Page 26 of The Devils in the Details

I kept walking. I also kept talking, because silence in proximity to Ari had a density that my verbal circuitry interpreted as an emergency requiring immediate intervention.

“The lemon tree,” I said, gesturing toward the corner where it stood in its terracotta pot, leaves dark against the ochre wall. “Question. Does it actually produce lemons, or is it purely decorative? Because if it’s decorative, someone has made a deeply questionable aesthetic choice. Decorative plants are for people who have given up on meaning. A lemon tree that doesn’t lemon is basically a metaphor for existential disappointment, and I’m not sure this courtyard is ready for that kind of tragedy.”

Ari’s hand stayed where it was. The heat of it was doing something to my lower vertebrae that I was choosing not to examine too carefully.

“It produces lemons,” he said. His voice was low, rough, the kind that carried in the small courtyard without him raising it, bouncing off stone and coming back warmer.

“Good.” I nodded, appreciating its horticultural integrity. “I respect a tree that earns its space. Too many plants out here are coasting on foliage. This one’s putting in the work. You can tell by the—” I gestured vaguely at the tree. “The lemon energy. It’s palpable.”

Ari made a sound low in his throat, barely audible.

I caught it. Filed it. Added it to the growing collection of sounds Ari made that were not meant for public consumption, but that I was collecting anyway, like a particularly dedicated archivist with questionable boundaries.

We reached the interior doorway. The hallway beyond was narrow—seventeenth-century architecture had opinions about personal space that were fundamentally incompatible with twenty-first-century notions of appropriate proximity, especially when one of the people in question was six-foot-three and built like something that had been carved rather than born.

Ari’s hand was still on my back. His body was close behind mine, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him.

We stopped at my door. My working room—the one with the good light and the questionable wifi and the desk where I’d spent the morning annotating Geno’s financial crimes with the focused attention of a man who considered embezzlement a form of conversational icebreaker.

Ari’s hand didn’t move.

My nervous system had grown used to the warmth, which was concerning from a professional standpoint and considerably less concerning from every other standpoint I was currently operating from.

I turned to face him.

Ari was close. Too close for the kind of conversation we were theoretically having, which was absolutely not about the way his black eyes found mine in the dimness and held them.

“I’m fine,” I said. Evenly. Pleasant. The voice of a man who had been followed for six blocks, handled it competently, collected useful intelligence, and was now standing in a narrow hallway with his boss’s hand on his lower back and his pulse doing something that would not look good on a performance review.

“In case you were wondering. No lasting trauma. Expensive shoes, shoulder tell, all handled. Professional-grade stalking response. You can add it to my resume under ‘special skills.’”

His jaw shifted. Something moved behind those eyes—assessment, calculation, the look of a man who was running several equations simultaneously and arriving at an answer he hadn’t expected.

“I wasn’t wondering,” he said. “I could see that.”

“Then why do you still look like that?”

“Like what.”

“Like you’re deciding something.” I held his gaze.

The hallway felt smaller than it had thirty seconds ago, the air between us thicker, the heat from his hand on my back radiating outward in a way that suggested my nervous system had abandoned professional boundaries entirely and was now operating on a different set of protocols.

A pause.

“I am,” he said.

My heart did something athletic. The kind of thing that would have qualified for Olympic consideration if cardiac gymnastics were a sport, which they should be, and I would win a medal, and the medal would be shaped like a caramel and engraved with the words “this was avoidable.”

I kept my face pleasant and my voice dry “I hope the decision involves dinner, because I skipped it. On account of the whole stalker thing. Which, for the record, was not my fault, though I acknowledge that my response involved gelato, which some might consider inferior from a security standpoint, but I stand by it. The pistachio was worth the risk.”

Ari looked at me for a long moment, long enough that the church bells rang somewhere in the distance, the sound carrying through stone and old wood and the narrow space between us.

Something shifted behind those black eyes. Something that started as assessment and landed somewhere warmer, something that looked like a man arriving at a conclusion he had been circling for longer than either of us was willing to admit.

“Dinner is fine,” he said.

Then he stepped back. His hand left my lower back, and the absence of it registered with an immediacy that my body interpreted as a tactical error requiring immediate correction.