The November wind cut through Auburn's downtown like a blade, carrying with it the rust-colored dust of a city that had forgotten how to breathe. Kelly Peterson walked quickly past the boarded storefronts, her breath clouding in the cold air. The old Riverside Theater still advertised movies from 2008. Next to it, a defunct bank stood with its windows papered over, a monument to the financial collapse that had hollowed out this place like a rotted tooth.

She pulled her coat tighter and turned onto Maple Street, where the coffee shop waited—tucked between a shuttered insurance office and an empty lot where the Brennan textile mill had once employed three hundred people. The shop was called Grounds for Thought, a name that had always struck Kelly as either optimistic or delusional. Today it felt like both.

Kelly pushed through the door into warmth and the rich smell of coffee. Only three other patrons occupied the small space—an elderly man reading a newspaper, two college students hunched over laptops. The barista, Marcus, nodded at her without comment. He knew better than to acknowledge her presence when James was likely to arrive soon.

She ordered her usual—black coffee, nothing else—and sat at the corner table facing the window. From here she could see the street, could watch for his arrival, could monitor for anyone who might recognize them together. The precaution felt both necessary and humiliating.

Kelly pulled out her phone and scrolled through the case files again, the same documents she'd been reviewing for weeks. Three workers. Three convictions. All of them innocent. The evidence was circumstantial at best, the investigation compromised by a police department more interested in closing the case than finding the truth. It was a story that repeated itself in Auburn like a broken record—economic desperation, rushed justice, lives destroyed.

The bell above the door chimed. Kelly didn't look up immediately, maintaining the pretense that she was simply a lawyer reviewing case files in a coffee shop. But her pulse quickened. She knew his footsteps by now, the particular weight and rhythm of his walk.

James Wagner entered, his prosecutor's suit slightly too formal for the casual space, his dark eyes carrying that familiar conflict she'd come to recognize—the war between duty and desire that played out across his features every time they met.