Page 30 of You, Only You

"You're staring," she said, still focused on her laptop.

"I'm reading the data."

"The data is on my screen. You're looking at my ear."

My ear. Not my neck, which would have been defensible. My ear, which was specific, and accurate, and deeply inconvenient.

"The screen is next to your ear. It's a proximity issue."

"Uh-huh." She didn't look up, but the corner of her mouth did something that suggested she was enjoying this. "Maybe move your workstation to the other side of the table if proximity is the problem."

"The outlet is on this side."

"There's an extension cord in the box by the door."

"The extension cord is a fire hazard."

"Will."

"What."

"You put both our workstations on the same table. On day one. When there's a perfectly functional second table three feet away."

She was looking at me now. Green eyes, steady and amused, and I could see exactly what she was doing: the same thing she did with shell companies and charitable foundations. Following the data to its logical conclusion.

"The second table wobbles," I said.

"I see."

"It's structurally unsound."

"Of course it is."

She held my gaze for exactly two seconds longer than was necessary, and then turned back to her screen, and the conversation was over, and nothing had been resolved, and something in the air between us had shifted by approximately one degree in a direction I was not going to think about.

I went back to my side of the table. Our shared table. The one I'd chosen for reasons that were entirely about electrical outlets and not at all about the fact that it put me eighteen inches from a woman who smelled like coffee and cheap soap and the particular kind of trouble I hadn't signed up for.

On the evening of day four, something happened that had nothing to do with the case.

Lindsey was on the phone with her mother. I hadn't meant to overhear. I'd come back from a supply run, bags of takeout in hand, and stopped in the hallway of the penthouse when I heard her voice coming from the guest room. The door was ajar. I should have walked past.

I didn't walk past.

"I'm fine, Mom. Really." A pause. "No, I'm not... it's a work thing. An extended project. The apartment is being fumigated." Another pause, longer. "Yes, I know you worry. I know."

Her voice changed on that last part. Got smaller. Younger. Like she'd regressed ten years in two sentences.

"How's the garden?" she asked, and I could hear the effort it took to redirect. The deliberate brightness. "Did the tomatoes come back?" A long pause. "That's great, Mom. That's really great. Send me a picture?"

More silence. Then, quietly: "Has he called you? Dad. Has he..." Another pause. "Okay. No, I know. I know he's not supposed to. I just wondered."

I stood in the hallway with lukewarm pad thai in my hands and listened to Lindsey Ashford ask about her incarcerated father with the careful casualness of someone who'd practiced the question in her head before saying it out loud. The way she said "I just wondered," like it was nothing, like it didn't matter, like she hadn't been carrying the wondering around all day.

It hit me somewhere I wasn't expecting. Not the content. The tone. The particular quality of a person pretending they're fine with something that is clearly, obviously, not fine, because the alternative is admitting it out loud, and admitting it makes it real, and real is harder to manage.

I knew that tone. I used it every time someone asked about Nicole.

I walked quietly past the door and set the takeout on the kitchen counter. When she emerged ten minutes later, her eyes were dry and her expression was neutral and she said, "Is that pad thai?" like nothing had happened.