BEHIND HIS WALLS

Chapter 9

By the second week of depositions, they'd fallen into a rhythm so natural it frightened her a little, in the quiet moments when she let herself notice it.

She could predict, now, the exact moment he'd reach for his coffee during a long witness answer, the specific furrow of his brow that meant he'd caught an inconsistency worth flagging, the dry half-joke he'd murmur under his breath when opposing counsel asked a particularly clumsy question.

He, in turn, had started handing her things before she asked for them—the right exhibit already pulled and ready, a second legal pad slid across the table the moment her first one filled up, as though he'd been tracking her needs alongside his own without either of them discussing it.

You two run like you've been doing this for years," Duke observed one afternoon, watching them wrap a deposition with the kind of seamless handoff—Sean closing on cross, Mara already flagging the next exhibit before he'd finished his sentence—that had taken the opposing paralegal visibly off guard.

"Not bad for three weeks in."

"She's a fast study," Sean said, not looking up from his notes, and Mara felt the compliment land somewhere warmer than it should have, given how casually he'd tossed it out.

The banter had crept in slowly, so gradually she couldn't point to the day it started.

He teased her, dryly, about her habit of color-coding exhibits by a system only she understood.

She teased him back about his refusal to use anything but a specific brand of black pen, three of which he kept in his breast pocket at all times like a man preparing for a pen-related emergency.

He didn't laugh easily, but when he did—really did, not the almost-smile she'd catalogued in her mind weeks ago but an actual, unguarded laugh—it transformed his whole face, made him look, briefly, like someone much younger, someone who hadn't yet learned to keep every door in himself locked.

She lived for those moments more than she wanted to admit.

You're doing the thing again," he said one evening, midway through reviewing testimony, not looking up from his own notes.

"What thing?"

"Staring at me like you're trying to solve a puzzle."

Mara felt her face heat, caught.

"I didn't realize I was staring."

"You do it a lot."

He finally looked up, something unreadable but not unkind in his expression.

I've decided not to mind."

"That's generous of you."

"I'm not usually generous."

A pause.

And then, quieter, almost like he hadn't quite meant to say it out loud:

"Apparently I'm making an exception."

She didn't have an answer for that—not one she trusted herself to say without giving away more than she meant to—so she said nothing, and went back to her notes, and did not look up again for a long while, though she was fairly certain, from the corner of her eye, that he did.