer than necessary, then nods and heads for the elevator.
I watch the doors close behind her and stand there for a moment with my hands in my pockets, running the arithmetic I've been running since I first confirmed that Why Knee Me Books & Brews sits in the Harbor View Drive block on Stein's acquisition sheet.
All of it within a mile of the Surfside warehouse, a detail that was in Pham's documents months before Avery ever walked into my office.
More notes fill the margins before I finally cap the pen and start gathering my things to head downstairs and meet the HVAC contractor. My hand catches on the lower drawer out of habit and pauses there a second before I pull it open.
The Kellerman file sits where it always does, worn at the corners with a faded label I never bothered to replace.
I leave it in the drawer and look at it for a moment instead, thinking about the thirteen buildings, the six relocations, and the two names that had nowhere left to go.
Then I shut the drawer, head down to the parking garage, and pull Jonah's name up on the screen while I back out of the space.
I owe him the call. The longer I wait, the worse the version of it gets.
He picks up on the second ring.
"Hey," I say.
"What do you think you're doing, asshole."
Not a question. I put the car in reverse and back out of the space. "Nothing I can take back."
The silence on his end has texture to it, and I can hear him in his kitchen from the way the space carries sound. A drawer opens and closes. "She's had people with money blow up her life already," he says after a second. "You know that."
"Yeah, you told me."
"If you're not in, if this is something you did because she was there and the situation was what it was and you didn't think it through..." He stops. Starts again. "Then you need to stay away from her, dude. I mean that."
I lean back against the seat.
Jonah doesn't do anything halfway. Not friendships. Not family. Not promises. It's one of the reasons people trust him with their lives. It's also one of the reasons he gets hurt when things fall apart.
"I know," I say.
I pull up to the garage exit and wait for the arm to lift.
"Do you?"
"Yes."
He's quiet for a moment. Pancake shifts in the passenger seat. "Be careful," Jonah says, and I know he doesn't mean traffic.
"I will," I tell him, and I merge onto the coast road and point the car southwest toward Harbor Walk.
The temporary bookstore smells like cardboard, fresh paint, and the kind of warmth a place gets when people have already started making a life inside it.
Avery is at the top of a ladder with a hand-lettered sign when I push through the door at five, the HVAC contractor a step behind me.
She looks up and there's a half-second where she recalibrates, the kind of pause a person has when someone walks in who had their hands on them a few hours ago, and then she goes back to the sign and presses the corner flat against the wall.
I tell myself the pause shouldn't matter. The fact that it does is its own problem.
Read This Before You Spiral.
Pancake crosses the floor and sits next to the stepladder. Avery comes down one rung and scratches her behind the ears without breaking her focus on how the sign hangs above the shelves.
"Climate control," I say. "Shouldn’t take him long to assess the job. I’ll wait for him to take a look." I nod toward the back, and the contractor heads that way without needing more direction.
Avery steps off the ladder and picks up a box from the floor, glancing at me once, then away.
"If you're going to loom," she says, "at least earn it." She holds the box out.
I take it. "I had a whole afternoon of standing around looking expensive planned, but okay."
There’s a flicker at the corner of her mouth like she almost smiles and decides not to, and then it’s gone.
She picks up another one and moves toward the shelving unit across the room.
I follow and we work without talking for a minute, her taking books two at a time and slotting them into place and me handing them off when she reaches back for the next one.
She reaches back again without looking.
"You reorganizing these or making me do cardio?" I ask.
She slides the next book into place. "You strike me as someone who pays people to sweat."
I hand her another book. "Only professionally."
Her shoulders move once like she caught the joke before she wanted to.
My eyes keep finding her hands.
"So are we just not talking about it?" she asks.
She's got her back to me, straightening three books that already look straight, spine of another in one hand. She says it casually enough that if I didn't know her, I'd think she meant it casually. "Are we doing that thing where we pretend this morning happened to other people?"
I hand the book back to her when she reaches for it and wait for the next one.
"It was real," I tell her. "And it doesn't change anything it shouldn't change." I glance at the shelf, then back at her. "Unless you want it to."
I hand her the next book. "I'm flexible."
She goes still and it takes her a fraction longer than it would have when the morning started. I can see it in the set of her shoulders and the small pause before she reaches for the next book.
She opens her mouth like she's about to say something, then her phone buzzes on the shelf between us, lighting up with Shane's name. She picks it up.
"Hey." There's a warmth in her voice that's automatic, easy.
I turn back to the shelving unit and slide an empty box out of the walkway with my foot while she talks. Her voice stays easy, like nothing happened this morning, and for reasons I choose not to examine too closely, that feels unreasonable.
The store is quiet enough that even without speaker I can make out Shane's voice clearly from where I stand. Bright and unhurried with a low laugh at the edge of it.
“Quick question,” he says. “Is the Anchor Street loading bay alarmed at night? I was thinking if we needed to work around your schedule we could come in the back and save you the trouble.”
Avery leans against the shelving unit, relaxed.
"We've moved all the furniture over, so there won't be any big deliveries for a while.
Front entrance is fine for anything that comes in.
" She pauses. "Actually, you can come straight to the pop-up tomorrow.
I could use an extra set of hands for the last of the setup. Opening's in two days."
"Absolutely." He sounds genuinely pleased.
"I'll see you tomorrow."
Another easy laugh. "Looking forward to it."
She sets the phone down and picks up where she left off.
I keep my hands on the shelf and my eyes on the books in front of me and say nothing.
There isn't anything I can say to her right now that doesn't turn into a conversation about the sex this morning, why I left afterward, or what I'm doing inside an arson investigation, and every version of that conversation blows something up.