James glanced over his shoulder at the lawyers ascending the courthouse steps, then back to Kelly. His expression was carefully composed, but she could read the conflict written in the set of his shoulders, the way his thumb pressed against his briefcase.
"My office," he said quietly. "Seven o'clock. After hours. No one will be around."
Kelly's breath caught. She knew what she was agreeing to—not just a professional conversation, but a private one. Alone. The kind of meeting that would raise questions if anyone discovered it. The kind of meeting that had already happened before, in different contexts, in places where neither of them could pretend to be purely professional.
"James—" she started, but he cut her off with a slight shake of his head.
"We need to discuss the case properly," he said, his voice dropping even lower. "Not here. Not like this." His eyes held hers for a beat longer than was necessary. "Seven o'clock."
Before Kelly could respond, he turned and descended the courthouse steps, his posture rigid, his briefcase held tight against his body. She watched him go, feeling the weight of what had just been negotiated settle over her like a familiar coat.
She told herself it was about Marcus. It was about the evidence, the safety reports, the machinery failure that had been covered up. It was about justice for three wrongfully convicted men.
But as she turned back toward the courthouse entrance, her hand trembling slightly as she pulled open the heavy wooden door, she knew that was only half the truth.
The courthouse hallway stretched before her, lined with the ghosts of cases past. Marble floors worn smooth by decades of footsteps. Portraits of judges long dead hanging on walls that needed fresh paint. Somewhere down one of these corridors, Marcus Webb was waiting for her. A man whose case had become her obsession, her mission, her reason for fighting against a system that seemed determined to crush people like him.
But now, walking toward that meeting, Kelly couldn't stop thinking about seven o'clock. About James's office. About the way he'd looked at her on those courthouse steps, like a man standing at the edge of something he knew he shouldn't jump into, but was considering the fall anyway.