Page 24 of Shades of Grey & Gold

Gets a mug.

The kitchen is not large enough for this to be anything other than what it is, which is two people who have a catastrophic history trying to share thirty square feet at seven forty-five in the morning.

“You’ve been good?” he asks.

I take my espresso and turn around, and I look at him the way you look at someone when you are deciding how they have survived on this earth so long without brain cells.

“I’ve been fine,” I say, sipping my coffee. “You?”

“Yeah.” He turns the mug over in his hands, like he’s trying to figure out what to say, stalling. I remember his stalling. I remember a lot of things, and most of them I’ve buried somewhere deep inside my brain because that’s where they belong. “It’s good to have you here.”

I sip again.

“Have a good day, Patrick,” I turn before the words fully leave my lips, and I walk out.

I make it to the hallway before I let out a long, slow breath. My hands are completely steady. I note this with something that isn’t quite pride but lives next door to it.

Cal is walking toward me from the elevator, jacket already on, a coffee from the place down the street in his hand. He reads my face the way he used to. His eyes flick behind me towards the kitchen and he doesn’t ask what happened.

“Halbrook witness confirmed for a video call Thursday,” he says instead.

“Good.”

He falls into step next to me as we walk to our corner of the office, and the morning starts properly, and that’s that.

The thing I notice, the thing I keep noticing, is that Cal’s different here than I expected.

I expected Ellison’s version of Callan Reed—buttoned up, respectful, working the room the way you work a room when the room belongs to other people. That’s who I saw at the bar and in Richard’s office that first day. Controlled. Every action deliberate.

That’s not who sits across from me at eleven o’clock every day going through the Halbrook case.

This Callan takes his jacket off. This Callan argues with me about case strategy in a way that is so specifically interested in what I actually think that sometimes I lose track of the argument because I’m busy adjusting to being taken seriously. He says on a Wednesday, in response to a point I make about the witness recantation timing, that I am right and he was wrong and he is going to change his approach, and he says it so simply, so without decoration or caveat, that I sit there for a full three seconds just receiving the information.

Patrick never admitted he was wrong in five and a half years. Patrick would say he wasn’t sure what I was getting at, and then proceed to do whatever he’d already decided to do or come up with an idea identical to mine three days later.

“What?” Cal asks after the pause has been going on for much longer than I thought.

I’ve been staring straight ahead at his hands laced in front of him on his desk after his announcement that he was wrong.

“Nothing,” I shake my head and frown. “You have ink on your hand.”

He looks at his hand. He does, in fact, have ink on his hand—a smear of blue pen across the side from the notes he’s been taking. He looks back up at me.

“Thank you,” he says, very dry, and goes back to the file. “Breaking cases wide open and catching pen smears.”

I go back to the file too.

The thing I decided to acknowledge at one in the morning with a cold cup of tea and a pen with my name on it bubbles up to the surface again. Where I tell it to calm down.

But it feels like we are getting somewhere.

Chapter Ten

Max

It’sbeenamonthand Bart likes Cal’s office better than his bed under my desk.

Cal has a couch in his office, a real one, leather, the kind Bart sinks into immediately and then refuses to leave—and Cal has never once told him to get down, which means the battle of me trying to persuade Bart back to his bed was lost on day three. Now Bart spends most of the day there, arranged across the couch like he owns the place, and occasionally wanders out to check on me. Then promptly goes back.