Page 64 of You, Only You

The implication was not subtle. She was maintaining the boundaries I'd imposed. Following the blueprint I'd drawn. Being exactly as professional as I'd demanded, and the compliance felt like swallowing something sharp.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"Just that she'll be ready for tomorrow, 9 AM. Chen wants to run through the forensic timeline one more time before she takes the stand."

"I'll be there."

Bates raised an eyebrow. "You sure that's a good idea? Given the..." He waved his hand between us and the general direction of the courtroom, a gesture that somehow encompassed the entire complicated mess of the last several weeks.

"Given what?"

"Will." He dropped the professional veneer for a second, and underneath was something that looked uncomfortably like concern. "Whatever's going on between you two, the jury will see it. If you're both in the same room tomorrow looking like you'retrying not to look at each other, that's a tell. And the defense will read it."

"I said I'll be there."

"Your call." He finished his coffee, crushed the cup in one hand. "Just remember: Reeves has the kind of lawyers who eat emotional subtext for breakfast. She needs to be focused up there, not navigating whatever frequency you two are broadcasting."

He left before I could formulate a response that wasn't defensive or, worse, honest.

The drive back to my penthouse took forty minutes in traffic that seemed personally committed to keeping me alone with my thoughts. Forty minutes of Bates's words on a loop. She asked me to tell you. The politeness of it. The careful, professional routing of a message through an intermediary because she couldn't or wouldn't face me directly.

No. Because she was doing what I'd asked her to do. The honesty of that correction stung worse than the alternative.

The penthouse was exactly as I'd left it: silent, clean, and full of her absence. The coffee she liked was still in the cabinet, the darker roast I'd bought because she'd mentioned once, offhandedly, that she preferred it stronger. Her shampoo was in the guest bathroom. The scrambled egg pan, the good one, not the warped safe-house disaster, was hanging in the kitchen where she'd left it after a morning we'd cooked breakfast together without discussing it, just moving through the same space in that choreography we'd built without trying.

I walked through the rooms and the evidence of her was everywhere, small artifacts of a presence that had changed the atmosphere of a place I'd lived in for years without it ever feeling like anything but a base of operations.

I poured a scotch. Held it up to the light. Set it down on the counter untouched.

Seven years I'd operated alone. Seven years of locked rooms and contingency plans and the particular loneliness of carrying a mission nobody else could see. I'd been good at it. Efficient. The solitude was functional, a tool, not a condition. I didn't need anyone. That was the foundation. The bedrock.

And then Lindsey Ashford had walked into my office with a tablet and outlet-store blazer and started dismantling the foundation with forensic precision, one question at a time.

I picked up the scotch. Put it down again.

The problem wasn't that I missed her. Missing was too clean a word, too manageable. This was something more structural. Like a load-bearing wall had been removed and I was just now noticing that the ceiling was sagging.

I stood at the window and watched the city do what it did. Traffic. Lights. The rhythm of other people's lives. Ordinary. I used to find that view steadying. Tonight it just looked like a lot of people going home to someone, and I was standing in a penthouse that smelled like the ghost of her shampoo, holding a drink I couldn't taste.

The phone rang at midnight. Nicole. Her specific tone, the one that cut through everything else.

"It's late," I said instead of hello. My default greeting for her, which she'd once told me sounded "like a Victorian butler with insomnia."

"It's nine here. I'm in a completely reasonable time zone." A pause. The kind of pause where I could hear her reading me through the phone, the way she'd been reading me my entire adult life. "You sound like someone scraped you hollow with a spoon."

"Thanks for that image."

"What happened?"

"Grand jury testimony." I leaned my forehead against the window glass. Cold. Grounding, slightly. "I was fine. Thetestimony was fine. Everything was completely, totally, entirely fine."

"You said fine four times, which means nothing is fine. What's actually going on?"

Silence. The city hummed against the glass.

"She wasn't there," I said.

Nicole didn't ask who. She knew.