8. Leah
EIGHT
LEAH
The hand on the back of my neck was Julian's.
The position was, saturday was a mistake.
The mistake was mine. I stopped at the railing instead of walking past it. I let him tuck the strand of hair behind my ear. I leaned a fraction into the warmth of his hand. I let his mouth come down to mine, I kissed him back, and I pulled him closer.
The mistake was not going to happen again.
I had a plan: report what was operational, omit what was personal, stay on protocol, and finish the case.
I picked up the phone and called Harlow.
She answered on the second ring.
"Sunday, Calder."
"I know."
"What is it, Calder?"
"He took me to dinner with the partners.
I went. I sat next to him. He told a story about Hale from the early days that the whole table laughed at.
He talked about his mother once, briefly.
I ran into him at the park yesterday and he walked with me.
We talked. He told me he used to want to be an architect.
He told me his mother died when he was twenty-six and that was the reason he went into finance. "
"That's good, Calder."
"He's opening up."
"That's good."
"I'm planning to keep at it. I'm going to the gala on Saturday."
"As his date."
"As his date."
A pause.
"Get him talking about the founding of the Vanguard. That's where the case lives. Whoever paid that judge in 2007, that's our man. If Cross was naive — Cross was naive — but if he knows anything, he knows it from those years. Push there."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Anything else?"
I sat with the phone against my cheek and the cold coffee at my foot and the lie sitting behind my teeth like a small smooth stone. I could feel the shape of it.
"No, ma'am."
"Talk soon."
She hung up.
I set the phone down on the cushion beside me. My throat was tight. I picked the coffee mug off the floor and crossed to the kitchen. I dumped what was left of it into the sink and stood at the counter with my hand on the rim of the sink and let my breath go.
The lie was an omission. The omission was operationally sound.
I had reported what was relevant to the case.
I had not reported what was relevant to my body.
The Bureau did not need to know that I had let my mark put his hand at the back of my neck and his mouth on mine.
The Bureau needed to know that the closer approach was working and that I was making him talk. Both were true.
The other thing was also true.
I rinsed the mug. I put it upside down on the rack. I went to brush my teeth.
Twenty minutes later I had not yet decided whether to shower or go for a run when the floor safe at the foot of my bed buzzed.
I crossed the bedroom, knelt, spun the dial, and lifted the lid. The personal phone Claire Kent did not own was lit up on top of the equipment kit.
Torres
I'm still in town. Dinner tomorrow night? No pressure. I just want to see you.
My stomach dropped.
I sat back on my heels with the phone in my hand and my left hand still on the open lid of the safe. The morning light came in slant through the blinds and fell in slats across the floor.
I read it twice.
I thought about not responding.
I thought about the fact that the only way to get rid of Torres was to look him in the face and tell him. I had been refusing to do that for fourteen months, and that was its own kind of leaving him on a hook.
I typed.
Leah
Fine. One dinner.
I hit send before I could change my mind.
I put the phone back in the safe. I closed the lid. I spun the dial. I sat on the floor with my back against the foot of the bed and my hands flat on my knees and did not move for a long minute.
The floor was cool through the sweats. The plant on the windowsill had a single new leaf at the top of the stem I had not noticed yesterday. The slats of light moved a quarter-inch across the floor as the sun came up another degree.
I got up.
I went for my run.
The Vanguard lobby was busy at 8:15 a.m. Sarah had two iced coffees in a cardboard tray and a paperback in her free hand.
She lifted the tray at me without breaking stride.
The elevator was crowded. I rode it up with a man from compliance and a woman from the third-floor analyst pool and I did not look at my reflection in the brass.
I came off on forty-two and heard the music before I saw the door.
Quiet. A piano. Something with a low bass line under it I did not recognize.
His door was half-open. He was at his desk in shirtsleeves with the sandy hair still damp from a shower and his coffee already at his elbow.
His head was bent over a printout I had laid on the corner of his desk last Thursday.
He had been there longer than I had.
I crossed to my desk, set my bag down, shrugged my coat off, crossed to the kitchen and made his coffee — flat white, no sugar, a single shot extra — and carried it back across the carpet to his door.
I knocked once on the frame.
He looked up.
The grin came up at the corner of his mouth and stayed there. Not the conference-room grin. The other one. The one for me.
"Good morning, Mr. Cross."
"Good morning, Claire."
I crossed to the desk, set the coffee on the coaster and let my hand stay on the rim of the cup for half a second longer than I needed to. He did not look at the cup. He looked at my face.
The whole weekend was in the room with us.
Neither of us mentioned it.
"Halverson at 10:00 a.m. Klein update at 11:30 a.m. Partners' meeting at 2:00 p.m. You have a block at 4:00 p.m. and the London call at 6:00 p.m."
"Got it."
"You want me to push the 4:00 p.m.?"
"No."
"Of course."
I stepped back from the desk. I turned. I walked out.
I decided that morning, I was going to draw a line.
I handed him a folder, and his fingers brushed mine on the handoff, neither of us pretended it was an accident. He held the brush for a count of two. I had pulled my hand back at one and a half.
Then I came around the side of his desk to point at a figure in the Whitfield file, and his eyes dropped to my collarbone. I had felt the air on the line of my throat where the placket fell open, I caught his eyes on it, and I did not step back.
He had asked me about the London call.
I stood beside his chair and walked him through the timing.
"Friday at 2:00 p.m. our time, 7:00 p.m. theirs.
They're sending the legal package by Wednesday so you have forty-eight hours to redline.
The CFO will not be on the call. The COO will.
Her name's Margaret Rhodes. She is a woman who likes preparation. "
He watched my mouth the whole time.
I finished. I waited for him to write something down. He did not write anything down.
"What?"
"I didn't say anything."
"You're looking at me, Mr. Cross."
"You're looking at me."
The silence sat for a second.
The grin at the corner of his mouth widened a quarter-inch. The corner of my own mouth wanted to do the thing it had been doing all morning. The thing it had done at the river before the kiss, and I held it.
I held it.
"Anything else?"
"No, Claire."
"Of course."
I went back to my desk.
My heart was loud. I sat down at my desk and put my hands on the keyboard and made myself type the email to Margaret Rhodes's office and it took me three tries to get the salutation right.
The line was supposed to hold.
The line was failing.
I refilled the coffee pot at 11:20 a.m.
The kitchen off the main hall was empty when I went in. I had the empty pot in my left hand and a clean filter in my right and I crossed to the coffee station and started the rinse. The door behind me opened, and I did not need to turn around to know who it was.
Julian crossed to the cabinet on my right.
He stood with his back to it. His shoulder was an inch from mine. He had a mug in his hand, and he was looking at the cabinet over my head as though he did not already know which shelf the canister of ground coffee was on.
I reached past him for a clean mug from the upper shelf.
He did not move.
I lifted the mug down. My arm was a quarter-inch from his chest. The smell of him was right there — the warm cotton of the shirt, the faint clean of his soap, the ghost of the shower he had taken three hours ago.
"You're in my way, Mr. Cross."
"You're in mine.”
Neither of us moved.
His hazel eyes were on mine, his mouth was a foot from my face. His free hand had come up off his side and was resting flat against the cabinet door behind me, an inch from my hip, not touching. The line I decided to draw this morning was about to break in a kitchen, with a mug in my hand.
The door opened.
"Oh — sorry, Julian, I just need — sorry — passing through — "
There stood James from accounting in the doorway, folder under his arm, gaze fixed downward, inching past us toward the espresso machine with the chagrin of someone who'd clearly entered the wrong space.
Julian stepped back.
The grin came back at the corner of his mouth.
"James. Walk me back to my office. You're going to talk to me about Q3."
"I — yeah, sure, yeah — "
He left with James.
I stood at the coffee station with the empty mug in my hand and the coffee pot still in the sink. My hand on the mug was not steady. I set the mug down on the counter and gripped the edge with both hands. I tried to calm my racing heart by breathing slowly.
James had saved me. James from accounting had saved me from going against the decision I made this morning. The gratitude I felt for him was disproportionate to the way I was going to nod at him on the way past his desk for the rest of the week.
I made the coffee.
I went back to my desk.
I worked.
By 5:30 p.m. I had answered eighteen emails, rerouted Vega's call to Friday, confirmed the Klein update for Wednesday, printed three copies of the partners' meeting agenda for tomorrow, and had not thought about Julian Cross more than twice every minute.
I was packing my bag when he came out of his office.