it that made sense to him and only him. In fact, if I came in and it was significantly neater or a surface had been conspicuously cleaned and tidied, I worried because that meant he was struggling hard to concentrate.
Today, he was apparently doing all right—he was focused intently on his screen, head bobbing slightly in time with the music, lips moving soundlessly along with the lyrics.
I came into the office, and as I put his coffee down beside him, he looked up and smiled. “Hey, baby.”
“Hey.” I leaned in for a quick kiss. “Am I interrupting?”
“Nah.” He paused the music and sat back lacing his hands behind his head as he stretched. Then he reached for his coffee. “You just get home?”
I nodded. “How much work do you have left?”
We both knew the answer was “enough to keep me busy until the sun burns out,” and that the question was really “what time should I have dinner ready?”
He sighed and glanced at his screen. “I just want to finish tweaking the shading on this one, and then I’ll call it a night.” Looking up at me again, he said, “Give me half an hour.”
“Okay.” I checked my phone. “Kelly’s supposed to be here at seven-thirty. Does that give us enough time?”
“Oh. Right. That’s tonight, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
Will rubbed his face. “I’ll go ahead and close this down, then. Let’s just do something quick for dinner.” He met my gaze. “Unless you already had something planned?”
“Nothing that can’t be modified.” I bent and kissed his forehead. “Let me grab a shower, and I’ll make some sandwiches or something.”
His smile made all the day’s fatigue flutter away. “Sounds great. I’ll be down in a sec. After I finish…” He motioned toward the screen.
Of course he would. Assuming he didn’t get sucked back into his project and lose track of time. That was okay—once I had our sandwiches ready, I’d gently pry him away from his work. It was just as well I wasn’t working late tonight, because when he was in the zone like this, he’d still have his nose to the screen by the time I came shuffling in at ten, eleven, midnight, or whenever.
And besides, we had company coming tonight.
We still had time before Kelly showed up, though. While Will drank the coffee I’d brought to him, I took his empty cup down to the kitchen and put it in the dishwasher. Then I went back upstairs for a shower to rinse away the day’s stress and fog.
Today had been all right. Nothing unusual, just tiring. Most of my clients were charged with offenses relating to narcotics and alcohol—possession, DUI, low-level trafficking. It was fairly straightforward and meant a lot more plea deals than trials, which I could live with.
Sometimes, the darker stuff came across my desk. Where there were people, there was violence, and there were times when I had to deal with clients who made me question humanity. There was a park in town I couldn’t go to because I knew too many details about (and still had nightmares about) a series of stabbings that had happened there. I avoided a particular street because I’d seen all the graphic images of that alcohol-fueled crash. Whenever I drove by a particular house on the south end of town, I caught myself wondering how the woman who’d lived there was doing after she’d killed her husband in self-defense. Things like that were vanishingly rare here, but they happened, and even if I did this job for a thousand years, I’d never understand why people did the things they did.
At least Laurelsburg is better than Chicago.
I turned my back to the shower spray and rolled my shoulders as the water beat on tired muscles. Today had just been a long day. Just a lot of dull, tedious things that were relatively easy but still managed to be fucking draining. Lots of paperwork. Lots of dense legal briefs. I’d gone to law school with a guy who’d been in the military, and he snarked that legal briefs were about as brief as military briefings: not even a little bit. Couldn’t really argue with him.
Rubbing my lower back, I reminded myself I needed to work on my posture instead of hunching over my desk. Will had been after me for a while to get a more ergonomic chair like the one he used. Maybe he was on to something. He usually was.
I smiled as the water beat some of the tension out