I tell him about the partner I brought on six years in who told me I was too aggressive in the courtroom and I should consider softening my approach, and how I made senior partner the following year and he left to start his own practice that folded within eighteen months.
Cruz laughs at that, delighted, genuine. “What did you say to him when it folded?”
“Nothing. I sent flowers.”
He looks at me then, fully, and his expression does something complicated. “That is the most devastating thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I thought so.”
We’re both quiet for a moment, easy with it, and the ocean fills the space between sentences the way it does, generously, without demand.
“Why solo?” he asks eventually. “The vacation. Why a month alone?”
I consider the lawyerly answer and discard it. “Because I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done something purely for myself. Not for the firm, not for my daughters, not toprove anything to anyone.” I look at the water. “I needed to find out if I still knew how.”
“Do you?”
“Ask me in three and a half weeks.”
He smiles, slow and warm, and looks back at the horizon. We sit there for a while —I don’t know how long, twenty minutes maybe, maybe more— and I read a little and he doesn’t seem to need to fill the silence and it’s comfortable in a way I didn’t expect and didn’t ask for and am not entirely sure what to do with.
We’re walking back when it happens.
Not back together. It evolved that way organically, both of us standing when the sun shifted, both of us heading the same direction because we live next door to each other, not because it means anything. We’re walking along the waterline, shoes off, the wet sand cool under my feet, and we’re talking about something inconsequential. I think it was about the architectural crimes of beach souvenir shops, but Cruz stops walking.
Just stops. So I stop too, and look at him, and he’s looking at me with an expression I haven’t seen directed at me in so long that it takes me a moment to identify it.
He says: “You’re beautiful, Hannah.”
Not as a line. Not with any of the machinery of a move.
No lean-in.
No loaded pause.
No hand reaching out.
He says it the way he talks about architecture, the way he saidthe house built to adapt, like he’s describing something real that he can see clearly and is simply noting it.
I feel it move through me like a current.
“Cruz—”
“I’m not saying it to start something,” he says, still in that same even tone. “I just think you should know that you are. The way you sit on that beach like you own it. The way you talk about your daughters. The way you put out my grill fire and handed back the extinguisher like you were returning a stapler.” The corner of his mouth moves. “You’re the most stunning person I’ve seen in a long time and I don’t think you know it and that seemed worth saying.”
I have cross-examined witnesses who tried to rattle me. I have sat across tables from men twice my size who thought volume was a substitute for logic. I have built something from nothing with my own hands and my own stubbornness and I do not get flustered.
I deflect. “You’re very charming for someone whose salmon is in a landfill.”
He laughs, and lets me have it, and starts walking again.
That’s what undoes me a little.
That he says it and means it and then justmoves on, doesn’t hold it over me, doesn’t wait for me to match it or deflect it or do anything with it. Just offers it like a gift with no strings attached and keeps walking.
Our hands are close at our sides. Not touching. The distance between them is approximately two inches and I am aware of every millimeter of it.
At the wooden walkway that leads back up toward our houses we stop at the bottom of the stairs and there’s a moment —brief, loaded, the ocean loud behind us— where neither of us moves.
