Page 136 of Key West Homecoming

“Not bad?”

“You’re still an apprentice.”

Emma smiled. “I’m beginning to think there’s no promotion coming.”

“There might be benefits.”

She looked at him.

Jake smiled and went back to work.

Around three, he brought out two glasses of iced tea. Emma stayed until late afternoon.

The next morning, she put on the gray Chicago blazer she’d packed in case she needed to take a client call.

Rachel had told her to wear something similar for Wednesday’s hearing. Emma decided she wanted it today too. Not because she needed to impress anyone at Alden and Petit.

She wanted to feel like herself when Arthur walked through the door.

Yolanda was at the front desk when Emma arrived at nine. Two coffees sat beside her keyboard. She handed one over without asking.

“He’ll be here at nine-thirty. His attorney is Ted Ballard out of Marathon. I’ve dealt with him twice, and he doesn’t do his homework. Rachel has done nothing but homework since Friday.”

Yolanda pointed toward the back. “The middle stack has grown. Don’t touch it.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“You’re in the small conference room across the hall. Stay all day if you want. Leave whenever you want. Rachel will come out during breaks.”

Emma followed her down the hall.

“There’s water and coffee,” Yolanda continued. “I put cookies in there. You’ll want to look busy, so I brought you a legal pad.”

Emma smiled. “Thank you.”

The conference room held a long table, four chairs and a small sofa beneath the window. A plate of shortbread cookies sat beside the water pitcher.

Emma had brought Gloria’s leather notebook. She settled onto the sofa and opened it to the place she’d stopped Saturday night.

Em came for a week once and spent the first two days sulking about a boy who had gone to camp instead of coming to Miami. On the third day she got up before I did and I found her on the porch drinking my coffee and reading a book. She said good morning Grandma. She sounded like her father. I sat down beside her and I didn’t say anything for a while, but I wondered how this little girl had already learned about coffee.

Emma read the entry three times.

She remembered the coffee. More surprisingly, she remembered Tyler Halloran, who had chosen lacrosse camp in Vermont over visiting his cousins in Miami.

Gloria had known his name all along.

Her grandmother had watched Emma suffer through the particular heartbreak of being fourteen and hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. Three days later, Gloria had simply sat beside her on the porch.

Emma had never understood that as a gift before.

She pressed her thumb against the page.

A door opened somewhere across the hall. Rachel’s voice came first, followed by a man Emma didn’t recognize. Then she heard Arthur.

The sound of his voice brought back a phone call from a year earlier. Emma had been sitting in her Chicago office when Arthur called about Gloria’s obituary. She had believed everything he told her. Afterward, she cried at her desk for nearly an hour before opening the spreadsheet she had been working on and finishing the day.

It bothered her now to remember how easily she had trusted him, but that woman hadn’t known what Emma knew today. She couldn’t change that.