The office sat above the old feed store on Willowmist Falls’ main street. The store had closed years ago, and the building had been divided into small commercial spaces. A modest sign by the stairwell readHarrington and Associatesin plain black letters.
I climbed the stairs. My knee ached, but I ignored it.
At the top, the space opened into a small reception area with a simple desk, a couple of waiting chairs, and a low table stacked with a few magazines. Two doors led off the reception area, each opening into a private office. One belonged to Emmett. The other stood empty, waiting.
The single door to the main suite had a frosted glass panel. I knocked once and pushed it open without waiting.
Emmett sat at his desk in the larger of the two offices, sleeves rolled up, a case file spread before him. He looked up the moment I entered.
Emmett Harrington looked exactly the same as he had at eighteen, which had always vaguely annoyed me. Same broad shoulders, same dark hair going slightly longer than regulation had ever allowed, same face that women in every town we’d ever been stationed near had found unreasonably compelling. The Corps had put muscle on both of us, but it sat differently on Emmett—easier, like he’d been built for it, like the whole enterprise of being that size required no particular effort on his part. He had the kind of looks that might have made him insufferable if he’d been a different type of man. He wasn’t, which was the only reason I’d put up with him for twenty-odd years.
Recognition hit him, and he quietly closed the file.
He studied me, the same steady man who had slept on my parents’ couch time after time when we were kids, raided their fridge with me at two in the morning, and stood beside me through deployments, a field hospital, and the long, slow crawl back to civilian life. He could still read my face like no one else.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’m not staying long.”
“Sit anyway.”
I dropped into the chair across from his desk. My chest was tight in a way that hadn’t eased since Cara drove away, and I pressed my feet flat to the floor and made myself focus on Emmett’s face instead of on the image that kept surfacing—her folding my shirt and leaving it on the bed, neat and deliberate, like she was trying to leave everything exactly as she’d found it.
Emmett leaned back, hands laced behind his head, and waited. He was good at waiting. Always had been.
“I’m in,” I said. “I know I told you I was, but I mean it now. I’m in. She knows.”
He didn’t move for a second. Then he lowered his arms and leaned forward, palms on the desk. “Jasper.”
“I’m in,” I said again, quieter. “I want the partnership. Start me whenever you want. I’ll keep working the bar until Paige finds someone—I won’t leave her without cover.” I stopped. The next part was harder to say out loud than I’d expected. “Cara left this morning. Not for good. She asked for room to think, and I’m giving it to her. But I’m not sitting on this anymore. If she comes back—when she comes back—we’ll figure out what the job looks like together. If she doesn’t—” The words snagged, and I left the sentence unfinished, because I had tried to complete it three times since she’d driven away, and I still couldn’t get there.
“She’ll come back,” Emmett said.
I swallowed hard. “She has to.” He watched me for a moment, reading the parts I wasn’t saying. “There’s one thing you need to understand before I sign anything,” I added.
“Go ahead.”
“I’m not building my life around this job,” I said. “I’m building the job around my life. Cases I can handle from here when possible. Home every night, I can manage it. Long weeks when you need me, I’ll take them. But I need to be a man who has a life, and the job fits inside it. Not the other way around.”
Emmett didn’t answer right away. Something settled in his expression—not surprise, more like recognition. “Jasper,” he said. “That is exactly how I have been running this firm.”
I looked at him.
“You remember Amanda.” It wasn’t a question. He said it flatly. “We got married the year after I got out. I was still doing contract work, gone all the time. I told myself she knew what she was signing up for.” He turned his pen over on the desk once, twice. “She did know. What I didn’t understand wasthat knowing doesn’t mean you can live with it. She asked me for a long time to come home more. I didn’t listen. By the time I finally understood she meant it, she had already stopped asking.”
I stayed quiet. I knew the broad outline of this—the divorce, Emmett moving back here, starting the firm. We had never talked about the specifics. I hadn’t asked, and now that sat uncomfortably in my chest alongside everything else.
“I took time off. Sat in the house I’d bought for us and figured out what I’d lost. Then I sold it.” He looked at me steadily. “Moved back here. Opened this place with one rule I wrote on a scrap of paper in my kitchen—I was never going to build my life around a job again.” He paused. “Life ended up smaller than the one I’d been chasing. But it was the one I should have been building all along. That’s the firm you’re walking into.”
Something moved through my chest at that. Not just what he was saying about the firm—what he was saying about Amanda. I thought about Cara at the kitchen table with her hands around her mug and the look on her face when she’d saidyou had all of those chancesand felt the guilt settle deeper.
“I didn’t know that was why?—”
“You didn’t ask.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
He looked at me with the patience of someone who had watched me be bad at this for a long time. “You are bad at asking questions when you are scared of the answers.”
