"My turn for what?"
"I answered your questions. Now I get to ask mine."
Claire tilted her head. The look on her face was caught between suspicious and delighted, and Jake understood exactly why Gator had laughed at the bar. There was something aboutClaire Harper that made you want to say the thing that surprised her, just to see what her face did.
"Fine," she said. "But I reserve the right to plead the Fifth."
"You're a prosecutor. You don't get to plead the Fifth."
"I'm off the clock. Ask."
"How'd you end up in motions? Emily says you could try cases."
Claire's eyes shifted. Not defensive. Recalibrating.
"I can try cases," she said. "I'm good at it. I did mock trial all through law school, won nationals our second year. I can stand up in a courtroom and do the thing."
"But?"
"But Emily's better." She said it without hesitation or resentment. A fact, delivered like a fact. "Not by a little. By a lot. She's the best I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. I watched her in our first trial advocacy class and I knew. She was born for it."
"And you decided to do something else."
"I decided to do the thing I was best at, instead of being second-best at the thing she was born for." Claire took a sip of wine. "Motions work is invisible. Nobody's watching. Nobody's writing articles about the brilliant brief that kept the evidence in. But if I don't do my job, Emily can't do hers. And I'd rather be the best at what I do than adequate at what she does."
Jake sat with that. The self-awareness it required. The ego it didn't.
"That's not how most people think," he said.
"Most people are idiots." Claire said it cheerfully. "I figured out early that there's no shame in being the person who makes the star shine brighter. There's a whole career in it, actually. A very good one."
"You're not in her shadow."
"No. I'm in her corner. There's a difference." Claire pointed her fork at him. "You get that. That's why I like you."
Their food arrived. Jake ate. Claire ate. The conversation moved the way good conversations do when neither person is performing. She told him about growing up in Atlanta, about her parents' divorce when she was twelve and how she'd decided then that she was going to be the person in the room who kept things together. He told her about Ranger, about the injury that ended his operational career, about how the dog had looked at him in the kennel like he'd been waiting.
"Emily says Ranger chose her," Claire said.
"Within seconds. He doesn't do that."
"What does he usually do?"
"Ignores people. Tolerates them if I tell him to. He walked up to Emily and put his head on her knee like he'd known her his whole life."
Claire smiled. Not the sharp smile or the knowing smile. The warm one. The one that looked like Emily's when Emily forgot to guard it.
"She told me about that night," Claire said. "The first time she went to your house. She called me at midnight and talked for an hour about your dog."
"Not about me?"
"Oh, she talked about you too. But Ranger got top billing." Claire leaned forward. “Jake, in all the years I've known Emily Callahan, through law school and clerkships and two offices and every terrible date she's ever been on, I have never heard her talk about anyone the way she talks about you."
Jake's phone buzzed on the table. He glanced at it.
Emily.
How's it going?
