BEHIND HIS WALLS

Chapter 6

Saturday mornings were the only time all week Mara let herself stop moving.

She'd found the coffee shop three blocks from her apartment during her first week in the city—small, cluttered with mismatched chairs, run by a couple who bickered affectionately behind the counter in a way that reminded her, with a small ache, of her parents.

She'd made it a ritual almost without meaning to: black coffee, the corner table by the window, and forty-five minutes on the phone with her mother before the rest of the day could claim her.

"You sound tired," her mother said this particular Saturday, in the tone she used when she meant tell me what's actually going on.

I'm always tired. It's the job."

"Is it the job, or is it a person."

Mara laughed, mostly at being caught so easily.

"Why would it be a person?"

"Because you've said the name Sean four times in the last ten minutes and you don't seem to have noticed."

Mara opened her mouth to argue and found, embarrassingly, that she didn't have one ready.

She looked out the window instead, at a couple crossing the street with their arms full of grocery bags, ordinary and unhurried, a version of a life she sometimes wondered if she'd traded for this one.

He's my boss" she said finally. "That's all it is."

"Mm."

Her mother let the silence do the disagreeing for her.

"I moved here for the job, Mom. Not—I didn't move here to fall for my boss on day one. That would be humiliating, honestly. He barely even—" she stopped herself before likes me, unsure why that was the sentence her mouth had reached for.

"Nobody said anything about falling for him," her mother said gently. "I just notice things."

Mara let the comment sit, unanswered, and changed the subject, and her mother—kind enough, or wise enough, not to push—let her.

She spent the rest of the morning the way she'd spent most Saturdays since arriving: unpacking one more box from the pile still stacked against her living room wall, a small act of penance for the ones she still hadn't touched.

This one held books, mostly—the paperbacks she'd hauled across three states because she couldn't bear to leave them, dog-eared and underlined, markers of who she'd been before any of this.

She found her law school casebooks near the bottom, heavier than she remembered, and sat on the floor with one open in her lap for a long moment, remembering exactly why she'd wanted this life in the first place.

Not the money, though the money helped.

Not the prestige, though she wasn't above admitting it felt good to say Ashford and Cole out loud to people back home.

She wanted this because somewhere in her second year of school, buried under exam stress and doubt, she'd found the one thing that made her feel entirely, unmistakably herself: the particular satisfaction of finding the one piece of evidence, the one date, the one detail nobody else had thought to check, that made an entire case make sense.

Find out which, Sean had said, on her very first day, and she'd felt something in her settle into place hearing it—not because it was him saying it, she told herself, but because it was exactly the kind of sentence she'd moved across the country hoping someone would say to her.

That was the truth she needed to hold onto, she thought, closing the casebook and setting it on the shelf where it belonged.

She hadn't come here to be seen by Sean Ashford.

She'd come here to become someone worth seeing on her own terms—and she wasn't going to let one late night, one almost-confession, one goodnight, Mara in a low careful voice undo two years of work convincing herself she could build a whole life out of nothing but her own determination.

She believed that, mostly.

She believed it right up until Monday morning, when she caught herself checking, before she'd even taken off her coat, whether the light was on in his office.

It was.

She told herself that meant nothing at all, and went to find out.