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She was almost grinning. The look sat on her face for two seconds before she replaced it with a frown that fooled neither of them.

“I’m leaving now,” she said.

“The elevator is to your left.”

“I know where the elevator is. I found your office without directions. Your receptionist couldn’t stop me.”

“Nobody could stop you, Lucy. That’s sort of the point.”

She left. The door closed behind her. Her clogs thudded down the hallway, fast and deliberate, and Knox didn’t move. He sat with his hands still folded on the desk, listening to the quiet she left behind.

He tried to name the feeling expanding behind his ribs. It wasn’t relief, and it wasn’t satisfaction. It landed closer to the sensation of watching a storm pass and discovering the ground had moved under you while you weren’t paying attention.

She’d called him infuriating. She’d told him she didn’t like him. She’d laughed.

The laugh was the problem. He’d filed every expression she’d worn since the engagement party by category and context, and that laugh had no category. It belonged in a drawer he hadn’t built yet, and the absence of a place for it bothered him more than anything she’d actually said.

Gabriel appeared in the doorway within thirty seconds. “So that went well.”

Knox settled into his chair. “She called me infuriating.”

“She came to your office at ten in the morning with flour on her sleeve. That’s not infuriating. That’s investment.” Gabriel leaned against the doorframe, easy and comfortable. He’d recently survived his own romantic detonation and found the other side worth living on. “She laughed, Knox. I heard it through the glass.”

“It was involuntary.”

“The best ones are.” Gabriel crossed his arms. “You know what Tessa said after our first fight? She said, ‘If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have bothered.’ Lucy just walked through Midtown Manhattan in an apron. She bothered.”

“She came to tell me off.”

“She came to engage. There’s a difference. I’ve been on both sides of it.” He tapped the doorframe twice. “You want my advice?”

“Not particularly.”

“Don’t chase her and don’t retreat.” Knox didn’t react. Devney had already given him the same advice, almost word for word. Gabriel went on. “Stay exactly where you are. Let her decide the next move.”

“And if she decides the next move is never speaking to me again?”

“Then you’ll know. But she took the folder, Knox. She took the folder. The whole case she walked in with, she walked back out with.”

Ronan materialized behind Gabriel, holding two mugs of coffee. He handed one to Knox. It was terrible. Knox drank it.

“I have a question,” Ronan said.

“No.”

“Devney told me about the grant. Did she turn it down?”

“She said she was going to.”

“Did she take the folder?”

Knox paused. “Yes.”

“Then she hasn’t decided yet.” Ronan sipped his coffee with earned certainty. He’d spent a year learning to read human behavior from books and had become, against all odds, quite good at it. “People who have decided don’t take the evidence with them. They leave it.”

Knox looked at his desk. The spot where the folder had been. The faint trace of flour Lucy’s sleeve had left on the edge.

He ran his thumb across it. Fine and white and ordinary.