Chapter Text
The bullpen was quiet in the specific, heavy way it only got when everyone was pretending to work while waiting for one person. It was an elaborate choreography of simulated productivity—the aggressive clicking of mice, the intense staring at spreadsheets, the performative sighing over paperwork.
Jesse checked the corner of his monitor, then looked up at the wall clock. "Three minutes."
"Mm," said Kai, his fingers moving across his keyboard with rhythm but no actual urgency. He didn’t look up.
"Think she'll make it?" Jesse leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. "Traffic on the H-1 was absolute garbage this morning. I barely made it, and I actually care about my performance review."
"She always does," Kai stated flatly. It wasn't a guess; it was a statistical fact based on six months of observation.
Ernie frowned at his screen, pausing a line of code he was running. He adjusted his glasses and looked between the two of them. "I still don't understand why we're timing this. It seems like a massive waste of collective cognitive energy. We are federal agents."
"Because, Ernie," Jesse said, leaning forward conspiratorially, "Agent Tara has spent the last six months trying to beat her own personal record. Arriving exactly one minute before Jane can officially call her late and mark it in the log."
Ernie blinked. "That's oddly specific."
"It's an art form," Jesse corrected. "It requires timing, spatial awareness, and a complete lack of shame."
Right on cue, the elevator at the far end of the hall dinged.
The doors slid open, and Lucy Tara stepped out. She was moving at a brisk jog-walk, one-handing a grease-stained brown paper bag and a massive iced coffee that she had absolutely no business not spilling given her speed. She didn't look at the team; her eyes went straight to the wall clock.
8:59.
Lucy slowed to a casual stroll, a massive, victorious grin spreading across her face like she'd just stuck a perfect ten landing at the Olympics. She strolled up to the desks and popped her collar. "Told you."
"You cut that way too close," Jesse said, shaking his head, though he was fighting a smile. "One of these days, a red light is going to ruin your whole streak."
"I had time," Lucy said smoothly, setting the iced coffee down with a satisfying thud.
"You had sixty-three seconds."
"Which is technically time. In the grand calculus of the universe, Jesse, sixty-three seconds is an eternity."
She dropped the heavy paper bag directly onto the center of his neat stack of case files. The scent of grilled tortillas, eggs, and heavy spices immediately filled the bullpen. "Breakfast burritos from the truck down the street. Feast, boys."
Kai immediately abandoned his keyboard, though he looked at the bag with a healthy dose of suspicion. He asked, without a shred of real hope, "Are any of them mild? Did any of them come without hot sauce?"
Lucy looked at him as if he had just insulted her ancestors. "There is no such thing as too much hot sauce, Kai. It’s a flavor profile, not a punishment."
"There is," Kai insisted, reaching into the bag anyway. "It's called the human pain threshold."
"You wound me. Truly."
Before Kai could argue the point further, the heavy wood door of Jane's office swung open. The casual atmosphere evaporated instantly. The bullpen straightened on reflex, spines aligning, posture resetting.
"Morning." Jane Tennant stepped out, a tablet in hand. Her eyes didn't linger on the burritos; they went straight to Lucy. "You made it."
"I always do, Boss."
"Barely."
"Still counts on the time sheet."
Jane didn't dignify that with a response, though the corner of her mouth twitched. She held up a physical manila file instead, her expression turning professional and sharp. "We've got a body. Marine Corps Base Hawaii—Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Reeves. Found in a secure comms bunker around oh-six-fifteen. Looks like a suicide."
Jesse's whole face fell, the humor draining out of him. "'Looks like'?"
"MPs aren't convinced," Jane explained, tapping the file against her palm. "Reeves was a straight arrow, but more importantly, he was set to testify in a high-profile military fraud case next week. The timing is incredibly convenient for a lot of bad people."
Jesse groaned softly, rubbing his temples. "Please don't say the magic three letters. I am not in the mood to share custody of a crime scene today."
Right on cue, the elevator bell chimed for the second time that morning.
Kate Whistler walked out. She looked like she had been carved out of marble and dressed in a perfectly tailored navy blazer. Her posture was like a plumb line, her expression giving away exactly nothing—which was, ironically, the loudest, most definitive thing about her. She held a leather portfolio pressed against her side.
"Too late," Jesse muttered under his breath, slumping slightly in his chair.
Lucy suddenly found the acoustic tiles on the ceiling deeply fascinating, studying them with sudden, profound interest. "Oh good. The day is officially complete."
"SAC Tennant," Kate said, ignoring the peanut gallery as she walked into the center of the bullpen.
"DIA officer Whistler." Jane nodded at the file in her own hand. "I assume you're here because the comms bunker falls under DIA jurisdiction?"
"It does," Kate said, her voice crisp and entirely professional. "The technical systems inside that specific bunker contain classified Defense Intelligence Agency routing protocols. I’ve been assigned to oversee the data integrity of the scene."
"Morning, Whistler," Lucy said, crossing her arms and leaning back against Jesse's desk, her tone dripping with casual defiance.
Kate’s eyes shifted to her, her expression remaining entirely neutral. "Agent Tara."
There was zero warmth in either greeting. To anyone watching from the outside, it sounded exactly like the last six months of every single bureaucratic conversation they'd ever had. It was a masterclass in professional distance.
Jesse leaned slightly toward Kai, keeping his voice low. "Give it five minutes before they start arguing about code sections."
Kai didn't look up from his burrito. "Three."
Jane heard both of them and said absolutely nothing, which was somehow worse than a lecture. She looked back at Kate. "We were just about to head out."
Kate flipped her portfolio open, her pen already poised. "Who entered the scene before NCIS was notified?"
"First responders and the base Military Police," Jane replied.
"Did they properly secure it?"
"They say they did."
Kate's brow furrowed slightly. "I'll want names, badge numbers, and radio logs for every individual who crossed the threshold."
Lucy sighed heavily, rolling her eyes. "Of course you do. Because what's a murder investigation without a light afternoon of reading the phone book?"
"If the chain of custody is compromised," Kate said, turning her head slightly to address Lucy directly, "everything downstream becomes legally questionable in a court of law. It doesn't matter what we find if a defense attorney can throw it out because an MP stepped on a footprint."
"Or," Lucy countered, stepping forward, "we could just focus on catching the killer instead of filling out triplicate forms about who stood where."
"Those two objectives are not mutually exclusive, Agent Tara."
"You always make things sound like legal briefs, Whistler."
"I was a lawyer. It's how my brain operates."
"I know," Lucy said, her voice dropping a fraction into something less combative and more pointed. "I was making conversation."
Kate blinked, caught off guard for a fraction of a second. Her pen hovered over the paper. "...Were you?"
"I can be friendly," Lucy said, flashing a quick, challenging smile. "It's a documented trait."
Jesse choked on his coffee, coughing into his fist to cover it up. Kai found something incredibly urgent to look at on the ceiling, suddenly matching Lucy's earlier interest in the architecture. Kate ignored all of it, adjusting her blazer and looking back at Jane, determinedly resetting the professional boundary.
"What time are we leaving, Tennant?"
Jane closed her file with a sharp snap. "Now. Let's go solve a murder."
The SUV ride to MCBH was exactly what Kate expected, which meant it was loud, chaotic, and entirely lacking in the quiet dignity she preferred during a transit window.
Jesse was in the front passenger seat, turning around to poll everyone on what specific crime theory they had drawn in their unofficial office pool. "Alright, let's hear it. I had fraud. The guy got greedy, realized he was in too deep, and someone took him out to keep him quiet."
"I had training accident cover-up," Ernie piped up from the back row, surrounded by two different laptops.
"I always have cyberattack," Kai said deadpan from the driver's seat, keeping his eyes on the road. "It's the only thing that explains why Ernie gets so excited on Friday mornings."
Lucy leaned over from her seat, elbowing Ernie playfully. "Which makes you a giant nerd, Ernie."
"I prefer the term 'digital forensic enthusiast,'" Ernie muttered, not looking up from his screen.
Through all of this, Kate sat in the middle row, the physical case file open on her lap. She was reading the primary victim profile for the third time, her eyes scanning the black-and-white printout of Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Reeves. Thirty-eight years old. Married to a schoolteacher, one ten-year-old daughter. No disciplinary record, no history of substance abuse, no outstanding debts. No reason on paper for a man like that to eat his own gun in a dark bunker at dawn.
"You've read that thing like four times," Lucy said, twisting around in her seat to look at Kate.
"Three," Kate corrected automatically, her finger tracing a line on the report.
"See? She counted," Lucy told Jesse, gesturing toward the back.
"I always count," Kate said, her voice quiet but firm. "Precision matters."
"I know," Lucy murmured. The tone was softer than before, a brief flash of familiarity that disappeared as quickly as it came.
Kate tapped the page with the back of her pen. "The initial MP report doesn't list an exact entry time for the responding officers. It just says 'approximately oh-six-thirty.'"
"That's what's bothering you?" Lucy asked, leaning closer to see the file. "An 'approximately'?"
"It should bother everyone. Evidence changes in thirteen minutes, Agent Tara. If they arrived at six-twenty-two versus six-thirty-five, the temperature of the room, the state of the digital logs—everything shifts."
"Sometimes thirteen seconds," Lucy mocked gently, though there was no heat in it.
Kai's voice drifted back, deadpan and steady from the driver's seat: "She reads legal journals for fun, Lucy. Don't try to understand it."
"Those are different," Kate said, defending herself with the particular, stiff dignity of someone who knew it wasn't a great defense but was determined to die on that hill anyway. "They provide valuable context on precedent."
Lucy laughed out loud. It was a bright, genuine sound that filled the entire cabin of the SUV, bouncing off the windows. It was loud enough that Kate found herself looking back down at her file a half-second too fast, her cheeks feeling slightly warmer than the air conditioning warranted.
The comms bunker smelled like cold metal, ozone, and the distinct, unmistakable copper tang of blood. It was a subterranean room, windowless and heavily shielded, lit only by the harsh fluorescent tubes overhead. Gunnery Sergeant Reeves sat slumped heavily in his ergonomic task chair, his chin resting against his chest. A service pistol lay on the floor near his right hand. Everything was arranged just a little too neatly—a tragic tableau that felt constructed rather than chaotic.
Kate immediately crouched by the body, her eyes scanning the positioning of the limbs, the angle of the wound, the blood spatter on the console.
Lucy, true to form, went straight for the walls. She walked the perimeter, checking the secure hinges on the door, the air vents, the dust patterns on the server racks. She always started with the room, looking at the macro environment; Kate always started with the victim, focusing on the micro data. Different roads, same destination.
"Captain," Kate said, her voice echoing slightly in the concrete space as she looked up at the base MP commander standing near the door. "Was Sergeant Reeves right-handed?"
"Yes, ma'am," the captain replied. "Standard qualification records confirm right-dominant."
"Then why," Kate pointed a gloved finger toward the weapon on the floor, "is the manual safety engaged?"
The room went completely still. The low hum of the server fans suddenly seemed much louder. Lucy stopped moving entirely, turning slowly on her heel to look across the bunker at Kate.
Jesse looked over Kate’s shoulder, squinting at the firearm. "Can someone shoot themselves and then flip the safety back on as a reflex?" He asked the question already knowing the answer, but needing to hear it aloud.
"No," said Kai from the doorway, his hands on his tactical vest. "Biologically impossible. Once that trigger is pulled at that angle, voluntary motor function ceases instantly."
Lucy walked back over, her boots clicking against the concrete. She stopped a foot away from Kate, looking down at the weapon, then up at Kate's face. Kate met her gaze, steady and resolute.
"So we're looking for a murderer," Lucy said. A slow, sharp smile spread across her face—not out of disrespect for the dead, but because for Lucy Tara, an actual, complicated mystery beat a closed, tragic suicide case every single time. It was the thrill of the hunt. "Christmas came early."
"It would appear so," Kate said softly.
Jane clapped her hands once, the sound sharp as a pistol shot. "Alright, people. Let's find out who forgot to switch the safety off. Jesse, coordinate with base security. Kai, I want full forensic photography of every inch of this console."
The bunker came alive instantly, shifting from a stagnant death scene to a hive of controlled activity. Kai began snapping photos, the flash throwing long shadows against the concrete walls. Jesse was already on his radio, running down the primary MP unit.
Ernie had dragged a rolling stool over to the primary comms terminal and was already elbow-deep in the system architecture, his fingers flying across the keys while he muttered incoherently to himself.
Lucy crouched down by the small plastic wastebasket beside the desk. She frowned, tipping it forward with a gloved finger. It was completely empty. Not a stray piece of paper, not a gum wrapper, not a single speck of dust. "Jesse. Where's the trash?"
Jesse looked up from his notebook, confused. "...What trash?"
"Exactly. A guy works a twelve-hour shift in a secure, high-stress bunker, and he doesn't throw away a single sticky note? A single wrapper?"
Across the room, Ernie made a loud noise—a hybrid gasp and squeak that usually meant he'd found buried treasure. "Oh, hello lovely data. The server logs show an external encrypted drive was badged into this terminal yesterday afternoon at fifteen-forty." He pulled the registration record up on his screen. "The drive belongs to a Staff Sergeant Nolan Pierce."
Jane walked over to his shoulder. "Where is Pierce now?"
"According to the database... he transferred to Okinawa three months ago," Ernie said, wincing slightly as he dug deeper. "And here's the kicker: Pierce reported that specific drive missing two months before he deployed."
Silence fell over the room again. The good kind of silence—the heavy, pressurized quiet that meant the case had just cracked wide open.
Kate walked back into the bunker, having just finished interviewing the nineteen-year-old private who had discovered the body at dawn. She had taken that interview alone, deliberately overriding Lucy's offer to assist, on the entirely reasonable grounds that the terrified kid shouldn't have to tell a traumatic story to two aggressive federal agents at the same time. She had been gentle with him, giving him water and time to breathe. Lucy hadn't seen the interview, but she would have bet good money on exactly how Kate handled it anyway.
"Anything?" Kate asked, pulling off her latex gloves.
"Somebody stole the victim's trash," Lucy said, pointing at the empty bin.
Kate stared at her for a second. Then she looked at the bin. Instead of the exasperated eye-roll Lucy was fully braced for, Kate turned directly to the MP captain. "Captain, what time does the civilian janitorial crew usually come through this sector?"
"Evening shift, ma'am. Around twenty-one hundred."
"So this bin should have contained at least twelve hours of yesterday's administrative waste," Kate reasoned, her logic locking into place.
The captain's face changed as the realization hit him. "...Yes. It should have."
"Someone emptied it after the janitorial shift," Kate concluded, looking back at Lucy. "To remove physical evidence. A note, a document, or something they dropped."
Lucy’s grin returned, full force. "Told you."
"You did," Kate said. There was no sarcasm in her voice. No professional defense mechanism. Just plain, unadorned agreement, and the sheer weight of it landed somewhere deep in Lucy's chest—a warm, solid feeling she immediately decided not to examine too closely.
From the doorway, Jane stood with her arms crossed, watching the two of them build on each other's ideas without a single beat of hesitation, their usual bickering replaced by a terrifyingly efficient rhythm. Interesting, Jane thought, her eyes tracking the subtle shift in their posture.
Then Kate noticed the coffee.
It was a ceramic Marine Corps mug sitting on a shelf behind the main terminal. It was full to the brim. Cold. A thin, dark skin had already formed across the top of the liquid.
"He badged in at five-forty-one," Kate said, walking over to it. "The medical examiner's preliminary estimate puts time of death around six-fifteen. That's a twenty-four minute window. If he made a fresh mug of coffee the second he walked in, why didn't he take a single sip?"
"Maybe he got interrupted before he could drink it," Lucy suggested, stepping up beside her.
"Or maybe somebody else made it to make the room look normal."
"You think someone was already inside the bunker waiting for him when he badged in."
Before Kate could answer, an NCIS forensics tech appeared in the doorway, holding a clear evidence bag containing a glass coffee carafe from the break area. "Officer, we got partial prints off the handle of the pot. We ran them against the base registry. One set belongs to the victim. The other set belongs to someone who definitely shouldn't be in this building."
Lucy and Kate turned their heads at the exact same time, speaking in perfect, startled unison: "He wasn't alone."
They caught each other's eyes immediately. The shared realization hung in the air between them for a beat too long—a quiet, private second in the middle of a crowded crime scene—before both suddenly became incredibly, desperately interested in their respective notebooks, flipping pages and scribbling notes that probably didn't need to be written.
Jane noticed that too. Jane noticed everything.
By six o'clock that evening, the entire case had come apart at the seams the way complex investigations sometimes did—not because of one single, brilliant deduction, but because of six small, meticulous pieces of data stacked on top of each other.
Ernie had resurrected a deleted digital access log out of pure spite for the killer's erasure software. A base maintenance worker had remembered hearing a whispered, angry argument near the loading dock at five-forty-five. The prints on the coffee pot matched a corrupt logistics officer who had been working with the fraud syndicate. Faced with the mountain of evidence, the suspect had collapsed in the interrogation room, confessing within thirty minutes. He’d been selling classified communication hardware for months; Reeves had discovered the discrepancies the previous afternoon and threatened to report him first thing in the morning. Panic, greed, and a staged suicide did the rest.
Which left the NCIS bullpen at six-fifteen p.m. buried under an absolute avalanche of post-case paperwork. Lucy was staring at the stack of forms on her desk like the paper had personally wronged her family.
"This is cruel," Lucy groaned, dropping her chin onto her hands. "We caught a murderer in record time. We should be getting a medal, or at least a beer. Not this."
"This is standard federal procedure, Agent Tara," Kate said from her temporary desk space, her pen moving with rhythmic, terrifying efficiency. She hadn't looked up once in twenty minutes.
"This is revenge."
"It's legal documentation."
"Same thing."
Jesse rolled his ergonomic chair over from his desk, a stack of folders in his lap. "I'd like the record to show that I personally chased down the gate logs that broke the alibi. I solved a murder today."
"You did," Kate said pleasantly, her tone even.
"So why am I currently filling out six different jurisdictional crossover reports for the Department of Navy?"
"Because you solved a murder today," Kate explained, as if it were the most logical conclusion in the world. "Success requires paperwork."
"That's exactly what I'm talking about," Lucy said, jumping up and pointing a finger at Kate like she'd just proven a mathematical theorem. "She's automated. She doesn't feel pain."
Kai walked past the desks, his jacket already on, holding a single, completed folder out to Jane's empty office door before dropping it in the outbox.
Lucy gasped. "You're done? You're a traitor, Kai."
"I write fast," Kai said, not stopping. "It’s called wanting to go home before midnight. Have fun, kids."
Ernie, who was currently three folders deep into an incredibly intricate, alphabetized filing system for the case digital assets, looked up when he realized Lucy was glaring at him next. He blinked innocently. "...Doesn't everyone enjoy the synthesis phase of a case file?"
"No," Lucy said flatly.
"Yes," Kate said at the exact same moment.
Lucy threw her hands up in the air. "I'm surrounded. Officially outnumbered by bureaucrats and data nerds."
Jane emerged from her office, her leather bag already slung over her shoulder and her car keys jingling in her hand. She stopped at the edge of the bullpen floor. "Reports finished, team?"
Kai and Ernie both nodded, Ernie pointing proudly at his color-coded binders. Jesse made a low, rumbling noise in his throat that wasn't quite a 'yes' but wasn't a definitive 'no' either. Jane's eyes skipped past them and landed directly on Lucy.
"I'm spiritually finished, Boss," Lucy offered, giving her best winning smile.
"You have three pages left of the incident summary," Jane countered, checking her digital queue.
"...Details."
Jane looked over at Kate, her expression entirely deadpan. "Keep her here until it's done if you have to, Whistler."
"I was planning to," Kate said with complete, terrifying sincerity.
Lucy groaned so loudly it practically rattled the reinforced glass windows of the bullpen. "I knew it. I knew you liked her more than me. This is institutional bullying."
Jane just smiled, a small, knowing expression, and headed toward the elevator lobby. She paused just before the corner, out of direct sight, turning back to watch the bullpen for one last moment.
She watched as Kate quietly, without a single word of lecture, slid Jesse's uncompleted report back across his desk. Kate didn't say a word; she just tapped a specific line on page four with the tip of her pen, pointed to a missing signature, and went right back to her own writing. Jesse sighed, pulled his chair back in, and picked up his pen. No argument. Just a tap and a wait.
Interesting, Jane thought again. She smiled to herself, turned the corner, and stepped into the waiting elevator.
The bullpen slowly emptied out, one person at a time, the ambient noise fading down to the hum of the air conditioning. Kai left first with a brief nod. Then Ernie went, offering a cheerful, singsong goodnight that nobody really answered. Jesse was the last of the core team to pack up. On his way past Lucy's desk, he reached out with lightning speed and snatched the last handful of pretzels out of a bag she had left open.
"Hey! You're a menace!" Lucy yelled after him as he sprinted for the closing elevator doors. "I hope you hit every single piece of construction traffic on the H-1!" she shouted as the doors slid shut.
She slumped back into her chair, huffing. "I hope his tire pressure light comes on."
"That seems slightly excessive for a handful of pretzels," Kate remarked, her voice calm in the quiet room.
"He took my pretzels, Whistler. In the arena of office warfare, food theft is a capital offense."
Kate paused her pen. She looked at the empty bag, then back at Lucy. "...Fair."
Lucy froze, her eyes widening slightly. "Wait. You're agreeing with me? The Kate Whistler is endorsing lawlessness and curses?"
"He took your snacks without consent. The law supports your grievance."
"Wow," Lucy murmured, a soft grin tugging at her lips. "I knew there was a heart buried under all that bureaucracy and starch."
"There isn't," Kate said, her tone clipped as she clicked her pen shut and closed her final folder with a decisive slap.
Lucy just hummed, a low, skeptical sound that made it clear she didn't believe her for a single second—which she didn't. Not anymore. Not for the last six months, ever since the sharp edges of dia officer Whistler had started to blur into something much more complicated when they were alone.
Lucy grabbed her leather jacket from the back of her chair, swung it over her shoulder, and walked toward the exit without saying a formal goodbye. That wasn't rudeness; that was just their unspoken protocol. They didn't do public departures.
Kate packed her portfolio into her briefcase exactly two minutes later, checked her watch, and headed for the elevator to return to the DIA building, her posture resetting to its standard, rigid baseline the moment she stepped out of the NCIS suite.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket before she had even sat down at her own desk. She pulled it out.
Lucy: don't even think about cancelling tonight
Kate felt a sudden, distinct loosening in her chest—a physical sensation of relief that had been wound tight like a spring through the entire grueling day of investigations and paperwork. She typed back with one hand.
Kate: I have never cancelled Friday dinner.
Lucy: good. because I already ordered us a table.
Kate: You can't order a table, Lucy. You reserve one. 'Order' implies you're taking the furniture home.
Lucy: i liked my version better. more aggressive.
A second later, a photo message arrived. It was a shot of a tiny, hole-in-the-wall family-run Chinese restaurant wedged precariously between a laundromat and a dive shop that Kate didn't recognize.
Lucy: Found this place after Jesse gave me completely wrong directions to a dry cleaner last week. Worth the lost hour. Trust me.
Kate laughed out loud—a real, unprompted sound that echoed off the empty walls of her office. She didn't even pretend to be embarrassed about it, looking around the empty room with a rare, relaxed smile.
Kate: Where exactly is this?
Lucy: don't laugh. remember what happened the last time you gave me directions?
Kate: That happened once.
Lucy: Twice.
A long pause stretched for nearly thirty seconds before the three typing dots reappeared.
Lucy: we're not counting the taco truck incident. that was a GPS error.
Kate: We are absolutely counting it. You ended up at a naval shipyard entry gate.
Lucy: rude.
There was a soft knock at her open office door. A senior DIA analyst was standing there, his briefcase in hand, heading out for the evening. "Heading out, Whistler? Have a good weekend."
"Thanks, you too," Kate replied, instantly smoothing her features back into her professional demeanor.
Once he walked away, she switched off her desk lamp, gripped her briefcase, and walked toward the security exit. Her phone buzzed exactly one more time just as she reached the heavy glass doors leading out to the parking lot.
Lucy: and Whistler? don't wear the grey blazer again. you have more than one jacket in that closet. i know for a fact.
Kate stopped in her tracks, looking down at her front. She was, in fact, wearing the exact grey blazer she had worn to three consecutive Friday dinners. A small, helpless laugh escaped her.
Kate: Too late.
Lucy: knew it. see you in twenty.
Kate smiled the entire walk across the dark asphalt to her car, the warm Hawaiian evening air hitting her face. She didn't examine why she was smiling, or why her heart was beating slightly faster than it had during the entire murder investigation. At work they argued, they maintained lines, they defended territories; outside of work, they didn't. She had long since stopped asking herself what the space between those two realities meant.
Up on the third floor, Jane Tennant happened to glance out her office window at exactly that moment. Her eyes tracked across the parking lot, catching the distinct silhouette of Kate Whistler walking toward her sedan. Even from this distance, Jane could see the relaxed drop of Kate's shoulders, the way she looked down at her phone, and the specific, completely helpless look of a woman failing entirely not to smile.
Jane took a slow, quiet sip of her now-cold coffee.
"Huh," she said to the empty room.
Then she smiled too, set her mug down, and went back to locking up her desk.