BEHIND HIS WALLS

Chapter 5

The courier records turned out to matter more than Mara had realized.

By the following week, the discrepancy she'd found had become the spine of an entire new line of argument—Sean had restructured half the trial strategy around it, and the trial team's meetings had taken on a different energy, sharper, more urgent, the particular electricity of a case that had just found its center of gravity.

It meant more late nights.

It meant, more specifically, more late nights where the trial team thinned down to just the senior associates and Sean, and then, more often than she wanted to examine too closely, down to just her and Sean, the two of them working through documents at the long table in his office because it was easier than shuttling files back and forth.

She was learning his rhythms.

He worked in long, unbroken stretches, then stopped abruptly to make coffee—always for himself, though he'd started, without comment, making a second cup and setting it near her elbow without a word about it, as though it were simply a fact of the room rather than a kindness.

He read fast.

He asked questions like a scalpel, precise and unhurried, never raising his voice even when he clearly disagreed with something.

And when he was deep in a document, working something out, he had a habit of turning his pen over and over between his fingers that she'd caught herself watching more than once.

It was on one of those nights—close to nine, the two of them alone, a half-eaten container of takeout going cold on the corner of his desk—that the crack appeared.

"You called the courier company yourself," he said, apropos of nothing, not looking up from the deposition transcript in front of him. "Most people would have asked me first. Or asked Duke. Or just assumed the discovery production was complete and moved on."

"Would you have said no?"

"No."

He turned a page.

"But most people ask permission before doing something outside the lines. You didn't."

"Should I have?"

He looked up at that, and something in his face was different than she'd seen before—not the careful blankness, not even the almost-smile from the other night, but something more exposed, like a door left open a crack by accident.

"No," he said again, quieter. "I used to be the same way. Before I learned it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission around here—and then, eventually, easier not to need forgiveness from anyone at all."

The sentence hung there, more honest than anything he'd said to her in three weeks, and she watched him seem to hear himself say it—watched the realization land, watched something in his posture straighten half an inch as though he were physically pulling the door shut again.

That's not—" he started, then stopped, then picked a different sentence instead. "Elizabeth used to say I never took risks. She was wrong. I took exactly one, and it taught me why people don't."

He said the name like it cost him something to say it—flat, deliberate, testing whether it would still hurt to hear out loud in front of someone.

Mara didn't move.

Didn't reach for her coffee.

Didn't shift in her chair, afraid that any motion at all might remind him she was in the room and give him the excuse he was visibly looking for to stop.

"I'm not asking," she said carefully, "but if you wanted to say more, I'd listen."

For a moment she thought he might.

His jaw worked, some internal argument playing out behind his eyes, and she had the strange sensation of watching a man stand at the edge of something and consider, just for a second, jumping.

Then he didn't.

"It's not relevant to the case," he said, and the door closed all the way, his voice sliding back into the flat, contained register she'd first met on her first day.

He picked the transcript back up.

"We should keep going. I want the outline finished before tomorrow."

"Of course," Mara said, and picked her pen back up, and did not let herself feel as disappointed as she did.

They worked another hour in silence, the easy rhythm from before replaced by something more careful, more guarded, both of them keeping their eyes on the documents rather than each other.

When she finally packed up to leave, he didn't walk her out, didn't say goodnight beyond a short nod, already absorbed again in his own reading.

But as she reached the door, she glanced back once, and found him watching her—not the case, not the transcript, her—with an expression she didn't have a name for yet, gone the instant he realized she'd caught him.

Goodnight, Sean," she said, using his first name for the first time without quite deciding to.

He didn't correct her.

"Goodnight, Mara."