The beach house on a stormy evening was a different place entirely.
I'd come out after the hearing, not the weekend, not scheduled, just me needing somewhere that wasn't my apartment or the office or any room that had a phone in it. The Webb situation was sitting on my chest and I needed to think without the city thinking around me.
I hadn't told Lucas I was coming.
His Bentley was in the road when the cab pulled up.
I sat in the back seat for a moment looking at it. Then I paid the driver and got out because the alternative was going home and I was done with my apartment for the evening.
The lights were on inside. The front door unlocked. I let myself in with my key and stood in the entrance hall and listened.
Rain starting on the roof. The clock somewhere in the house. The sound of something in the kitchen.
I put my bag down and went to find it.
Lucas was at the stove.
Not something simple that would have been explainable. He was making something that involved three separate pots and a cutting board covered in things he'd apparently found in a kitchen neither of us had fully stocked yet and a level of focused concentration that suggested this was not casual.
He looked up when I came in.
Neither of us said anything for a second.
"I didn't know you were coming," he said.
"I didn't know you were coming either."
He looked at the three pots. Back at me. "I stress cook."
I looked at the three pots. "How stressed are you?"
"Moderately." A pause. "Sit down. This needs another twenty minutes."
I almost said I wasn't staying for dinner. I almost said I'd just come to think and would be out of his way. I almost said a lot of things.
I sat down at the kitchen table.
The storm came in properly around an hour later.
The power went first, a flicker, then nothing, the whole house going dark and quiet except for the rain and the wind doing something significant to the trees outside. Lucas found candles in the third drawer he tried, which told me he'd been learning the house faster than I had. He set them on the table without comment and went back to checking that the food hadn't been ruined by the timing.
It hadn't. Whatever he'd made, something with pasta and something that smelled like it had been thought about, was better than anything that had come out of that kitchen since we'd started using it. I didn't tell him this. He probably knew.
We ate by candlelight because there was no other option, and it was either that or sit in the dark and the dark felt like too much of a statement.
We didn't talk about the case. We didn't talk about the house or the sixty days or the envelope still in the drawer. The rules held, technically, because neither of us brought up anything that was on the list of things we weren't supposed to bring up.
We talked about other things instead.
It started small. I asked about the cooking, not as a compliment, just a genuine question, because three pots on a stormy evening in a house you've been in twice was a specific choice and I wanted to understand it.
He told me about his brother.
Not everything. Not the heavy parts, just Jamie, just who he was. The way Jamie shook hands like he meant it. The way he'd declared every place he'd ever visited either the best place or the worst place on earth with zero middle ground. The way he laughed loud, no filter, the kind of laugh that made other people laugh just from hearing it.
Lucas talked about his brother the way people talk about the thing they love most when they think nobody's grading them for it. Easy. Unhurried. The composed exterior still there but something underneath it quieter and less managed.
I listened without interrupting.
When he finished I didn't say anything immediately and he didn't fill the silence and the candle between us burned down another inch.
Then he looked at me. "Your turn."
"That wasn't a rule we established."
"It's an implied rule. I told you something. Reciprocal disclosure."
"That's not how rules work."
"It's how conversations work."
I looked at the candle. At the rain doing what it wanted against the kitchen window. At the water I could hear but not see beyond the glass.
I told him about my mother.
Not the medical debt I wasn't ready for that. Not the 2019 case I didn't know yet what that meant between us. Just Eleanor. Who she was. The way she made people feel at home within twenty minutes of meeting them, a skill I had watched and studied my entire life and never successfully replicated. The way she had raised me alone and never once framed it as hardship. The way she made the same soup every time I came home sick, not because it was medicinal, she admitted once, but because it was the only thing she knew I'd eat without arguing.
Lucas listened the way he listened to everything with his full attention, nothing divided, like what I was saying was the only thing happening in the room.
When I finished he said: "She sounds like someone worth fighting for."
Not a performance. Not a line. Just a statement, simply made.
I looked at the table for a moment.
"She is," I said.
The candle burned lower.
At some point I stopped noticing the rain. At some point the conversation stopped being careful, stopped having the slight formal edge that conversations between us always had, the awareness that we were opposing counsel sharing a house under a dead man's instructions.
He told me he'd almost quit law after his second year. Not because he was bad at it he'd been good at it from the start, which had been its own kind of problem. Because being good at something and wanting to be doing it are different things, and it had taken him longer than he wanted to admit to understand that distinction.
I told him I'd never almost quit. That the work was the thing I'd been sure of since I was nineteen years old watching a public defender stand up in a courtroom for someone who had nobody else. That I'd gone into law with exactly that image in mind and had spent six years making sure I stayed close enough to it to remember why.
He was quiet for a moment after that.
"You stayed close to it," he said.
"I tried."
"You did." Not a compliment exactly. More like a verdict. Stated as fact. "You are the closest to it of anyone I've watched in a courtroom."
I looked at him across the table in the candlelight and the rain and thought about the cufflink and the paper bag in his jacket pocket and the fact that he'd cooked enough for two in a house he hadn't known I was coming to.
"That's a very specific observation for opposing counsel," I said.
"I'm observant," he said. "You know that already."
The candle between us was down to almost nothing.
I should have gone to bed. It was late and the storm wasn't letting up and I had an early morning and approximately four hundred reasons to say goodnight and close the door between us.
I didn't move.
Lucas didn't move either.
"Can I ask you something," he said.
"Depends on what it is."
"The no personal questions rule."
"Yes."
"Does it apply retroactively?"
I looked at him. "What does that mean?"
"Does it apply to things that happened before we wrote it on a paper bag? Or only going forward."
"That's a lawyer's question."
"I'm a lawyer."
I almost smiled. Almost. "What's the question?"
He looked at me, not the almost-smile, not the unreadable composure. Something more direct than either.
"Why did you become a public defender specifically?" A pause. "Not just why law. Why that."
I could have deflected. Could have given the version I gave at professional events the clean narrative, the nineteen-year-old in the courtroom, the image I'd held onto.
The candle went out.
The room went dark except for the thin light coming through the rain-streaked window.
Neither of us moved to find another candle.
"Because someone should have fought harder for my mother once," I said. "And didn't."
Silence.
The rain.
The clock somewhere in the house.
"I'm sorry," Lucas said. Quietly, simply, without asking for more.
"Don't be." I pushed back from the table. "It's why I'm good at it."
I stood up. Took my plate to the sink. Stood there for a moment with my back to him and the rain against the window and the dark kitchen and the thing I'd just said sitting in the air between us.
"Goodnight, Lucas," I said.
The first time I'd used his name.
I didn't look back to see what it did.
I went to my room and closed the door and lay in the dark listening to the storm and thought about what I'd just said and who I'd said it to and the specific way he'd said I'm sorry like he meant it and wasn't going to make anything more of it than what it was.
I fell asleep thinking about it.
I woke up to his voice on the phone through the wall low, the words indistinct, but three came through clearly before the storm swallowed the rest.
I'll handle Aria.
I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
There it was.