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I stand, pick up my bag. “And if Griffin lays a hand on me”—I flip my braid—“I’m going to need you and your FBI friends to pretend you don’t see what happens next.”

I don’t wait for his response, but I hear the Sheriff’s snigger.

I walk out to Opal, who hands me a caramel cream. “Well?”

I take the candy. “I’m going to need that Noelle Dunn story to get rid of the bad taste in my mouth.”

“Wild Coffee.” Opal slides her purse strap over her shoulder. “Boss, I’m taking a break.”

“Woman, you don’t take breaks,” the Sheriff calls out. “You stage them.”

Opal ignores him magnificently.

We go to Wild Coffee and gossip. It’s an excellent distraction.

But it doesn’t entirely wipe away the feeling—the small, unwelcome, infuriating flicker of warmth—when Kaz insisted that Mason Brooks cares enough to show up for me.

Taya, you are a pathetic, lovesick moron.

CHAPTER 34

mason

Four weeks in the Chelsea apartment and I have established a routine.

I wake at five because my body doesn’t know how to sleep in.

I run the West Side Highway path until the Hudson turns from black to gray.

I come back, shower, make coffee in the kitchen, which I use for nothing else.

I sit on the armchair by the window.

I read the public docket filings on the Whitman water rights case for as long as it takes me to feel sufficiently disgusted with myself to stop.

Then I do it again the next day.

I don’t answer the phone.

Two new jobs have come in—people who haven’t yet heard about my situation with Jessup, which could be the only reason they’re calling.

I turn them down by saying: Conflict of interest.

Cleaner than a no, because rich men treat no as an opening position. Conflict of interest has the texture of me working for the other side or the wrong side, and that could cost them power—and that they respect.

Jessup has called ten times.

Left forty messages.

I haven’t listened to the voicemails, but the texts tell me enough—he’s moved through denial and bargaining and landed squarely in anger. The motherfucker is predictable if nothing else.

What I actually do, between the running and the staring at the Empire State Building from my apartment on 27th and 6th in Chelsea, and reading the docket filings, is drinking.

There’s a liquor store downstairs where I pick up a bottle as needed—about once every two to three days—when I get back from my run.

My dasher and I have become friends—albeit our relationship is casual. He hands me food. I tip him in the app.

I spend a lot of time imagining her at the county justice center. I think a lot about the moment when Taya picked up the document Aldridge had probably given her victoriously, and she read her own case analysis in someone else’s filing.