Chapter 7 #2
Andy treats every piece of it with the same weight.
He asks follow-up questions that show he's listening, not just recording, questions that take what I give him and push it one step further.
When did that change? Was it gradual or sudden?
Did anyone else notice? He doesn't tell me what's useful and what isn't. He takes it all and lets the pattern emerge.
The way he does it, the focus, the stillness, his pen moving across the notebook without his eyes ever leaving my face for longer than it takes to write a line, is a kind of attention I have no defense against. The Doms at Dominion listen to negotiate and then stop listening when the scene starts.
Margot listens with purpose and efficiency and files what she needs.
Andy listens the way he watches, with a thoroughness that covers everything and judges nothing, and his bare forearm is resting close enough to mine on the table that I can feel the warmth off his skin without touching it, and neither of us has moved to close or widen that gap for the better part of an hour.
He gets up to refill the coffee. He refills both mugs without asking and sets mine down in front of me with a fresh napkin, and when he does his fingers brush the back of my hand.
It's a graze, possibly accidental. His eyes meet mine over the table when he sits back down, and the look in them tells me nothing was accidental.
He picks up his pen and says, "Keep going," and the two words land with the same quiet authority as every other command he's given me tonight. And I keep obeying them.
The kitchen clock pushes past two, then past three.
"The reading glasses are new," I say during a lull, because apparently my mouth has decided that deflection and curiosity are the same thing at three in the morning.
"They're not new. I just don't wear them at the club."
"Why not?"
"Because a Dom in reading glasses undermines a certain aesthetic."
I laugh before I can stop it, a real one, startled out of me by the dry delivery and the honesty underneath it. He watches me laugh, and his face opens by a degree. The warmth is real, but it's rationed. It lasts exactly long enough for me to feel it before the control slides back into place.
"You should undermine the aesthetic more often," I say, and the words come out softer than I intended, which means it's time to change the subject before I say something I can't take back.
He does it for me.
"What happened when Margot found you?" The question is quiet, asked into the lull rather than pushed into it. "You gave me the outline. Caught you at an associate's house, offered you a job. What's the rest of it?"
I wrap both hands around my mug. The warmth of the ceramic grounds me the way a glass behind the bar grounds me, something solid between my hands and the world.
"Margot's associate had a safe in his study.
A Hartwell 3200. Good safe, decent lock, terrible combination.
His wife's birthday." I manage a thin smile.
"Rich people always make it easy. I had the combination in under a minute.
" The memory plays back in a sequence I haven't shared with anyone, the study and the necklace and the light coming on.
"I was holding a sapphire necklace in a velvet box when Margot walked in.
She was sitting in a friend's house in the dark because his alarm system sends alerts to her phone.
She watched me work the safe before she said a word. "
Andy is still. The notebook sits closed on the table, and the stillness in him has a quality I've learned to recognize.
It's the same stillness he holds at the bar when a scene gets interesting.
He is all focus and no movement, like anything he does might break whatever is happening in front of him.
"She didn't call the cops. She sat down in the armchair and told me I was twenty-five years old with a skill set that was going to land me in prison before thirty, and then she asked me how much I owed."
"How much did you owe?"
"Enough. My mother's medical bills. Years of them.
" The coffee is cooling in my hands but I don't drink.
"Margot offered me a job. Bartender at a club I'd never heard of.
She said I wouldn't steal from her, and she said it the way she says everything, like the outcome was already decided and she was just waiting for me to catch up. "
"Sounds like Margot."
"That's dangerously close to admiration, Detective."
"That's recognizing someone who doesn't waste time pretending outcomes are negotiable.
" He holds my gaze, and his hair is in his face and the t-shirt pulls across his shoulders when he shifts, and I take in every detail because I can't stop and I don't want to and both of those facts are getting harder to pretend away. "What happened next?"
"I took it. I shook her hand in that study and walked out onto the porch and promised myself I was done. Not to Margot. To myself. The woman who broke into houses was dead, and I was going to be someone who deserved what Margot was offering."
The kitchen is quiet. The refrigerator hums. Outside, the sky hasn't started to lighten yet, but the quality of the darkness has shifted, the deep black loosening by degrees.
"And then you broke into Lawrence Blanchard's house," Andy says.
"And then I broke into Lawrence Blanchard's house." I set the mug down because my hands want to shake and I won't let them. "I told you the facts. I didn't tell you how it felt."
He waits. He doesn't prompt and he doesn't prod, and the patience is the thing that undoes me, because if he pushed I could push back, and pushing back is how I keep people out. Andy Broussard's silence is more dangerous than most men's demands.
"It felt good." The words cost me more than the confession about the B&E itself.
"The entry was clean. The exit was clean.
My hands remembered everything, the picks, the sweep pattern, the way you read a room by its sounds.
I sat in my car afterward and my hands were shaking, and the shaking wasn't fear.
It was the high, the warm, rushing satisfaction of a job done well, and it felt better than anything since Margot shook my hand. "
I watch his face and I wait for the judgment. His jaw is tight, but the eyes behind the tightness are steady, tracking me with the same focus he's given every piece of intelligence tonight. He doesn't interrupt.
"Better than the first clean shift at Dominion.
Better than Margot's approval. Better than paying off the last of my mother's debt.
I picked a lock and walked through a stranger's house and I was home, Andy.
Years of earning Margot's trust, years of being the person she believed I could be, and I threw all of it away for an adrenaline fix I didn't even want to admit I missed.
" I look at him. "And that terrifies me more than any of the rest of it because it means the woman in the gloves isn't dead. She was just waiting."
The silence that follows is long enough that I start to regret saying it. Then Andy folds the reading glasses and sets them on the closed notebook with the same precision he gives everything that matters.
"The B&E was reckless," he says. "You could have contaminated evidence, gotten yourself arrested, or walked into an occupied house with a killer who'd already demonstrated he cleans up loose ends.
Being good at something doesn't make it right, and the fact that it felt good should worry you more than the fact that you did it. "
The words land without heat and without mercy and without the judgment I was bracing for.
He's not telling me I'm a bad person. He's telling me I made a dangerous choice for the wrong reasons, and he's saying it the way he says everything that cuts deepest, low and level and without raising his voice.
"It does worry me," I say. "That's why I told you."
"You told me because it's three in the morning and you're sitting in my kitchen in shorts that barely qualify as clothing and the dark makes confessions feel cheaper.
" He holds my gaze, and the directness in it has an edge that the bare feet and the loose hair don't soften at all. "But I'll take it however it comes."
Heat climbs up the back of my neck. I reach for the sarcasm the way I reach for a bottle when a customer gets too close.
"Are you critiquing my wardrobe or my decision-making? Because I can only handle one character flaw at a time."
"Both. The decision-making is worse." He reaches for the coffee pot. "More coffee?"
"Is there anything else in this house?"
"There's bourbon."
"I'll take the coffee. The last thing I need is impaired judgment around you at this hour of the morning."
The words land between us with more honesty than I intended. His hand pauses on the pot, and the look he gives me is brief and heated and entirely controlled, a door opened a crack and held there.
He pours. He sets the mug in front of me. He sits back down and doesn't touch me, and the not-touching is louder than contact would have been.
The kitchen has gone from dark to grey while we've been talking, the window over the sink catching the earliest shift in the sky, not sunrise yet but the promise of it, the deep blue that means the city is about to remember it's morning.
Neither of us has slept. The case files sit between us alongside the notebook and the cold remains of coffee, and whatever we've been pretending this is all night stopped being that at least two pots ago.
"I should try to sleep," I say, though we both know I won't.
"You should." He doesn't move to stand. He stays in his chair with the coffee and the case files, and his eyes track me when I stand in a way that is not professional and not casual and not anything he's trying to hide. "Renata."
My name in his voice at this hour, in this kitchen, with the grey light and the cold coffee and the confession still raw between us, stops me in the doorway.
"What?"
"The woman in the gloves isn't the problem. The woman who told me about her is." He picks up his pen. "Get some sleep."
I take my mug to the sink and rinse it. From behind me I hear him open the notebook and the soft scratch of his pen on paper, already back to the case, already building.
When I reach the kitchen doorway I glance back.
He's put the reading glasses on again, and the sight of him in the grey pre-dawn light with his worn t-shirt and his pen moving across a page stops me for a second I don't intend to give.
He doesn't look up. I think he knows I'm looking. The not-looking feels deliberate, a choice to give me the space to want without being caught wanting.
I walk down the hallway to the guest room that smells like cedar and detergent and close the door.
I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and try to identify the feeling settling into my body. It takes a while. The feeling is unfamiliar, coated in years of rust, buried under sarcasm and distance and the careful management of how much of myself I let anyone see.
I told Andy Broussard more in one night than I've told anyone in years.
Not just the facts of Margot and the B&E, which are dangerous enough, but the truth underneath the facts: that I liked it, that I miss it, that the woman I promised to leave behind is still alive in my hands and my instincts and the part of me that reads a room for entry points before I notice the furniture.
He didn't flinch. He didn't moralize. He told me I was reckless and told me my shorts barely qualified as clothing, and he said all of it with a gaze that tracked my legs when I stood up and didn't apologize for it.
The front door opens and closes. His car starts in the driveway.
He's leaving for the precinct with the case files and the notebook and the list of names I gave him and whatever else he carries out of this house when he puts the badge back on and becomes the version of himself the world gets to see.
I close my eyes. The cedar is still there.
The feeling is still there, settling deeper, and I let it stay because fighting it would take more energy than I have and because the alternative is admitting that the safest I've felt in years is in a house that belongs to a man who used to be just another bourbon order at the end of my bar, who wears reading glasses in his kitchen and listens to me like the things I say have weight.
Then the thought I've been keeping at arm's length all night finally lands.
Andy is driving to the precinct with a notebook full of names I gave him.
Names of Dominion members whose patterns shifted, whose habits changed, who disappeared.
I handed him the map I've been building behind the bar for years, and somewhere in that map is the name of a person who is killing people and cleaning it up like a professional.
Which means somewhere in that map is the reason they might come for me next.
Sleep doesn't come. It doesn't even circle this time.