Page 8 of The Silent Hour

He wasn’t showing off; he was opening doors to the life he moved through daily, letting me glimpse the texture of his world, and I drank it all in like something rare and real.

"So, how'd you end up in law?" I asked as we waited at a crosswalk, as if I didn’t know.

Ethan glanced at me. "That's a very long answer."

"We have nowhere to be."

Something about that made him smile.

"My family always had lawyers around."

"That sounds ominous."

The light changed, and we crossed with the crowd.

"I was good at arguing," he continued. "Good at finding holes in things other people thought were airtight. My brothers used to say I could convince someone the sky was green and have them apologizing for ever calling it blue."

"Useful skill," I commented.

"Extremely." His reply came quickly and clean.

"Morally questionable."

"Also, extremely." A faint smile touched his mouth as he said it, there and gone in the space between one step and the next. I bumped my shoulder against his arm, feeling the solid warmth of him.

"So, you became a defense attorney."

"I became a lawyer first." His expression shifted, the earlier amusement giving way to something more serious. "Defense came later. I figured out pretty quickly that everyone deserves someone in the room who knows the rules. Doesn't matter whether I like them. Doesn't even matter whether I think they're innocent."

"That's very noble of you."

"It's really not." The words came out flat, definitive.

"No?"

"No." He slid his hands into his pockets, shoulders rolling back slightly. "I'm very good at what I do, Julia. I like being very good at what I do."

There was a kind of certainty there that seemed to live in the set of his jaw, the directness of his gaze. I liked that he didn't dress it up as some childhood calling to save the innocent. He liked the law because he understood it, could manipulate it, and apparently enjoyed winning.

That, I understood.

"What about you?" he asked, turning his head just enough to catch my eye.

"What about me?"

"Music."

I turned my head to look at him fully, the movement sharp. "I don't remember telling you I was a musician."

He let a full second of street noise fill the space between us before answering. The corner of his mouth twitched a tiny fracture in his composure. "You didn't."

Interesting. I folded my arms across my chest, feeling the borrowed fabric of his shirt—now knotted at my lower back—strain with the motion. "So how do you know?"

"I know who your father is."

All trace of amusement vanished from my face. The sidewalk seemed to amplify around us, the hiss of tires on asphalt, the fragmented conversations of passing strangers, the distant blare of a car horn three blocks away.

"Do you?"