The door creaks shut. His silhouette crosses toward the trailer and disappears inside.
Just like that, it's over.
I'm in bed twenty minutes later, staring at the ceiling, and the guilt arrives the way it always does. Not during. Never during. Only after, when everything goes quiet and there's nothing left to focus on.
He never saw me.
The living room was dim, music too loud, the place smelling like liquor and smoke. He was already deep into the bottle when I came through, a line of coke on the coffee table, vodka beside it, the particular chaos of a man alone with his habits on a Saturday night. He went to the kitchen for a chaser and I had maybe fifteen seconds.
Bottle. Cap. Powder. Back in place exactly where it was.
By the time anyone finds him it'll read exactly the way it should. Another wealthy attorney, another late night, another accidental overdose. Miami PD won't look twice. There's nothing to look twice at.
Still. The house felt empty in a way that sat with me. Too many expensive things and no one to share them with, which is a specific kind of loneliness I recognized without wanting to.
I almost felt something like pity. Almost.
But his pain had a ceiling. The people who hired me have been living under something that doesn't.
Ma goes to church in a few hours. I'll sit beside her. Light a candle. Let the quiet of the place do whatever it does.
I close my eyes and try to find sleep.
She's the last thing I land on before I do. Blonde hair. Sage green eyes. The sound of my own name in a voice I've never heard say it.
Harvee.
I make a mental note to swing past the firm Monday morning. Just to confirm she made it back okay.
Just that. Nothing more.
I almost believe it.
CHAPTER 16
HARVEE
The weekend dissolves into bedsheets and DoorDash bags left by the door. I surface long enough to eat, to use the bathroom, to stare at the ceiling until sleep pulled me back under. Every time I closed my eyes the night came back in pieces. Music. Hands. The cold air of the alley. A police car door clicking shut.
Monday morning arrives whether I'm ready for it or not.
I pull into the parking lot five minutes before I'm supposed to clock in, hands still wrapped tight around the steering wheel, and I see the lights before I've fully processed what I'm looking at. Three patrol cars lined up outside the firm, red and blue washing the glass lobby in slow pulses. Officers moving in and out. Staff clustered in small groups with their hands over their mouths.
"What the fuck," I whisper.
Donna is visible through the glass doors, face drained of color, eyes too wide. She spots me and jerks her head toward the entrance. My legs feel like wet paper but I make them move.
"Donna." I grab her arm the second I'm through the door. "What is happening?"
"He's dead," she says. Like she still can't make the words fit together correctly.
"Who is dead?"
"Clark." She blinks. "They found him at home this morning. That's all they'll say."
The lobby sounds go muffled. Like something has been placed between me and the room. Clark Turner. Dead. The man who made my skin crawl for two years, the man who won that case on Thursday, the man who sent me a winky face while a family fell apart in a courthouse. Dead.
The room snaps back.