Chapter 5
HANNAH
He slows down when he runs past me.
I notice because I’m a details person. Twenty-four years of reading a courtroom teaches you to track the small things, the tells, the moments people think they’re unobserved.
I clock the slight reduction in his pace without looking up from my book, which I am reading, actually reading, and not using as a prop to avoid acknowledging my neighbor.
I turn a page.
He’s gone by the time I look up, which I do eventually, just to check the horizon. That’s all. The horizon.
He circles back twenty minutes later and this time he stops.
Not close, about ten feet away, at the edge of comfortable conversation distance, hands on his knees catching his breath. He looks up and finds me already looking and I don’t bother pretending otherwise because I’m too old for that particular performance.
“Room for one more?” he asks, nodding at the sand beside me.
I should say no. I came to this beach specifically to be alone with my book and my thoughts and the ocean, and Cruz Jackson is none of those things.
He’s the opposite of quiet. He’s the opposite of uncomplicated.
He’s thirty-four years old with a jaw that should come with a warning label and he slowed down when he ran past me and I noticed and I am not going to make good decisions here if I don’t establish some boundaries.
“Sure,” I say.
He drops down beside me, not too close, forearms on his knees, looking at the water. He’s breathing normally again within a minute, which is mildly annoying. I close my book around my finger to hold the page.
“Good run?”
“Good beach,” he says. “I forget every year how different it looks in person versus photos.”
“You photograph it a lot?”
“Comes with the job.” He pauses. “The other job.”
I find I like that distinction —the other job— the way he separates the two things without apologizing for either of them.
“What are you working on right now? The architecture.”
Something shifts in his posture. Barely perceptible, but I catch it. A kind of settling, like a question he didn’t expect to get asked.
“Coastal preservation project up near Corolla. Trying to design something that works with the erosion patterns instead of against them.” He glances at me. “Most developers want to fight the water. I think you have to design like it’s going to win eventually.”
“Because it will.”
“Because it will,” he agrees. “The house that lasts isn’t the one built to resist. It’s the one built to adapt.”
I sit with that for a moment. There’s something in it I’m not going to say out loud.
“Tell me about the firm,” he says. “How you built it.”
So I do, but I don’t know why exactly, except that he’s looking at the water while I talk and it’s easier to say true things when someone isn’t watching your face for the reaction.
I tell him about the first office, which was a converted spare bedroom in my house with a secondhand desk and a laptop that overheated in summer.
I tell him about the years when I worked until two a.m. after the girls were in bed, about the cases I took for free because I recognized the look on a woman’s face when she’s been told by the system to be patient, to wait, to accept less than she’s owed.
I tell him about the partner I brought on six years in who told me I was too aggressive in the courtroom and I should consider softening my approach, and how I made senior partner the following year and he left to start his own practice that folded within eighteen months.
Cruz laughs at that, delighted, genuine. “What did you say to him when it folded?”
“Nothing. I sent flowers.”
He looks at me then, fully, and his expression does something complicated. “That is the most devastating thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I thought so.”
We’re both quiet for a moment, easy with it, and the ocean fills the space between sentences the way it does, generously, without demand.
“Why solo?” he asks eventually. “The vacation. Why a month alone?”
I consider the lawyerly answer and discard it. “Because I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done something purely for myself. Not for the firm, not for my daughters, not to prove anything to anyone.” I look at the water. “I needed to find out if I still knew how.”
“Do you?”
“Ask me in three and a half weeks.”
He smiles, slow and warm, and looks back at the horizon.
We sit there for a while —I don’t know how long, twenty minutes maybe, maybe more— and I read a little and he doesn’t seem to need to fill the silence and it’s comfortable in a way I didn’t expect and didn’t ask for and am not entirely sure what to do with.
We’re walking back when it happens.
Not back together. It evolved that way organically, both of us standing when the sun shifted, both of us heading the same direction because we live next door to each other, not because it means anything.
We’re walking along the waterline, shoes off, the wet sand cool under my feet, and we’re talking about something inconsequential.
I think it was about the architectural crimes of beach souvenir shops, but Cruz stops walking.
Just stops. So I stop too, and look at him, and he’s looking at me with an expression I haven’t seen directed at me in so long that it takes me a moment to identify it.
He says: “You’re beautiful, Hannah.”
Not as a line. Not with any of the machinery of a move.
No lean-in.
No loaded pause.
No hand reaching out.
He says it the way he talks about architecture, the way he said the house built to adapt, like he’s describing something real that he can see clearly and is simply noting it.
I feel it move through me like a current.
“Cruz—”
“I’m not saying it to start something,” he says, still in that same even tone.
“I just think you should know that you are. The way you sit on that beach like you own it. The way you talk about your daughters. The way you put out my grill fire and handed back the extinguisher like you were returning a stapler.” The corner of his mouth moves.
“You’re the most stunning person I’ve seen in a long time and I don’t think you know it and that seemed worth saying. ”
I have cross-examined witnesses who tried to rattle me. I have sat across tables from men twice my size who thought volume was a substitute for logic. I have built something from nothing with my own hands and my own stubbornness and I do not get flustered.
I deflect. “You’re very charming for someone whose salmon is in a landfill.”
He laughs, and lets me have it, and starts walking again.
That’s what undoes me a little.
That he says it and means it and then just moves on, doesn’t hold it over me, doesn’t wait for me to match it or deflect it or do anything with it. Just offers it like a gift with no strings attached and keeps walking.
Our hands are close at our sides. Not touching. The distance between them is approximately two inches and I am aware of every millimeter of it.
At the wooden walkway that leads back up toward our houses we stop at the bottom of the stairs and there’s a moment —brief, loaded, the ocean loud behind us— where neither of us moves.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
And I see it clearly for the first time, what’s actually happening here: I’m not afraid of him being too young. I’m not even afraid of the gap, the math, the optics. Those are real considerations for later but they’re not the fear.
The fear is wanting something again. The specific vulnerability of letting myself lean toward something warm when you’ve spent fourteen years being my own heat source.
I built myself into someone who doesn’t need and I’m proud of that, I earned that, but Cruz Jackson standing at the bottom of a beach walkway with sand on his feet and total sincerity on his face is threatening the architecture of that very carefully.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he says. Easy. No pressure. Just a fact.
“I’ll be on the deck,” I say, like I wasn’t going to be there regardless.
I go up the stairs first. I don’t look back.
But at the top, before the walkway curves toward my door, I hear him still on the beach below and I know without looking that he waited until I was safely up before he started climbing.
That does something to me I don’t have a name for yet.