"Tell me what happened when you walked in."
"Nothing happened. Ray introduced us. We discussed the case. He left."
"Emily."
"What?"
"You put your hand on the doorframe."
Emily's pen stopped moving.
She hadn't realized Claire had seen that. The half-second when she'd walked into Ray's office, looked at the man in the chair by the window, and reached for the doorframe because her legs had done the one thing they'd never done in a courtroom, in a deposition, in any room she'd ever entered with the intention of commanding it.
They'd gone uncertain.
"That was balance," Emily said. "The floor is uneven."
"The floor is federal marble, and you walk on it in heels every day without touching anything." Claire set her coffee down. "I've watched you walk into courtrooms with hostile judges and circumstantial evidence and I have never, not once, seen you reach for anything to prop yourself."
"He surprised me."
"He did more than surprise you."
Claire stood. Walked around the desk. Sat on the edge of it, close enough that Emily had to look at her.
"Do you remember junior year?" Claire said. "The Springsteen concert. Sold out. You convinced security you were the drummer's girlfriend."
"Max Weinberg. And I said I was his niece."
"You talked your way past three checkpoints and ended up six rows from the stage." Claire's voice had shifted. Softer. The voice she used when she was reaching for a version of Emily that had been put away a long time ago. "That girl didn't need to hold herself up in doorways."
"That girl grew up."
"That girl shut down. There's a difference."
Emily turned the pen in her fingers. A nervous habit she thought she'd trained out of herself in law school. A professor had told her once that fidgeting was the body's confession of anunprepared mind. Her mind was not unprepared. Her mind was running seventeen simultaneous assessments of Jake Walsh and every single one of them was returning results she didn't know how to file.
"He called me beautiful," she said. "In the middle of a briefing. In front of Ray. Like it was a fact he thought I should know."
"And?"
"And then he spent the next thirty minutes being exactly as smart as I am, which shouldn't be attractive, but apparently it is, and then he put a DEA agent on hold to ask me to drinks."
"While looking at you."
"While looking at me."
"What did you say?"
"I said I'd think about it."
"Which we both know is Emily Callahan for 'I want to say yes and I'm furious about it.'"
Emily turned back to her files. The sentences blurred, refusing to assemble into argument or analysis or anything resembling the work she'd built her identity around. She could still hear his voice in the hallway after he'd left, laughing, talking to Rodriguez, like the last hour hadn't rearranged anything for him. Except she'd seen his face when she'd smiled. The grin that started before he gave it permission. He was rearranged too. He was better at walking away from it.
"Tell me I'm wrong," Claire said.
"You're wrong."
