BEHIND HIS WALLS

Chapter 2

The meeting lasted ninety minutes, and Mara spent every one of them trying very hard not to look like she was drowning.

The Halloran matter, as far as she could piece together from the shorthand being thrown around the table, was a construction dispute that had ballooned into something much larger—breach of contract, allegations of fraud, enough zeros in the damages claim that she'd had to stop herself from visibly blinking the first time someone said the number out loud.

There were four associates on the trial team besides her, two senior, two junior, and a paralegal named Duke who seemed to be the only person in the room entirely unbothered by Sean's presence.

Sean ran the meeting the way she imagined he did everything—without waste.

No pleasantries.

No meandering.

He'd ask a question, someone would answer, and if the answer wasn't precise enough he'd ask it again, differently, until it was.

He didn't raise his voice.

He didn't need to.

Mara watched a junior associate named Grant visibly recalibrate his own sentence halfway through speaking, correcting course under the weight of Sean's silence alone.

She didn't say anything for the first forty minutes. She'd promised herself she wouldn't—better to listen, to learn the shape of the case, than to ask a question that revealed how little she actually knew yet.

Then Sean said, "Whitfield," and she nearly dropped her pen.

"Yes?"

"You've read the file."

Not a question, again.

Everything out of his mouth seemed to arrive pre-decided.

"I have."

"Then you'll have noticed the gap in the timeline between the March inspection and the April change order."

She had, actually.

She'd spent an entire evening two nights ago cross-referencing dates specifically because something about that gap had itched at her.

She hadn't expected to be asked about it in front of eight people on her first day.

"I did," she said, and made herself keep going before the silence could swallow her. "There's a six-week window where the inspection reports and the change orders don't line up with the correspondence Halloran's team produced. Either something's missing from the production, or—" she hesitated, then decided the sentence was worth finishing "—or someone backdated the change order to make it look like the client signed off before the inspection flagged the issue."

The room had gone quiet in a different way than before—not the tense quiet of someone being corrected, but the quiet of people listening.

Sean looked at her for a long moment.

She couldn't read anything in his expression, which she was rapidly learning was simply the default setting of his face, not something reserved for her.

"That's the theory," he said finally.

"Good. Find out which."

It wasn't praise, not really—barely more than four words, delivered as flatly as everything else he'd said all morning—but she felt it land somewhere in her chest anyway, warm and startling, and she had to look down at her notebook to keep it from showing on her face.

The meeting broke a little after eleven, associates filing out in twos and threes, already murmuring logistics to each other.

Mara gathered her things slowly, replaying the exchange, wondering if she'd imagined the shift in his voice or invented it out of sheer nervous need for some kind of foothold.

"He doesn't say that to everyone."

She looked up.

It was Duke, the paralegal, tucking a laptop under his arm with the unhurried air of someone who'd worked here long enough to have opinions and no fear of sharing them.

"Say what?"

"Good."

Duke smiled, not unkindly.

"I've been on his teams for four years. First time I heard him say it, I went home and told my wife like I'd won something."

"He seemed—" Mara searched for a diplomatic word "—efficient."

Duke laughed, a real laugh, low and easy.

"That's one way to put it. You'll get used to it. He's not unkind, whatever the junior associates say. He's just not going to waste your time or his pretending otherwise."

He studied her for a second, something assessing but not unfriendly in it.

"You held your own in there. That'll matter more than you think."

"Good to know," Mara said, and meant it.

Duke gave her a nod and headed for the door, leaving her alone in the conference room with the ghost of coffee smell and a folder of documents she now needed to read three more times before tomorrow.

She gathered the file, hugged it to her chest, and allowed herself, just for a second, standing alone in that glass-walled room thirty-one floors above the city she'd chosen for herself, one small unguarded breath of something like pride.

Find out which, he'd said.

She intended to.