"With Jake Walsh."
"He's my investigator."
"Emily." Claire's voice shifted. The worry was still there, but it was making room for something else. The recognition of a pattern she'd been watching for and had maybe stopped believing she'd ever see. "You haven't checked your phone in twelve hours. You don't not check your phone. You check your phone during movies. You check your phone during my birthday dinners. You once checked your phone during a pedicure, and the woman had to ask you to stop moving your feet."
Emily didn't have a response to that.
Claire looked at her. The flush that hadn't faded. The brightness behind her eyes. The way Emily was standing on this sidewalk without any of her usual form. No defenses, no deflection, no meticulously constructed distance between herself and whatever she was feeling.
"Oh my God." Claire's voice dropped barely above a whisper. "You're gone."
Emily didn't deny it.
She couldn't.
"He calls me Em." It came out small. Not the way she said things in courtrooms or conference rooms or any of the rooms where words were instruments of precision. This was different. A confession she hadn't known she was carrying until it found the air. "Nobody calls me Em."
Claire watched her the way she always watched when something real was happening underneath everything Emily used to keep real things from happening.
"I want to be that girl," Emily said. "The one he sees."
Claire stared at her. Then her face broke open, and she pulled Emily into a hug that held.
"You looked like you swallowed the sun."
"Tell me everything."
CHAPTER 6
The Anchor was different at seven in the morning. No music, no crowd, no Tommy holding court at the corner of the bar. Just Gator behind the counter with a coffee pot and the kind of silence that came from thirty years of knowing when to wait.
Jake had been sitting with his mug for ten minutes before either of them spoke.
"So," Gator said, refilling without asking. "The lawyer."
"Emily."
"Emily." Gator set the pot down, leaned against the back counter with his arms crossed. The posture of a man settling in for a conversation he'd been expecting. "You've talked about her more in the last two days than you've talked about the case."
"The case is straightforward. She's not."
"Straightforward women bore you."
Jake smiled into his coffee. "They do."
He'd dated since the Army. Plenty of women, plenty of interest. He was good-looking enough and easy enough company that opportunities found him without effort. But easy had never held his attention. He'd smile, be polite, end things before they became real enough to require an ending. Notbecause he was broken or guarded or any of the things people assumed about operators who kept moving. He hadn't found anyone who made him want to stay.
Then Emily happened.
She'd walked into Ray's office, locked eyes with him, and the ground shifted. Not a lightning bolt, not the nonsense people wrote about. More like recognizing a language he hadn't known he'd been waiting to hear.
"She's different," Jake said.
"Different how?"
He considered the question. "She sees things. Reads a room the way operators read terrain. I was explaining surveillance basics in the car yesterday. Pattern recognition, behavioral baselines. She was already there. Natural instinct." He thought about her catching the photo frame on Maria's desk, filing it away without comment. How she'd tracked his movements at The Anchor without appearing to watch. "Vanderbilt. First in her class. Could have gone anywhere, taken any job. She's from Nashville, had every reason to stay. Didn't."
"Why'd she leave?"
