Anna pulled out the chair beside Emily and sat. The movement was unhurried. A woman who'd decided and was acting on it.
"He came in yesterday," Anna said. Not to Jake. To Emily. "For lunch. Sat at the counter."
Jake's posture shifted beside her. The slight change of a man recognizing a conversation was about to go somewhere he hadn't mapped.
"He talked about someone he'd met." Anna's voice was conversational, but her eyes were doing something else entirely. They were watching Emily with a prosecutor's attention.Looking for the reaction underneath the reaction. "The prosecutor."
"Anna." Jake's voice carried a note Emily hadn't heard from him before. Not warning. More like a man recognizing he'd lost control of a situation and deciding how much to fight it.
Anna ignored him completely. "He doesn't do that. Come in here and talk about someone. Not in all the years I've known him." She let that settle. "I told him to bring you here so I could see for myself."
Emily looked at Jake. He was looking back, and his expression was one she hadn't seen before. Not vulnerability, exactly, but the absence of the thing that usually covered it. Anna had pulled back a layer he hadn't offered to remove, and he was letting it stay removed.
"I wanted her read on things," he said. Simply. Directly. The way he handled everything that mattered to him. "Anna's judgment is better than mine."
"And what's your read?" Emily asked Anna.
Anna paused. Looked at her with the full burden of a woman who'd raised a son she'd lost and loved a shop she'd kept and watched enough people walk through her door to know the difference between the ones who stayed and the ones who didn't.
"I see someone who's paying attention," Anna said. "That's enough. For now."
She collected the plates and disappeared into the kitchen. Jake watched her go, then turned back to Emily.
"She's protective," Emily said.
"She's earned it."
"She didn't say she liked me."
"She sat down." Jake's eyes warmed. "That's more than most people get."
Emily considered that. A woman who'd watched Jake come and go for nearly twenty years. Who'd fed him and listened tohim and built a bond deep enough to make him drive across town for a sandwich he could make at home. A woman who didn't sit down for just anyone.
"She sat down," Emily repeated.
"Yeah, she did."
The sun was angling west when they pulled out of Anna's, painting the streets in that late-afternoon gold that made even strip malls look worth remembering.
Emily watched the city pass and took inventory. She'd spent the day following Jake Walsh around Tampa. Watching him work. Learning how he moved through the world. The patience, the attention, how he made the complicated look like common sense. She'd eaten a sandwich that had fundamentally altered her understanding of bread. She'd been assessed by a Greek woman who may or may not have approved of her.
And somewhere between the warehouse and Anna's, she'd stopped pretending this was about the case.
"Jake."
"Yeah."
"We confirmed Vance's people don't know where Costa is. That's useful intelligence."
"It is."
"And we identified a staging area with documentable surveillance."
"Also true."
"So, the day wasn't wasted."
"Nobody said it was."
