Chapter Text
The office smelled like coffee and old paper and something Karen had brought in on Monday — some kind of candle or lotion, he still hadn’t worked out which — and Matt had been quietly, privately furious about it all week.
Not furious. That wasn’t the word. He didn’t have a word for it. That was the problem.
He found the right page in the deposition by feel and set it on the desk in front of him, and across the room he heard Karen’s keyboard slow, pause, resume. The scratch of Foggy’s pen two feet to his left. The city outside doing what the city did — sirens and pigeons and the particular rattle of the heating vent that Foggy had complained about twice and then apparently made peace with. All of it familiar. All of it good, in the way that only things you’d almost lost could be good.
Karen’s keyboard stopped again.
He didn’t mean to track it. He just did.
“The Schneider filing,” she said, not to anyone in particular. “Did we get the amended version or the original?”
“Amended,” Matt said. “Second drawer, first folder.”
A pause. Then the sound of the drawer. Then: “How do you always know where things are?”
“I pay attention.”
He heard Foggy set his pen down very deliberately, the way he did when he was performing innocence.
"Some of us pay attention," Foggy said. "Others of us drink the last of the good coffee and then pretend the pot was already empty."
"That was one time," Karen said.
"It was not one time."
Matt smiled at the deposition. Across the room, Karen's heartbeat had settled back into its usual rhythm — the one he'd mapped without meaning to, without deciding to, the way you learn a route so well your feet know it before your mind does. He'd known her heartbeat for years. Known it scared and angry and grief-split and relieved. Known it in the particular register it had when she was lying and the different one when she was telling herself something was fine that wasn't.
He knew it now, too. He just didn't let himself think about what it was saying.
She brought him coffee at half past eleven without being asked. Set it at the corner of his desk where he'd find it without knocking it over, which was something she'd worked out sometime in the first week and never mentioned. The mug was the right temperature. She'd let it sit the right amount of time.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me, I made a whole pot, I needed somewhere to put it." She was already walking back to her side of the office. He heard the small particular exhale she made when she sat down — not quite a sigh, just the sound of the day settling around her — and he kept his face where it was, pointed at the deposition, giving nothing away.
Across from him, Foggy's pen paused for exactly one second before resuming.
Matt picked up the coffee.
They broke for lunch at one. Foggy went to get sandwiches — "the good ones, not the place that gives me the sad turkey" — and the office went quiet, just Matt and Karen and the vent and the city outside, and Karen said, "Can I look at the Reyes thing with you for a second? There's something in the amended language I can't figure out."
"Sure."
She came around to his side of the desk. He'd been expecting it — he'd heard her stand, heard her cross — and he'd already pulled the document up on his laptop by the time she leaned over his shoulder to read from the screen, close enough that the ends of her hair brushed against his back, just barely, just enough.
"Here," she said, and he could feel the warmth of her beside him as she read the passage aloud, her voice dropping into that particular register she used when she was thinking out loud, picking something apart. "This clause — it almost reads like they're limiting the liability window, but the wording is strange."
"It's a carve-out," he said. He knew the document well enough by now that he didn't need to navigate to it, just let her voice trace the shape of it while he followed along in his own way. "See the reference mark at the end of that line? It runs to the footnote on page eight. They buried the actual limit in the footnote."
"That's — " She made a short sound of disgust. "That's horrible lawyering."
"It's very effective lawyering."
"Those aren't the same thing."
"No," he agreed. "They're really not."
She was still leaning over his shoulder. He was very aware of the precise distance between them — an inch, maybe less — and the weight of her hair against his back, and the fact that he wasn't moving, and the fact that she wasn't either. Then she straightened, the warmth of her lifting away, and he heard her exhale very quietly through her nose as she crossed back to her side of the room, like she was resetting something.
"Page eight," she said.
"Page eight," he confirmed.
The vent rattled. Outside, someone leaned on a horn. Matt pressed his thumb to the edge of the Braille reader until he could feel the individual dots of a word he wasn't reading, and said nothing, and said nothing, and said nothing.
At six o'clock Foggy put his coat on and announced that Marci had booked them a table somewhere that apparently had a dress code, which he felt was excessive on a Wednesday but was choosing to view as a personal growth opportunity. He looked between the two of them with the expression he'd been wearing all week — patient, watchful, saying absolutely nothing — and said, "Don't stay too late."
"We won't," Karen said.
"Good," said Foggy, and left, with the energy of a man exercising significant self-control.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Matt turned a page on the reader he hadn't absorbed. Karen's keyboard started again, slow and thoughtful. The city moved through its evening rhythms outside, and the office was warm, and somewhere in the building someone was cooking something, and everything was fine, everything was good — better than good, better than anything had any right to be, after everything — and Matt sat very quietly with all of it and let himself have it, just for a moment. Just the warmth and the coffee smell and the sound of her, unhurried, still here.
He'd almost said something, a dozen times this week. He could feel the shape of it, sitting at the back of his throat. Words that kept getting most of the way there and then stalling, backing down, finding reasons.
He moved to the next file.
Tomorrow, he told himself.
He'd believed that, the first few times he said it.