Page 7 of His Wall

"Jules."

I pushed off the door. "You okay?"

He ran a hand down the back of his neck. "Lena's got a fever. Thea just put her down. I have to go."

"Go."

"I had Claire booked at — "

I waved him off. "Declan. Go home. Kiss the baby. Tell Thea I said hi."

He squeezed my shoulder once on his way past, hard enough that I felt it through the jacket, and crossed to his car. The door slammed. The engine started. The taillights swept across my shoes as he backed out, and then he was up the ramp.

I stood there with my keys in my hand. I rolled them once across my palm and looked at the elevator bank.

The Whitfield file was on my desk. I needed it for the morning call. Three minutes up, three minutes down.

I crossed back to the elevator.

The doors opened on the forty-second floor, and I stepped off into a dark hallway. Reception was off, the overhead lights on the low overnight setting, the carpet quiet under my shoes. I shrugged my jacket higher on my shoulder and started down the hall toward my office.

Claire's desk lamp was off.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding. I had told her to go home, and she had, finally, gone home. I walked past the empty chair, around the corner toward my office, and stopped.

The door was closed.

I had not closed the door.

I stood with one hand still in my jacket pocket and looked at the closed door and tried, for half a second, to give myself a different version of the last forty minutes. Maybe I'd done it without thinking. I had not. I'd left it open. I left it open every night.

I rubbed my jaw with the back of my hand.

My chest tightened.

I closed the last three steps to the door and pushed it open in one slow motion, my hand flat against the wood.

The desk lamp was on. The bulb threw a circle of yellow across the blotter and lit the back wall.

Claire was behind my desk.

She had her left hand braced on the edge of the keyboard. Her right hand was an inch from the closed lid of my laptop, her fingers half-curled. The folder she'd had on her own desk all afternoon was open beside her elbow.

Her chin came up. She straightened, slow, one hand sliding off the keyboard, the other dropping to her side.

The low knot of her hair caught the lamplight as she turned to face me.

Her face did not change.

I felt mine change. My jaw tightened, my mouth opening and closing once. I stayed in the doorway with my hand on the wood because I did not yet trust where my feet were going to take me.

I looked at her.

I looked at the bottom drawer, flush against the cabinet face.

I looked at the keyboard, two inches too close to the edge of the desk, exactly where it had been when I'd stood in this same doorway this morning and told her someone had been in my office.

I looked back at her.