Page 22 of Shades of Grey & Gold

It smells like him—leather and cedar and something that I have apparently decided is just the smell of things being okay, burned salt or smoke—and the furnishings are magnificent without being showy. Dark wood, clean lines, a bookshelf that has books he’s likely actually read. His black, likely expensive, suit jacket is hanging on the back of his chair.

He picks it up, shrugs it on, and does the button in one fluid motion in that confident way guys do. “I’ll need a new laptop,” I say slowly, recalibrating. “And I want to see your active caseload.”

His face does the thing—the thing I saw through the glass a few minutes ago, the beginning of the smile he couldn’t help. Except this time he lets it finish. And his smile burns a hole in my brain. I swear the picture will never be erased, because it’s a smile I didn’t know I was missing.

“Yeah?” He looks down and then steps closer to me, meeting my eyes with his, crinkling at the corners.

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”

“I’m not.” His smile gets bigger, and with a wink, his eyebrows raise suggestively. “You wanna see my caseload, Sims?”

“You absolutely are, and yes.”

He holds out his hand. I stare at it for a second.

“Welcome back, Counselor,” he says.

I roll my eyes, realizing for a second that he must realize I didn’t finish law school and that nickname doesn’t apply to me anymore.

I shake his hand anyway, and he runs his thumb up the side of mine in a slow, deliberate motion that makes me forget what we were talking about.

Chapter Nine

Max

Theseconddayisharder than the first.

On the first day, I had adrenaline. I had terms to demand and a posture to maintain and a very specific kind of fury to weaponize. On the second day I just have a desk, and that desk is outside Callan Reed’s office, and I must sit at it and do normal things. And pretend I’m not waiting for the inevitable ghosts of the past to breeze by.

Normal things include: setting up my laptop, requesting file access from IT, reading through background on a case Cal dropped on my desk with a sticky note that says:‘thecase I thought you might be interested in’ in handwriting that I recognize from two years of shared study sessions and somehow find obnoxiously irritating in the best way; the way that makes me have to force my lips together to avoid smiling.

I do not smile. I open the Halbrook file and start reading.

The case is twelve years of wrongful conviction compressed into a five-inch stack of documents, convicted on the testimony of a single eyewitness who has since signed an affidavit saying he lied. The witness was seventeen at the time. He was scared and he was wrong and he said so in writing three years ago and somehow the defendant is still in a cell. I read for an hour and a half without looking up and by the time I surface I have four pages of notes and an actual feeling in my chest that I haven’t felt at work in a very long time.

Purpose has bloomed from a seed that has been long dormant inside of me.

“You have that face,” Cal’s voice seeps into the air around me.

I look up. He’s leaning in the doorway of his office—one shoulder against the frame, arms crossed, his towering height making his confidence palpable in a way that is so attractive it has me questioning how I could get any work done at all—and he’s looking at the notes in my hand.

“What face?”

“The one where you’ve found something or figured something out.” He tips his head at my notepad. “What’d you find?”

“Nothing yet. But the state’s case is thinner than they made it look at trial.” I flip back a page in my notes. “The eyewitness identification happened at dusk, forty feet of distance, partial obstruction. The defense attorney at trial didn’t challenge it adequately, and there’s a second witness who was never called—a woman who was walking her dog; she gave a statement to police that doesn’t match the eyewitness account in three key details and somehow never made it to the defense table.”

Cal is quiet for a moment.

“That’s in the file?” he asks.

“It’s in the original police report, which is in the file. It just takes a while to get there.” I look up at him. “How long have you had this case?”

“Three years.”

“And you never found her?”

“I found her.” Something moves across his face. “She moved. We’ve been trying to locate her current address for eight months. But we’ve had a lot of cases.”