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Before I climbed in, I looked up at him.

“You stayed all evening.”

He rested one hand on the top of the door. “I had nowhere I needed to be more.”

The answer was matter-of-fact, which made it land harder.

I got into the truck because standing in the street staring at him seemed unlikely to improve my judgment.

The drive back to his property was quieter than the one earlier, but not because either of us was avoiding conversation. The day had simply filled every available space.

Meredith’s voice returned to me in pieces: Gavin didn’t kill Brad. He believed someone else would be destroyed. Then I would look at Rex’s hand on the steering wheel and remember his eyes following me across the Lantern House.

By the time his property appeared beyond the trees, I wanted answers about Gavin, and I wanted Rex’s hands on me again with equally inconvenient intensity.

We went into the field office because my notebook and Gavin’s file were still there. That was the practical reason; the less practical one became clear as soon as Rex shut the door.

The lamps cast warm pools of light across the desks while the windows reflected only darkness. The heater had been off long enough for the room to cool, and the silence after hours inside a busy restaurant was almost startling.

I sat at my desk to send Annette the last vendor notes I had promised.

Rex took off his jacket and rolled his shoulders once as he crossed toward the file cabinet.

My eyes followed the movement. He caught me looking, and neither of us pretended I had been interested in the cabinet.

“You changed clothes,” he said.

“I did that before Meredith called.” I glanced at him. “You noticed?”

“I noticed, but you had other things on your mind.”

The answer was so entirely Rex that warmth spread through me for reasons that had little to do with the way the black henley fit across his chest.

I turned back to the computer.

“Give me ten minutes for Annette. She likes me right now, and I’d like to preserve that.”

Rex sat at his desk and opened Gavin’s folder rather than his laptop. “I’m fairly sure she likes you more than she likes me.”

“That’s because I send receipts.”

I smiled at the screen while finishing the email.

The office settled around us.

For a while we worked without speaking. I entered the final vendor update and sent it to Boise. Rex reviewed the pages we had discussed earlier, making a few notes on a legal pad but finding nothing that turned Meredith’s partial truth into a complete one.

What changed was not the case but the space between us. Awareness had followed us all day, with work and other people repeatedly stepping between it. Here there was only the faint hum of the heater, the soft movement of paper beneath Rex’s hands, and the knowledge that my loft waited directly overhead.

I finished the email and closed the computer. Rex looked up.

“Done?”

“Yes.” The word settled into the quiet with more meaning than it should have had.

I stood and carried my empty water glass toward the small sink beside the supply cabinet. Rex rose at nearly the same time to put Gavin’s file away, and we met in the narrow space between the desks.

His hand brushed my waist as he passed. He could have kept going, but his fingers remained there, and I turned toward him. The room seemed to get warmer.