Jaime cleared her throat. “Hey. Uh, thank you. I… guess I needed that shower.”
Olivia managed a dumb nod.
“So, can we talk now?”
“Yes,” Olivia rasped, pointing at the couch, and they both sat down across from each other. Olivia didn’t trust herself to be within touching distance of Jaime.
Jaime rubbed her hands over her pants legs, staring at the floor.
After a couple of silent minutes ticked by, and before Olivia snapped and started shouting, she said, “So.”
Jaime’s gaze flew up. “Why did you drop out of the Cain case?”
“Excuse me?” Anger and disappointment crashed through Olivia, battling for supremacy.Of courseJaime was here to talk shop. She hadn’t meant to hope, yet it was clear she had.
“I just… You were assigned the case, and then someone else took over. You weren’t sick.”
“Are you seriously here to discuss a case that ended several weeks ago?”
Jaime sighed. “No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I’m not sure.” She frowned.
“Then why were you knocking at my door like the police at nine in the evening on a Saturday night? In the middle of a thunderstorm.”
Jaime licked her lips. “My routines no longer work.”
Olivia did a double take. As non sequiturs went, this was up there. “Come again?”
“I don’t like how we left things, and… I may have been rash in ending things between us.”
Olivia’s eyes widened, but she remained silent.
“We had a good thing going, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know where you live.”
“What?” Jaime’s brows furrowed.
“What we had was…fleeting. A secret tryst kept separate from everything else, from anything real.”
“I thought… I thought you enjoyed the time we spent together.”
“I did. But you had a point in ending things. What we had wasn’t sustainable.”
“Because you don’t know where I live?”
“That’s a symptom.”
“Are you sure you don’t know? I told you, like when we went toneverending pagesand—”
“No. You only said you live close by.”
Jaime released a long sigh. “So, this is it, then?”
“I still don’t know what you want.”
