BEHIND HIS WALLS

Chapter 8

Depositions changed the shape of everything.

For six days, the Halloran matter consumed every waking hour Mara had, and several she'd have sworn she didn't.

She and Sean spent long mornings prepping witnesses, longer afternoons in windowless conference rooms across town watching opposing counsel try to rattle their own witnesses loose, and evenings back at the office picking apart every transcript line by line, hunting for the small inconsistencies that would matter later, in front of a jury, in ways no one in the room but Sean seemed to fully anticipate yet.

She'd never worked like this before—this close to someone, this constantly, twelve and fourteen hours some days, running on coffee and the particular adrenaline of a case that was, undeniably, going well.

She learned things about him in the gaps between the work.

That he took his coffee black, same as her, and had started, without either of them commenting on it, ordering for both of them when he called down to the deli on the corner.

That he had a low, dry sense of humor that surfaced only when he was tired enough to stop guarding it—a running commentary during the worst of the depositions, murmured just for her, that had her biting back laughter more than once in front of opposing counsel.

That he remembered things she mentioned only once—an offhand comment about her sister, a joke about her terrible parallel parking—and brought them up days later in a way that told her he'd actually been listening, not just waiting for his turn to talk.

"You're good at this," he told her Wednesday night, the two of them alone again, packing up after a fourteen-hour day. "The depositions. You read people faster than most attorneys twice your age."

High praise."

"I don't hand it out unless it's earned."

He said it without any particular weight, the way he said most things, but she'd learned by now to listen for what sat underneath his flatness rather than the flatness itself.

"Is that a rule you live by, or just a work thing?"

Something flickered across his face—amusement, maybe, or the memory of amusement.

"Everything's a work thing, with me. You'll find that out."

"I'm starting to."

He looked at her for a beat longer than the conversation strictly required, and something passed between them that neither of them named—comfortable, familiar, the particular ease of two people who'd spent a week functioning as one unit and found, somewhat to their own surprise, that it fit.

"Go home, Whitfield," he said finally, breaking whatever the moment had been. "Depositions resume at eight. You'll want to sleep."

"So will you."

"I don't, much."

He said it lightly, like a joke, but something in his eyes told her it wasn't entirely one.

She thought about that on the train home—about a man who didn't sleep much, alone in a glass office at the top of a building bearing a name that must ache every time he read it, and wondered, not for the first time, what exactly it would take to make him let someone see all the way in.