The Substitute

Chapter Five: The Dinner

She should have brought it to him immediately. Instead, she found herself three nights later sitting across from Julian Cole at a small Italian place two blocks from the office, ostensibly to discuss "case logistics," in reality because he'd asked and she hadn't found it in herself to say no.

Candlelight did something unfair to the planes of his face. He talked about Elise carefully, in the past tense that wasn't quite an admission and wasn't quite hope, either — the way she used to overthink restaurant orders, the terrible jokes she'd text him during his most boring meetings, the ring he'd bought two weeks before she vanished and never got to give her.

"I never told anyone that," he said, turning his water glass in slow circles. "About the ring."

"Why tell me?"

"Because you look at me like you're trying to solve something, not like you're afraid of what you'll find. Everyone else in that building looks at me like I might be the answer to a question they're too polite to ask out loud." His eyes met hers, dark and tired and searching. "You don't look at me that way. Yet."

"Where were you? The night she disappeared?"

Something closed behind his expression, quick as a door.

"I've told the police everything I know."

"That's not what I asked."

He was quiet long enough that the waiter came and went twice. "I was at her apartment," he finally said. "We argued. I left around eleven. I've never told anyone that, because the last thing I said to her was cruel, and I've spent five weeks convinced that if I'd stayed ten more minutes, she'd still—" He stopped, jaw tight. "I didn't hurt her, Mara. Whatever you're starting to think, I didn't hurt her."

Under the table, without meaning to, she'd already decided she believed him. That should have frightened her more than it did.

Walking her to the train after, he paused at the top of the stairs, close enough that she could smell rain and cedar and something underneath that was just him.

"I know this is insane," he said quietly. "I know what it looks like, whatever I'm starting to feel. But when you walked onto that floor three weeks ago, it was the first time in over a month I remembered what it felt like to want to get out of bed."

He didn't kiss her. He wanted to; she could see the want plain on his face, and some matching gravity in her own chest. But he stepped back instead, said goodnight, and left her standing on the platform with her heart going twice its normal speed and her phone, in her pocket, already buzzing with a new message.

I saw that.

Careful, Mara. He does this. He makes you feel like the only person in the room.

He did it to her too.