"What are you thinking about?"
"The fact that yesterday, I didn't check my phone for twelve hours. Twelve hours." Her hands were still at her sides, but Jake could see the tension in her fingers. "I'm an AUSA. I've spent seven years building a career on discipline and judgment and never, not once, letting anything compromise my objectivity. And you've been in my life for seventy-two hours and I'm already someone I don't recognize."
Jake was very still. The operator's stillness, the one that came from years of knowing that the wrong movement at the wrong time could change everything.
"I'm not asking you to be someone you don't recognize," he said.
"You're not asking me anything. That's the problem." Her voice thinned, barely, and she sealed it back immediately. "You show up. You lean against cars and tell Syria stories and take me to sandwich shops where a woman who loves you sits down and tells me things you didn't choose to share. You don't push, you don't pressure, you don't do any of the things I know how to defend against. You just exist in my space and somehow that's worse, because I can't be angry at someone for being kind."
"Do you want to be angry?"
"I want to be in control." The words came out raw. "I want to know what's happening to me. I want to be able to put a name on it and file it and build a case around it so I can understand the parameters. And I can't. Because the parameters keep moving."
Jake let the silence hold. He'd spent fifteen years learning when to speak and when to wait, and this was a time that required waiting. She wasn't done. He could see it building behind her eyes, the pressure she'd been carrying since yesterday, maybe longer, maybe since she walked into Ray's office and felt the ground shift the same way he had.
"This is too fast," she said.
"It is."
"Three days, Jake."
He didn't answer that one. Didn't agree, didn't argue. Let her have the importance of it without trying to take it from her.
"And I'm already..." She stopped. Looked away. Looked back. "Claire took one look at me last night and knew. I didn't say a word and she knew. I couldn't hide it. I have never, in my entire adult life, been unable to hide what I was feeling."
Jake felt the pull of that settle into him. The woman who'd spent a decade building walls had walked out of his car radiating, and the fact that it had been visible to her best friend, to anyone and that had terrified her more than anything she'd ever faced in a courtroom.
"Okay," he said. "Then we slow down."
Emily's eyes came back to him. Wary.
"If this is too fast, we slow down. I'll keep it professional. We work the case, we find Costa, and I stop being in your space."
"You haven't been in my space."
"I've been present. For you, that might be the same thing." He met her eyes. "I'm not trying to wreck your life, Em. If you need distance, you can have it. If you need me to step back, I'll step back. I mean that."
He did mean it. He could feel the truth of it, the willingness to walk away if that's what she needed, and the cost of that willingness, which was higher than he'd expected. Gator's voicein his head:Didn't matter if you came home because you didn't have anything to come home to.
Emily stared at him. The parking lot hummed with afternoon traffic, cars moving through the lot, someone's radio playing through an open window three rows over. The ordinary sounds of a Tuesday in Westshore that had nothing to do with what was happening between these two people standing six feet apart beside a black Range Rover.
"So, what?" she said. "You're saying give up? Walk away because I'm scared?"
"That's not what I said."
"That's what it sounded like."
"It sounded like me trying to do the right thing."
"Well, stop it."
The words hung in the air. Emily heard herself say them. Jake watched her hear herself say them.
"I'm an idiot," she said. Not to him. To herself. To the parking lot and the afternoon heat and whatever force of nature had decided to put Jake Walsh in her life and watch her precisely constructed world rearrange itself around him.
"No," Jake said. He stepped closer. Not crowding her. Just closing the distance she'd been so cautious to maintain. "You're not an idiot, Em."
He was right there now. Close enough that she could have stepped back, and they both knew she wasn't going to.
