BEHIND HIS WALLS

Chapter 7

The light was on because Sean had been there since six, and by the time Mara found this out—from Duke, over his own too-early cup of coffee—the morning had already taken a turn she hadn't anticipated.

"Grant's out," Duke said, without much preamble, the way he said most things. "Called in sick. Which leaves us short a body for the Halloran depositions starting Thursday, which means somebody's about to have a very long week."

"How long?"

"Long enough that I'd get comfortable."

Duke nodded toward the conference room, where raised voices—one of them unmistakably Sean's, cold and clipped in a way she hadn't heard directed at anyone but opposing counsel—were audible even through the glass.

"That's Preston in there. Managing partner. Wants to pull a second-year off another matter to cover the gap. Ashford's not thrilled."

Mara didn't need to ask why.

She'd been on the Halloran team long enough now to understand that a swap this close to depositions meant someone unfamiliar with three weeks of accumulated case knowledge, someone who'd need hand-holding at exactly the moment there was no time for it.

She was still turning the problem over when the conference room door opened and Preston walked out first, unbothered, the particular unbotheredness of a person used to getting his way eventually.

Sean followed a beat later, jaw set, and his eyes found Mara across the hall before she'd even decided whether to make herself scarce.

"Whitfield. My office."

She followed him in, and he shut the door—not hard, but with a finality that told her whatever came next mattered.

"Preston wants to pull Delgado off the Kessler file to cover Grant's depositions," he said, without sitting down, arms crossed, some coiled frustration still visible in the line of his shoulders. "I told him no."

"Why?"

"Because Delgado's never touched this case and doesn't have three weeks to learn it before Thursday. Because you have."

He looked at her directly, none of the earlier heat in his voice now, just flat certainty.

I want you on the depositions instead."

Mara's stomach dropped, half excitement, half genuine alarm.

"I've never sat second chair on a deposition."

"I know."

"That's usually a third- or fourth-year role."

"I'm aware of the usual."

Something almost like impatience crossed his face, though not at her—at the argument itself, as though he'd already run through every objection she could raise and discarded them.

You know this file better than anyone in that room except me. You found the courier discrepancy. You caught the change order gap before anyone else even thought to look. I'm not putting someone in that chair who has to be walked through three weeks of material during a coffee break. I'm putting in the person who already knows it."

"Preston agreed to that?"

"Preston didn't have a choice," Sean said, and there was something in the flatness of it—not quite pride, but close, an edge of something fierce she hadn't seen from him before—that told her exactly how the argument in that conference room had actually gone.

He'd fought for this.

For her, specifically, over someone with three more years of seniority.

"I told him I trust my own read of my own case team more than I trust an org chart."

The word trust landed harder than she expected, given everything Priscilla had told her, everything Sean himself had half-admitted in his office two weeks ago.

She knew, in some instinctive way she couldn't fully explain, that a man who'd learned the hard way not to trust anyone easily didn't hand that word out casually—not even in a sentence about legal strategy.

"Thank you," she said, and meant several things by it that she didn't say out loud.

Don't thank me. Earn it."

But his voice had none of its usual edge when he said it, and for just a moment, something almost warm moved behind his eyes—there and gone, the way it always was with him, but unmistakable this time, at least to her.

"We start prep tomorrow morning. Seven a.m. Bring everything you have."

"I'll be there."

She left his office feeling something she hadn't expected to feel this early in a job she'd been terrified of failing at three weeks ago: chosen.

Not because he'd said anything close to it—he never would, not yet, maybe not for a long time—but because he'd stood in a room and put his own credibility behind her, specifically, deliberately, when it would have been easier not to.

She thought about her mother's voice on the phone.

Nobody said anything about falling for him.

Standing in the hallway outside his office, deposition binder already forming itself in her mind, Mara allowed herself to admit, just for a second, that her mother might have been onto something after all.