Chapter 17 #2
We sit with that for a moment while the harbor outside shifts gently against the docks, the water catching the late light in long, steady ripples.
"I've been working with Pham for years. Feeding her information whenever she had questions about properties.
In time it developed into ties to Stein's acquisitions, learning about his pressure tactics and patterns.
When Jonah told me you needed a temporary space and asked if I had any properties available to lease, your bookstore was already on Stein's list."
She exhales slowly. "That's why I saw my building on those maps you had laid out on the table in your conference room."
"Bringing you in close," I say, "made sense on paper."
"That is maybe the least romantic sentence anyone has ever said to me," she says.
"I had a follow-up sentence prepared," I tell her.
"Was it better than that one?"
"Statistically, yes."
She lifts her glass, then stops with it halfway to her mouth, watching me.
"It gave me access, it gave me visibility, it let me control variables I wouldn't have been able to otherwise."
"Control," she says, like she's filing the word.
"That was the plan," I say. "What I didn't plan for was you." I look at her. "The part where it stopped being a case and started being something I didn't want to step away from when it was over."
She doesn't look away this time.
"I got what I needed," I say. "We shut Stein down. We got justice for Danny and Cora."
I pause, just long enough that she knows there's more.
"And I hav you," I say. "Which was never part of the strategy, and is the only part of this I would not give back."
Her mouth moves like she's about to say something and then doesn't.
"I'm in love with you," I say.
She inhales, sharp enough that I feel it where our hands are still connected.
"You don't have to—"
"I know," she says, cutting me off. "I know I don't have to say anything back right this second." She looks at me, steady now. "I'm just deciding how dramatic I want to be about it."
"Take your time," I say.
"No," she says, and her fingers tighten in mine. "I don't think I will."
She leans across the table and kisses me, and there's nothing careful about it, nothing measured or negotiated. Just the two of us, here, with nothing pressing in on it, nothing about to go wrong.
When she pulls back, she rests her forehead against mine like she's checking something.
"For the record," she says quietly, "I never got over it."
She looks down at our hands.
"At some point I realized I didn't actually want to."
"That would've been really inconvenient for me if you had," I say.
She smiles, softer now, and sits back, and the world does not rush back in to interrupt us.
For once, it just stays like this, the wind off the water lifting the edge of the tablecloth and a halyard tapping softly against a mast across the harbor.
I keep catching myself waiting for the version of her I’ve learned under pressure, the one who smooths her expression a half second before anyone else notices and whose voice drops just enough when she’s holding something together in front of people.
She doesn’t do any of that now. She laughs mid-sentence and doesn’t correct it, lets a thought trail off without tightening it into something presentable, leans into me without checking who’s watching.
The space between us feels different without the urgency that used to build it, and I’m realizing how much of what I know about her came from watching her hold a line that isn’t here tonight.
I’ve seen her hold a room together when everything was about to go wrong, and I’ve heard her at two in the morning pretending she wasn’t afraid.
What I don't have much of yet is this. The version of her with nothing at stake, nothing incoming, nothing being managed. She laughs at something dumb I say about Cordelia eventually having to negotiate custody rights with Pancake, then laughs harder when she tries to stop herself.
A few minutes later she's telling me about the time her display copy of Pachinko developed a readership of its own, dog-eared to page forty-seven by someone she never caught, which she maintains was a violation and which she also maintains might have sold three copies.
"I heard you talking with Shane about the Mossman novels. Book two is the best one," she says, and it takes me a second to realize she remembered a throwaway conversation I barely remembered having myself.
"It's not," I say.
"Hmphh," she huffs, satisfied, and takes a sip of her drink like that settles it.
I let her have two of the three points she makes because she's not entirely wrong.
The server comes by with our food and Avery immediately steals one of my fries like she's checking for poison.
"Now who's redistributing resources?"
"Just benefiting from your generosity," she shoots back, stealing another fry off my plate while she says it.
I watch her do it and let her get away with it.
We spend the next few minutes talking about completely useless things, the kind of conversation that only exists when no one is trying to survive anything.
Cordelia's inability to keep plants alive and dating a farmer.
Whether harbor towns all secretly smell the same.
The fact that Jonah once tried to grill salmon on a piece of driftwood because he saw it on television and nearly lit a patio umbrella on fire.
"At some point I'm going to diagram the correct way to load a dishwasher for you."
"You say that like we're going to have this argument more than once," I say a little too quickly.
She looks at me over the rim of her glass.
"You absolutely seem like a man who loads bowls upside down with confidence," she says.
"You're going to need a whiteboard for that," I say.
"I absolutely am," she says, like it's obvious.
She leans closer across the table, her knee brushing mine under it.
She tells me about the first year of the store, before it was anything, when she couldn't afford a floor plan she redrew six times and a shelving system that took three weeks and Jonah's two free Saturdays to build.
The part where she ran out of money and had to call her mother, which she describes as a creative exercise in dignity management.
When the first regular came in, a woman named Gloria who wanted a book about gardens and stayed for four hours talking about her late husband who'd been a reader.
Avery found her a book and didn't charge her for it, which isn't a business model but was the right call.
"She's come every Tuesday for two years," Avery says. "She moved to be near her daughter."
She says it the way people say things that still land somewhere.
I don't say anything for a moment. Outside, the sun is lowering closer to the horizon. A door moves in the salt air. The two men in the corner are leaving, and I don't track them.
We walk back along the harbor, her shoulder pressed into my arm, our steps falling into something unplanned and even.
She bumps into me when she laughs and doesn’t correct it, just leans in a fraction more.
The marina lights stretch across the water in broken lines.
A boat shifts against its rope and the sound carries.
She gestures as she talks, sketching it out in the air like she can already see it built. I watch her hand, then her face, the way she leans into the idea like it’s something she can move with enough force.
"You have a theory for everything," I say.
"You say that like you haven’t spent six months psychologically profiling me," she says.
"I do," she says. "And I’m right more often than you’d expect."
I look over at her and catch the small, satisfied smile she’s trying not to lean into too hard, like she already knows she won that exchange before I had a chance to answer it.
I let the thought settle instead of chasing it further and keep walking with her along the water.
My phone buzzes in my jacket pocket.
I feel it. One pulse, then the pause that means it's waiting.
For the first time in years, I almost don't recognize it right away.
Stein is done. The arrests happened. The case is in Pham's hands now, where it belongs, and somewhere along the way I started letting myself believe my part in all of this was over.
Then the second pulse comes.
I know the number before I look. I know the shape of the timing.
Late enough to be deliberate, specific enough to mean something moved today, something that needs me to know before morning.
Pham, or Torres, or one of the three numbers that only produce contact when the situation warrants it.
I know what it is. I know what it will ask of me.
I put my hand over the pocket and leave it there.
Not now. I'll get to it later.
Avery is looking at the water, her shoulders tucked under my arm. The harbor lights are laying a long line across the surface and somewhere down the dock a line is ticking against a mast in the salt air, irregular and quiet.
I leave my phone in my pocket, my hand resting over it for a moment longer before I let it drop.
"Okay," I say. "Sell me on book two again."
She looks up at me, and the expression she has is one I'll be thinking about later when I'm alone, not surprised, something more like she understands exactly what I just chose to ignore.
"The middle section," she says, "sets up everything the ending needs. You just have to trust that it knows what it's doing."