Gray said, “I’ll pick up the binder this afternoon and take it to the print shop.”
She exhaled.“This is insane.I am a secretary committing larcenous evidence preservation.”
“Technically, swapping a copy for an original that’s on government-adjacent premises might be some sort of a misdemeanor.”
“That’s not as comforting as you think it is, Gray.”
He was quiet for a beat, and then he said, “You don’t have to do this.Cooper can subpoena the original through proper channels.”
“Which will take months and tip Lucas off that someone’s investigating him.He’ll destroy everything that’s left.”She looked at Lucas’s closed office door.“No.I’ll make the swap tomorrow.”
She made the swap at nine-fifteen Thursday morning, and it went without a hitch.
Gray had driven to Apple Pie Creek the previous afternoon and returned with a three ring notebook in the same shade of dark blue as the original with the insurance company’s logo perfectly reproduced on its cover.The only difference between the two binders was the rings on the new one opened more stiffly than the old one.She’d spent a half-hour at the kitchen table opening and closing it in an effort to get it to loosen up.
“What are you making?”Noah had asked, poking his head through the doorway.
“A report for work.”
“It looks boring.”
“It’s spectacularly boring.Go finish your math.”
Cassidy had glanced at the notebook and looked up sharply at Bonnie’s face.She said nothing and went back to reading.Sometimes Bonnie wondered what it would be like to have a nine-year-old who wasn’t preternaturally observant.
The swap itself took under a minute.She opened the top file drawer, removed the original, inserted the copy, and closed the drawer.She slid the original into the oversized envelope Gray had provided, sealed it, and placed it in her bag.
At noon, she met Gray at the fire station and gave him the envelope with hands that were only slightly trembling.
He took it and studied her carefully.“How are you feeling?”
“Terrified.Exhilarated.Slightly nauseous.”
“All reasonable responses to larcenous evidence preservation.”
A laugh burst out of her.An actual laugh.The kind she hadn’t heard from herself in days.“Stop calling it that.”
“You started it,” he replied, grinning.
He set the envelope on the table and looked at her.The station was quiet.
She was standing close enough to him to see the individual striations of silver and gray in his eyes, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes from laughing or maybe from squinting at textbooks in bad light.
His jaw was rough with a day’s growth of stubble, and his hair needed a trim.And he was giving her his full, undivided attention.Except his expression wasn’t analytical at all.It was much warmer than that.
Don’t,she told herself.Not here.
But she reached out anyway and rested her hand on his forearm.She felt the tension in the muscles beneath his sleeve.He was holding himself very still, the way he did when he was trying not to say or do the wrong thing.
“Thank you,” she said.“For not trying to talk me out of doing this.”
“Would it have worked?Trying to talk you out of it?”
“Not a chance.”
He smiled.It was the quiet, lopsided smile that had been doing increasingly unreasonable things to her pulse rate for the past few weeks.“That’s what I figured.”
She squeezed his arm and let go before she did something reckless, like stand on her toes and kiss him in the fire station where her husband had spent the last night of his life.
