Kelly's eyes lifted from her phone just as James ordered his coffee at the counter. She forced herself to look away, back down at the case files, maintaining the careful distance they'd perfected over months of secret meetings. Her heart hammered against her ribs as she watched him in her peripheral vision, the way he moved with that careful precision, the prosecutor's bearing that never quite left him even in civilian spaces.

He didn't sit immediately. Instead, James moved to the window, pretending to study Auburn's dying streetscape as if contemplating the city's economic collapse rather than waiting for the right moment. The choreography of their meetings had become almost ritualistic—separate arrivals, separate seating, calculated intervals before one would move closer to the other.

Kelly forced herself to take a sip of her coffee, now cooling on the table. The case files blurred in front of her eyes. She knew them by heart anyway. Thomas Reeves, Marcus Chen, David Kowalski. Three men whose lives had been dismantled by a system that valued speed over accuracy. The police had needed someone to blame for the warehouse robbery that occurred during the factory closures—a crime born from desperation in a city gasping for its last breath. These three had been convenient.

James finally moved. He pulled out a chair at a table three rows away, positioned so they could see each other without appearing to. He opened his messenger bag, withdrew papers of his own. To anyone watching, they were simply two legal professionals working independently in the same space.

But Kelly felt the weight of his presence like a physical thing. The air between them seemed charged, dangerous. She'd told herself this would be the last time. She'd promised herself that professional ethics would eventually override whatever this was between them. Yet here she sat, in a coffee shop in a dying city, risking everything for stolen moments with a man whose job was to keep her clients imprisoned.

Kelly's phone vibrated silently against the table. A text from an unknown number: *How long?*

She didn't respond. Not yet. First, they needed to talk about the evidence.