Kelly's fingers tightened around her coffee cup. She understood the calculus James was performing—the delicate balance between his conscience and his career, between loving her and serving the institution that had shaped him. It was a calculation she'd forced him to make, and the guilt of that sat heavy in her chest.

"Your career matters," she said quietly, the words feeling both true and inadequate. "What you've built, the respect you've earned—I don't want to be the reason you lose that."

James let out a bitter laugh, so quiet only she could hear it. "Do you think I became a prosecutor to protect guilty people, Kelly? Do you think that's what I signed up for?"

"No." She met his eyes. "But I also know what they'll do to you if you help me. I've seen it happen before. You go against the department, you become a liability. They'll bury you."

"Then we don't give them the chance to see it coming." James glanced around the coffee shop again—a habit born of necessity. "There are procedures. Ways to introduce evidence that don't trace back to me directly. A judicial discovery request from your end, handled properly. It looks routine. It looks like you found it yourself."

Kelly felt the seductive pull of his solution, the way it promised everything she wanted without the visible cost. But she'd spent her entire career fighting against exactly this kind of compromise—the quiet manipulation, the hidden hand, the system protecting itself through subterfuge.

"And if someone connects the dots?" she asked. "If someone realizes the timing is too convenient?"

"Then we deal with it." James's voice carried a finality that frightened her. "But Kelly, we don't have time for perfect solutions. Every day your clients stay inside is another day the system wins. Every day we wait, the evidence gets older, witnesses disappear, the case gets colder."

He was right, and that was the cruelest part. He was right about the urgency, right about the stakes. But he was also asking her to become complicit in the very corruption she was fighting against—just in service of a better outcome.

Kelly opened her mouth to respond, but movement outside the window caught her eye. A figure in a dark coat, walking slowly past the coffee shop. Her stomach dropped.