Chapter Nine
Max
The second day is harder than the first.
On the first day, I had adrenaline. I had terms to demand and a posture to maintain and a very specific kind of fury to weaponize.
On the second day I just have a desk, and that desk is outside Callan Reed’s office, and I must sit at it and do normal things.
And pretend I’m not waiting for the inevitable ghosts of the past to breeze by.
Normal things include: setting up my laptop, requesting file access from IT, reading through background on a case Cal dropped on my desk with a sticky note that says: ‘the case I thought you might be interested in’ in handwriting that I recognize from two years of shared study sessions and somehow find obnoxiously irritating in the best way; the way that makes me have to force my lips together to avoid smiling.
I do not smile. I open the Halbrook file and start reading.
The case is twelve years of wrongful conviction compressed into a five-inch stack of documents, convicted on the testimony of a single eyewitness who has since signed an affidavit saying he lied.
The witness was seventeen at the time. He was scared and he was wrong and he said so in writing three years ago and somehow the defendant is still in a cell.
I read for an hour and a half without looking up and by the time I surface I have four pages of notes and an actual feeling in my chest that I haven’t felt at work in a very long time.
Purpose has bloomed from a seed that has been long dormant inside of me.
“You have that face,” Cal’s voice seeps into the air around me.
I look up. He’s leaning in the doorway of his office—one shoulder against the frame, arms crossed, his towering height making his confidence palpable in a way that is so attractive it has me questioning how I could get any work done at all—and he’s looking at the notes in my hand.
“What face?”
“The one where you’ve found something or figured something out.” He tips his head at my notepad. “What’d you find?”
“Nothing yet. But the state’s case is thinner than they made it look at trial.
” I flip back a page in my notes. “The eyewitness identification happened at dusk, forty feet of distance, partial obstruction. The defense attorney at trial didn’t challenge it adequately, and there’s a second witness who was never called—a woman who was walking her dog; she gave a statement to police that doesn’t match the eyewitness account in three key details and somehow never made it to the defense table. ”
Cal is quiet for a moment.
“That’s in the file?” he asks.
“It’s in the original police report, which is in the file. It just takes a while to get there.” I look up at him. “How long have you had this case?”
“Three years.”
“And you never found her?”
“I found her.” Something moves across his face. “She moved. We’ve been trying to locate her current address for eight months. But we’ve had a lot of cases.”
I look at my notes. I look back at him.
“I might be able to find her,” I say. Many years of vetting Becca’s Tinder dates prepared me well for this. People don’t disappear. They just make it inconvenient to be found.
He looks at me for a long moment. His expression is the one I remember him getting when he’s deciding which cards to show—like there’s something underneath the composed surface that wants to say something, and he’s deliberating whether to let it out.
“Yeah,” he says, finally. “Do it.”
By the end of the first week, I have found the missing witness—currently living under her married name in Vermont, working at an elementary school, and very willing to testify once I explained what her statement could mean for the defendant.
I have also successfully avoided Patrick Ellison four times by learning (just like I did years ago) his calendar, which is not a difficult thing to do.
Patrick’s schedule is Patrick’s identity.
He has never, in all the years I have known him, done anything spontaneous—well, if you don’t count all the cheating.
He is a nine-o’-clock-meeting-with-coffee-in-hand man; he is a twelve-thirty-lunch-reservation man; he is an end-of-day-scotch-in-his-corner-office man.
He has the predictability of a tide chart, and I am very good at not being where he’s going to be.
But of course, Cal notices.
He doesn’t say anything, which is how he has always been—especially when it comes to Patrick. He notices everything and says very little of it out loud.
He noticed on Wednesday when I took the stairs to avoid the elevator that was already occupied by Patrick and Brenda.
He noticed on Thursday when I rerouted through the conference room to get to the kitchen.
He noticed this morning when I went to stand up to switch chairs, so I didn’t have to stare at Patrick having an impromptu meeting in the middle of the office with one of the associates.
And Cal came and sat in the chair in front of me without being asked, opened his laptop and said nothing about it.
“You don’t have to do that,” I tell him.
“Do what,” he says too calmly, which was a lie, but a polite one.
“Position yourself so I don’t have to look at him.”
He is quiet for a second. “I’m not. I have a meeting in twenty minutes, and this is a comfortable chair.”
“You have never sat in this chair before.”
“I’m branching out.”
I look at him. He looks at his laptop. He gives away exactly nothing.
“Thank you,” I say, quietly.
He looks up then, briefly, and his eyes feel like they trail over every inch of my face before he covers it immediately with whatever the Cal Reed version of composure is when he’s trying not to let something show.
“The Halbrook witness,” he says. “Good work finding her, Sims.”
He goes back to his laptop. I go back to mine. And if I was smiling at my screen for approximately the next twenty minutes, that was a private experience and had nothing to do with Cal.
The first time I run into Patrick without warning is eleven days in.
It’s early—I came in at seven-thirty to get a head start before anyone else arrived, which I thought was a reliable strategy—and I’m standing at the espresso machine in the kitchen when he walks in.
He stops. I do not acknowledge his existence.
I focus on the espresso machine like it’s a complex document requiring my full attention. It’s not, it requires approximately seven seconds of my time and I’m giving it twenty.
“Max.” His voice acknowledges my presence carefully. Rehearsed.
“Morning,” I say to the machine.
A pause.
He walks to the cabinet.
Gets a mug.
The kitchen is not large enough for this to be anything other than what it is, which is two people who have a catastrophic history trying to share thirty square feet at seven forty-five in the morning.
“You’ve been good?” he asks.
I take my espresso and turn around, and I look at him the way you look at someone when you are deciding how they have survived on this earth so long without brain cells.
“I’ve been fine,” I say, sipping my coffee. “You?”
“Yeah.” He turns the mug over in his hands, like he’s trying to figure out what to say, stalling. I remember his stalling. I remember a lot of things, and most of them I’ve buried somewhere deep inside my brain because that’s where they belong. “It’s good to have you here.”
I sip again.
“Have a good day, Patrick,” I turn before the words fully leave my lips, and I walk out.
I make it to the hallway before I let out a long, slow breath. My hands are completely steady. I note this with something that isn’t quite pride but lives next door to it.
Cal is walking toward me from the elevator, jacket already on, a coffee from the place down the street in his hand. He reads my face the way he used to. His eyes flick behind me towards the kitchen and he doesn’t ask what happened.
“Halbrook witness confirmed for a video call Thursday,” he says instead.
“Good.”
He falls into step next to me as we walk to our corner of the office, and the morning starts properly, and that’s that.
The thing I notice, the thing I keep noticing, is that Cal’s different here than I expected.
I expected Ellison’s version of Callan Reed—buttoned up, respectful, working the room the way you work a room when the room belongs to other people. That’s who I saw at the bar and in Richard’s office that first day. Controlled. Every action deliberate.
That’s not who sits across from me at eleven o’clock every day going through the Halbrook case.
This Callan takes his jacket off. This Callan argues with me about case strategy in a way that is so specifically interested in what I actually think that sometimes I lose track of the argument because I’m busy adjusting to being taken seriously.
He says on a Wednesday, in response to a point I make about the witness recantation timing, that I am right and he was wrong and he is going to change his approach, and he says it so simply, so without decoration or caveat, that I sit there for a full three seconds just receiving the information.
Patrick never admitted he was wrong in five and a half years. Patrick would say he wasn’t sure what I was getting at, and then proceed to do whatever he’d already decided to do or come up with an idea identical to mine three days later.
“What?” Cal asks after the pause has been going on for much longer than I thought.
I’ve been staring straight ahead at his hands laced in front of him on his desk after his announcement that he was wrong.
“Nothing,” I shake my head and frown. “You have ink on your hand.”
He looks at his hand. He does, in fact, have ink on his hand—a smear of blue pen across the side from the notes he’s been taking. He looks back up at me.
“Thank you,” he says, very dry, and goes back to the file. “Breaking cases wide open and catching pen smears.”
I go back to the file too.
The thing I decided to acknowledge at one in the morning with a cold cup of tea and a pen with my name on it bubbles up to the surface again. Where I tell it to calm down.
But it feels like we are getting somewhere.