Her office. Door open. She grabbed her bag from the chair, her keys from the desk, the blazer she'd draped over the filing cabinet that morning when she still thought today was a day she could manage.
A cardboard box sat on her desk. Between the pen holder and the Post-its. Plain brown. No label. It hadn't been there this morning.
She didn't look at it. Didn't check for a return address. Didn't give it the three seconds it would have taken to recognize the courier label or the size or any of the details that would have told her who it was from.
She picked up her bag. Shoved the blazer inside. Reached for the door and pulled it shut behind her and the glass shudderedin the frame and the sound carried down the hallway like a verdict.
She didn't look back. If she had, she would have seen the cardboard box sitting untouched near the edge of her desk, patient and waiting. She would have seen Claire appear in the hallway two offices down, standing in her doorway, watching Emily move toward the elevator with a stride that said don't follow me.
Claire didn't follow.
Emily pressed the elevator button. The doors opened. She stepped in and turned around and as the doors closed she caught one frame of the hallway. Claire, still in her doorway, phone already in her hand, face carrying an expression Emily had seen exactly once before, in law school, the night Emily had called her from a parking lot at three in the morning and saidI think I made a mistakeand Claire had driven forty minutes without asking what the mistake was.
The doors closed. Emily rode down alone.
Emily's apartmentfelt like nothing.
Not unpleasant. Not cold. Just absent. The emptiness of a space that was maintained but not inhabited. She stood in the doorway and registered the absence the way you register a sound that's stopped. Not by hearing it but by noticing the silence where it used to be.
She'd been here two days ago. But between then and now she'd fallen asleep on Jake Walsh's couch with his hand in her hair and his heartbeat under her ear and the discernment of being held by someone who wasn't going anywhere, and the memory of how that felt made her own apartment feel like a waiting room.
She changed out of her work clothes. Found the old Vanderbilt t-shirt she'd had since undergrad, the one with the hole in the collar and the faded lettering that she kept because some things you keep without knowing why. Sweatpants. Bare feet on the tile floor.
She sat on the couch. Her couch. The one she'd picked out herself at a store in Nashville, moved twice, dragged through every relocation. It held her weight the way it always had. Familiar. Indifferent. Not like Jake's couch, which was warm and alive in a house full of Ranger's nails on the hardwood and the porch settling in the heat. This was the silence of four walls and nothing between them that proved anyone lived here.
She'd come here instead of going to Jake's to stay with Ranger because she needed to prove it to herself. Prove that she could sit alone. That she could be the woman she'd been for thirty-one years before Jake Walsh walked into Ray's office and ruined her entire operating system.
The hours passed. She didn't turn on the television. Didn't open her laptop. Didn't check her phone, which sat on the kitchen counter where she'd left it because keeping it close meant checking it and checking it meant caring and she was trying very hard to pretend she didn't care.
She cared. She cared so much it was rearranging her internal organs.
At 8:47 the phone rang.
Emily heard it from the couch. Knew what it was before she moved. The twelve-hour check-in. The terms she'd set in Ray's office that morning.Not a text. A call. I hear your voice.
She crossed to the kitchen. Picked up the phone. His name on the screen. She pressed accept and held it to her ear.
"Walsh." She used his last name. Professional. The AUSA receiving a field report from an investigator.
"Hey." His voice was low. Warm. The voice that wasn't performing warmth for anyone. The voice that was warm because she was on the other end and he couldn't help it. "I'm good. Heading south of the city. Working a lead on a property Angela Costa's family has ties to."
"Copy."
She could hear road noise. Could hear him breathing. Could hear the quality of silence that happened when Jake Walsh was deciding whether or not to speak.
"How was your day?"
"Fine. Won the Prescott motion. Filed the status report early."
"That's great, Em."
Em.The name nobody called her. The name she'd never corrected because it felt like his hand on the small of her back when he said it.
She closed her eyes. Her hand was gripping the phone hard enough to feel the case flex.
"Glad to hear you're safe. Report back tomorrow."
The words came out clipped and professional and absolutely nothing like the woman who had saidI love youwith her eyes open two nights ago. They sounded like a supervisor closing a status call. They sounded like someone who had never been held by the man on the other end of this phone and never wanted to be.
