Claire blinked. "Yesterday."
"I couldn't. I was." Emily shook her head. "I wasn't ready."
Claire studied her. Reading the layers. The tears that were present tense and the fury that was past tense and whatever else underneath both that was new and raw and luminous.
"But you're ready now." Claire said it with the certainty of someone who could see the answer.
"I sent him a text last night. At four in the morning." Emily's voice was calm now, the way a voice gets when it's passed through the worst of something and come out the other side. "I hung up on him first. He called, the check-in, and I gave him nothing. Professional. Cold. He started to say it and I hung up."
Claire's face didn't change. She was listening with the complete attention of a woman who understood that whatever was coming next was the thing that mattered.
"I sat in my apartment all night. Alone. Because I was so angry at him for leaving and so angry at myself for caring that I went home to prove I didn't need any of this." Emily looked at the frame. The photos were cycling. Her laughter. Her focus. Her place at the table. "And at four in the morning I texted himI love you too."
"Too," Claire said. Catching it.
"He was saying it when I hung up. He got toI loand I cut him off because I couldn't hear it. Because hearing it meant it was real and if it was real then I was the woman who needs someone and I have never been that woman, Claire. I have never been the woman who sits in her apartment at midnight unable to function because a man is out there and she can't reach him."
"You are now."
Emily looked at her best friend. The tears had slowed but her eyes were bright and full, holding more than the small glass office where she'd spent a year proving she belonged could contain.
"Yeah," she said. "I am now."
Claire reached over and took her hand.
Emily turned the frame so Claire could see. The bleachers. Emily watching Jacob's at-bat with the intensity of a woman who'd never watched anything casually in her life.
"He took all of these. I didn't know he was taking most of them." She let the photos cycle. "There's one of us. You and me. At The Anchor."
It cycled around. Claire saw it. The two of them, heads together, matching expressions of disbelief over whatever had been on Claire's phone. She didn't remember exactly when it happened. She didn't need to.
"That man," Claire said. The words carried everything she meant them to.
Emily laughed, still half-wrecked from crying, but real. The laugh of a woman who'd spent all night fighting herself and lost and was glad she'd lost.
"No, Emily. Listen to me." Claire leaned forward. "He built this before he left. He sat in that house yesterday morning knowing he was about to go dark, for however long, and instead of walking out the door, he loaded photographs of your life onto a frame and arranged for it to land on your desk while you couldn't reach him." She paused. "And then you hung up on him. And he didn't call back. And at four in the morning you told him you loved him and he sent you a picture of the road he was on."
Emily nodded.
"That's a man who will wait for you to be ready," Claire said. "That's a man who will stand on the other side of every wall you build and just be there when you open the door."
"The note saysthis is what I'm coming home to," Emily said. "Not that he'll be fine. Not that I shouldn't worry. He's coming home tothis."
They sat there together, Emily's life rotating in ten-second intervals, and neither of them said another word, because some things didn't need them.
Through the glass,Ray observed for a beat longer. He didn't know what was in the frame. Didn't know Jake had sent it, didn't know what the note said, didn't have any of the pieces that would have explained why his prosecutor was crying at her desk at seven-thirty in the morning when she wasn't supposed to be here for another hour. But he could read a room, even through glass, and what he read was that Emily Callahan was not falling apart.
She was arriving somewhere.
He took his coffee and walked back to his office, pulling the door shut behind him.
CHAPTER 22
She was in Ray's office when Marchand came. It was not a scheduled meeting. No knock on the glass. The door simply opened, the way doors opened for men who'd spent their careers deciding which rooms belonged to them, and Jasper Marchand stepped inside like he was checking on a renovation he'd commissioned.
"Ray. Emily." He used their first names. He always used first names, the informality of a man who understood that familiarity, when deployed from above, was its own form of authority. "I was downstairs for the Morrison briefing. Thought I'd stop in."
He hadn't been downstairs for the Morrison briefing. Emily knew this because she'd walked past Morrison's office eleven minutes ago and the lights were off. But she filed it away the way she filed everything about Marchand. Silently, precisely, in the growing dossier she kept in a part of her mind that had been trained by years of building cases against people who believed they were untouchable.
