"That you've been running on coffee and adrenaline for hours." He pulled the Range Rover off the main road, winding through side streets. "I know a place."
The place was a sandwich shop wedged between a dry cleaner and a payday loan office. No sign out front, just a hand-painted board in the window that said ANNA'S in faded letters. A place you had to know existed to find.
"This doesn't look like much," Emily said.
"Trust me."
She was beginning to understand that those words, from him, were less a request than a statement of intent.
Inside was small. Six tables, a counter, a kitchen visible through a pass-through window where someone was moving with the efficiency of long practice. An older woman emerged, gray hair pulled back, apron that had seen decades of use. She looked up when they walked in, and her whole bearing changed.
"Jake Walsh." She came around the counter and pulled him into a hug that he returned without hesitation, bending to meet her, and Emily watched the way he held her. Gentle, familiar, the embrace of someone who understood this woman was important in ways that didn't require explanation.
"Twice in two days," Anna said, releasing him. "People will talk."
"Let them."
Anna's eyes found Emily. Not a glance. An assessment. Emily recognized the look from courtrooms. Measuring, cataloguing, deciding. Anna's eyes moved from Emily's face to her posture to the distance between her and Jake, and Emily had the distinctimpression of being evaluated by someone whose standards were exacting and non-negotiable.
"Anna Kostopoulos," Jake said. "Emily Callahan."
"The prosecutor." Anna said it with no inflection that Emily could read, which was itself a tell. A woman reserving judgment.
"It's nice to meet you," Emily said.
Anna studied her. Then her expression shifted. Not warmth yet, but the willingness to consider warmth. She nodded toward a table by the window.
"Sit. I'll feed you."
She disappeared into the kitchen without asking what they wanted.
"She doesn't take orders?" Emily asked.
"She makes what she thinks you need." Jake fell into his chair with the ease of a man who'd sat in it a thousand times. "She's never been wrong."
Emily looked around the shop. The walls held photographs. Old ones, faded, some in frames and some pinned directly to the plaster. A young man in Army dress uniform. The same young man, older, in desert fatigues, squinting into sun. A woman who looked like Anna, decades younger, standing in front of this same counter.
Jake followed her to the photographs but didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. The placement told the story. Centered on the wall behind the register, visible from every seat in the house, maintained with care that meant the loss was permanent and present.
Emily didn't ask. She understood what those photographs meant the same way she understood sealed testimony and exhibits marked for identification. Some evidence spoke for itself.
"You come here a lot," she said instead.
"Since I was seventeen. Ray brought me the first time. Anna fed us for free for a month because she said we looked hungry." The memory moved across his face, softening it. "She's family. The kind you choose."
Through the pass-through window, Emily watched Anna work. The economy of movement. The way her hands knew where everything was without looking. Not rushed, not performative. Someone doing the thing they'd done every day for twenty-six years because the doing of it mattered.
Anna emerged with two plates. Thick sandwiches on crusty bread, layered with care that was visible in the structure. She set them down and stood back, arms crossed, watching.
Emily took a bite. Closed her eyes.
It was, without qualification, the best sandwich she'd ever eaten. Not because of any single ingredient but because of the attention. Every element placed with intention, balanced against everything else. The work of someone who believed feeding people was a serious act.
"Told you," Jake said.
"You undersold it."
"I wanted you to discover that yourself."
