My own name had jumped out at me like a flare in the dark.
Sloane Harper, New York Times.
The Tommy Vickers exposé. The Lang investigation. The housing discrimination series that won me my first award.
Article after article, carefully cut and stacked, kept in the one personal space in his entire apartment.
He'd been collecting them. For years, apparently.
I stood at my bathroom mirror now, mascara wand frozen halfway to my lashes, and tried to make sense of it.
Garrett Stone, who'd had every reason to hate me, who'd spent a decade building walls I could see from across a room—he'd been following my work. Reading my words. Keeping pieces of me in his home like they mattered.
Like I mattered.
And then there was the food.
Pad Thai with extra peanuts. Green Curry, mild. My exact order from a decade ago, delivered without a single question.
He'd just known. The way he used to know when I needed coffee at midnight, when I needed silence instead of conversation, when I needed him to pull me away from work and remind me that the world existed outside my laptop screen.
Eat.That's all he'd said. Like it was simple. Like remembering someone's takeout order after eight years was nothing.
The thought made my chest ache in ways I wasn't ready to examine.
He probably hadn't realized the articles were visible through the glass. Probably would have hidden them if he'd thought about it, the same way he hid everything else that might make him vulnerable.
But he hadn't. And I'd seen.
I finished my makeup. Pulled my hair back. Went through the motions of getting ready for work while my mind kept circling back to those worn edges. To the pad thai. To the ease of working beside him, our minds ran parallel tracks the way they always had.
God, I'd forgotten how good he was at this. How that tactical mind worked, taking in information and finding patterns other people missed.
It was one of the reasons I'd fallen in love with him, back when falling in love seemed like something I could afford to do.
Professional,I reminded myself.Keep it professional.
I'd never been good at lying to myself.
The 114th Precinct smelled like burnt coffee and old paper. I signed in at the front desk, clipped the visitor badge to my jacket, and followed a uniformed officer through the bullpen to a small office in the back corner.
Detective Diaz's name was on the door. The office itself was barely bigger than a closet: a metal desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and a window that looked out onto the parking lot.
But it had walls. It had a door that closed.
That was what mattered
Diaz stood when I entered. Tired eyes. Sensible blazer. The permanent tension in her shoulders of someone who carried too many open cases at once.
She gestured to the chair across from her desk and waited until the uniform pulled the door shut behind him.
"Ms. Harper." This time, she offered her hand. "Good to see you again."
"Likewise, Detective."
"I heard you got the serial arson case," I said.
"Two days ago. The previous detective had it for two months." She settled back into her chair. "Left me a mess of dead ends and a stack of paperwork that doesn't add up to much."
