“Finish the documentary.” Sienna’s voice was clear, certain, the voice of a woman who had been hurt and had decided to use the hurt as fuel rather than weight. “The case is too important to abandon because Adriana Lovett can’t handle being happy. We have Marcus Reed. We have the financial documents. We have Adriana’s internal evidence. The documentary is bigger than any of us, and I’m not going to let her fear be the reason it doesn’t get made.”
“And the alliance?”
Sienna pulled back from the hug and wiped her eyes once with the back of her hand.
“Continues. Professionally. On her terms.” Sienna set the mug down and stood. Her voice steadied. The hurt was still there. It would be there for a long time, she suspected. But the conviction was louder. “If she wants to pretend that two nights of being the most real version of herself were a lapse in professional judgment, I’ll let her pretend. I’ll work across the table from her and review documents and coordinate the interview schedule and treat her with exactly the professional courtesy she’s asking for. I will not mention what happened. I will be the colleague she says she needs me to be.”
Dani held her gaze. Her dark eyes were bright and her jaw was tight and Dani was measuring the distance between what Sienna was saying and what Sienna was feeling and deciding, with the wisdom of long friendship, to honor the distance.
“That’s going to hurt,” Dani said. “Every session. Sitting across from her. Knowing what she sounds like when she laughs. Knowing what she looks like when she stops pretending.”
Sienna picked at a thread on her sleeve.
“I know.”
Dani’s jaw worked. “Knowing that she knows you know and watching her perform anyway.”
“I know.” Sienna’s voice cracked on the second word, a tiny fracture in the steadiness she was holding together with both hands, and Dani caught it and held it and said nothing more. There was nothing more to say. The situation was clear and the choices were limited and the pain was real and Dani, who had been Sienna’s anchor since film school, understood all of it without requiring further explanation.
Sienna did not mention Adriana’s name in the days that followed.
She threw herself into the documentary instead. Marcus Reed’s interview was scheduled for the following week. She rebuilt the narrative arc, cross-referenced every financial document, and worked until Dani appeared in the doorway with food Sienna had forgotten she needed. The work was the best she’d ever done. Pain, it turned out, made an excellent editor.
The working sessions with Adriana continued.
They met in the conference room three times that week. The meetings were productive, efficient, and professional. Adriana provided additional documentation. They coordinated the legal framework for Marcus Reed’s testimony. They reviewed the draft narrative structure and identified gaps that needed sourcing.
They did not touch. They did not make eye contact that lasted longer than two seconds. They did not mention Friday night. They did not mention Thursday night. They did not mention the car or the hallway or the bed or the tears or the way Adriana had saidI want youwith her voice breaking and her eyes wide and honest.
On Wednesday, Adriana picked up the Reed verification timeline. She held it a half-second longer than necessary—the pause there and gone before Sienna could decide if she’d imagined it—before sliding it across. Her arm extended, released before Sienna’s hand arrived. Their fingers brushed anyway.
Both of them flinched. The flinch was small, identical, and devastating in its symmetry. Neither of them acknowledged it. Adriana looked at her laptop. Sienna looked at the document. A clock on the wall marked three seconds before either of them spoke.
“There’s a gap in the chain of custody on the February transfers,” Adriana said. Her voice was even, clean, carrying nothing.
“I’ll close it before Friday,” Sienna said.
They returned to the work.
Adriana’s performance was impeccable—speaking about the case, the evidence, the legal strategy with nothing in her voice or posture acknowledging that anything had changed. But Sienna watched her. Sienna always watched people; it was the foundation of her profession, and she saw the tells.
The way Adriana’s hand curled around her coffee cup when Sienna leaned forward. The microsecond where her gaze dropped to Sienna’s mouth before returning to her eyes. The slight catch in her breathing when their fingers brushed over a shared document.
The Ice Queen was performing. And the person underneath the performance looked like she was in as much pain as Sienna was.
Sienna did not point this out. She kept her promise. It cost her every session.
She maintained her own surface. Matched Adriana’s professionalism. Spoke about the case with the careful clarity of a collaborator and nothing more. Went home each evening to the apartment that still carried the memory of two nights she was not allowed to reference. The bed still held the impression of two bodies. The pillowcase still held the faint trace of Adriana’s shampoo. Sienna changed the sheets on Wednesday and the new sheets were clean and empty and that was worse.
On Friday evening, after an intensely productive session that had been equally painful to sit through, because Adriana had been brilliant in the session—her analysis of the legal framework sharp and creative and delivered with a passion that made Sienna’s chest ache because it was the same passion Adriana brought to everything she cared about and was apparently able to redirect at will—Sienna drove to Silver Lake and sat in the office with the lights off and the evidence boards glowing in the residual street light and texted Dani,I’m fine.
Dani’s reply came in seconds.No you’re not. I’m bringing pad thai and a bottle of wine and we’re not going to talk about her unless you want to.
Sienna set her phone down and stared at the wall of evidence that was going to bring down Burty Howarth’s empire and had already brought down every defense she’d built around her own heart.
The documentary was going to be extraordinary. The case was going to be airtight. Sienna was going to see it through to the end.
But every working session with Adriana was a reminder of what they’d had for two nights, and what Adriana had chosen to put back in its box, and the distance between their chairs was eighteen inches and a thousand miles and the most painful space Sienna had ever occupied.
