The woman nodded once, as if they had exchanged something sacred and enough, and left.
Nicole dried her hands, squared her shoulders, and reassembled herself.Work first.Breakdown later.
In the corridor, the light found Tripp before she did.He stood by the stairwell door, jacket unbuttoned, tie loosened.For a heartbeat, he was eighteen again and everything was simple.Then the stairwell yawned behind him, and she remembered every complicated thing.
He didn’t speak as she approached.He just watched her.The look stripped away the room, the noise, the years.It scared her how much she wanted to step into it.
“You okay?”he asked at last.
“Define okay.”She managed a ghost of a smile.“I’ve been better.I’ve been worse.”
“I’m sorry, this case seemed to parallel our own lives.”His voice was low, roughened by something she didn’t want to name.
“Different people.Same song.”
His jaw shifted.For a second, she thought he might say her name the way he used to, make it a place she could go.Instead, he said, “You did the right thing in there.”
“So did you.”She glanced down the corridor toward the emptying courtroom.“You saved him.You gave Bianca…you gave her mother the truth.”
“We both did.”He looked at her longer than was safe in a hallway with windows.“Nicole—” He broke off, rubbed the back of his neck.“When I called Evelyn, I thought I knew how it would go.I didn’t know…” He swallowed.“I didn’t know it would sound like that.I suspected her of murder.”
“Neither did I.”Her voice frayed.She pulled it taut again.“But now we do.”
A silence opened, filled with everything they hadn’t said for years: I tried.I failed you.I was scared.They made me choose.I let them.I’m still angry.I’m still here.
He stepped aside, opening the stairwell door like a gentleman in a bygone century.She slipped into the cool echo of concrete and metal, and he followed.
“Tonight,” he said softly.“Seven.The restaurant on Sixth, the corner booth they always try to save for the judge.”The corner of his mouth lifted.“I bribed the hostess.She still owes me three favors.”
Nicole stared out the window at the reporters.A shiver rippled through her.If she said yes, she wasn’t just agreeing to dinner.She was agreeing to open the door that the past had slammed shut to see what had survived on the other side.
“Say no if you need to,” he added, so gently she could have cried.“Say later.Say never.I’ll take what you give.”
She looked up.The blue of his eyes was older now, complicated, capable of both mercy and cross-examination.The man who had cut a mother to the bone in defense of a son also looked like someone who could learn to hold a woman’s heart carefully this time.
“I’ll be there,” she said, and the ache that had lived under her sternum for years shifted, made room.
His breath left him, almost a laugh.“Seven,” he repeated, softer.
She nodded and turned to go before she changed her mind.
Outside, the sky was a hot, relentless blue.Reporters waited at the bottom of the steps, microphones like the heads of curious birds.Derrick stood a few yards away, shoulders hunched, his lawyer at his side.When he saw Nicole, he straightened, eyes red-rimmed but steady.For a moment, they simply looked at each other, prosecutor and almost-victim, the shape of a life returned to him still unfamiliar.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly when she reached him.“For what you lost.For what I couldn’t see soon enough.”
He nodded.“Thank you,” he managed.“For…not making it about winning.”
“It was never about that.”And today, at least, that had been true.
She left him to the cameras and the questions, to the sweep of a life that had changed too quickly.She walked down the steps into the noise, into the heat, into the city that would not pause for grief.A breeze teased the hem of her skirt and, on its back, for the first time in years, came the fragile scent of something like hope.
Tonight at seven, she would sit in a corner booth and decide if the past had to own the future.She would tell the seventeen-year-old version of herself, shaking, furious, unbroken, that sometimes justice arrived late but still arrived.That sometimes the truth didn’t heal you cleanly, but it could set the bone right so it could knit.
Nicole lifted her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and let the light find every cracked place.Then she opened them again and kept walking.
Chapter20
The restaurant was one of those quiet coastal places that looked out over the water, all soft lighting and dark wood, the kind of place couples lingered in corners with wineglasses between them.Nicole sat at a table near the window, her untouched glass of chardonnay catching the glow of the candles.
