She grabbed her bag off the hook by the door. I held the door open. She walked through without looking at me, and I pulled it shut behind us, checked the deadbolt, and followed her down the stairs.
I DROVE. SHE SAT INthe passenger seat with her bag in her lap and her hands still.
Jenna's hands were never still. In a week I'd watched her pour, wipe, organize, fix, clean, rearrange, and handle every object within arm's reach when her brain was running fast. Her hands were how she processed. Stillness meant she was holding it in, and whatever it was, it was heavy enough to lock down the whole system.
I wanted to speak. I had nothing to say that wasn't the professional script or the truth, and the truth would've cracked the day open in a way neither of us could afford before she walked into a grand jury room and told twelve strangers about the worst night of her life.
So I drove. St. Charles to Poydras, the live oaks overhead catching the early sun. The route was clear. I'd driven it twice this week, once Monday and once yesterday, mapping the approach and the parking and the walk from the lot to the entrance. Old habit. The Marshals had drilled it: know theroute, know the building, know where your client is every second they're not in your line of sight.
Except she wasn't my client anymore. She hadn't been since Sunday. And the route planning and the building recon and the suit were all part of the protocol I was running because the protocol was the only thing I had left, and if I stopped running it I'd have to decide what came next, and I didn't have a playbook for that.
"You're quiet," she said.
"Thinking."
"You're always thinking. You just usually talk through it."
She was right. I did. The charm, the easy line, the humor that kept the air moving. I'd been running that program since I was twenty-three and it worked on everyone. It hadn't worked on Jenna since Thursday night a week ago, and I'd kept running it anyway because the alternative was silence, and silence with her was dangerous because silence with her meant I could hear my own head.
"Just running through the building layout," I said.
She looked at me for a long second. Then she turned to the window and didn't push it, and the fact that she didn't push it was worse than if she had.
THE ORLEANS PARISHcourthouse was concrete and columns and the kind of institutional air conditioning that turned every hallway into a walk-in cooler. I parked in the lot, came around, opened her door. She got out without comment. We walked in together and I cleared the security check and stayed three steps behind her while she checked in with the clerk.
The grand jury room was on the second floor. A bench in the hallway outside with a view of the elevator bank and nothingelse. I stood. She sat. The fluorescent light was doing nothing for either of us.
"Dane."
"Yeah."
"Stop hovering."
"I'm not hovering. I'm standing."
"You're standing in a way that constitutes hovering." She looked up at me. Her face was composed, the red lipstick in place, and underneath it she was scared and handling it how she handled everything, which was by looking you dead in the eye and daring you to mention it. "Sit down."
I sat. The bench was hard and too short and my knee was three inches from hers.
"When I come out," she said, "I don't want the debrief face. I want normal."
"I don't have a debrief face."
"You have seven faces and I've catalogued all of them and the debrief face is the one where you look professional and distant and it makes me want to throw something at you."
I looked at her. She was studying the opposite wall with the focus of someone who was not going to let her voice crack in a courthouse hallway.
"Normal," I said. "Got it."
The clerk called her name. She stood, straightened her jacket, and walked toward the door. Halfway there she stopped and looked back at me.
"Don't go anywhere," she said.
"I'll be here."
She went in. The door closed. I sat on the bench and stared at the wall. The silence settled in and filled every corner of my skull.
FORTY-THREE MINUTES.
