Damn, but I’d mishandled Julian, and misunderstood him, too, on several levels. I had to make a room for him, as well as Hana. Metaphorically, at least. But not right this second. I took a long, slow exhale and thanked the gods that I knew how to compartmentalize.
I called the offices of Clark’s lawyer, Dean Macon, from my cell. I left a voicemail notifying him that I now represented Oakleigh. She came down when the cops rang the doorbell a few minutes later. The rest of the afternoon was simple, professionally speaking. Police interest in The Kittening was cursory, and we got our countercomplaints on the record. Afterward, Oakleigh swanned upstairs to take a bath, leaving me to call Nick’s PI firm. I asked them to send a fellow over ASAP to bug sweep and find Clark’s way in.
While I waited for the PI, I went out to the car. Julian was in the passenger seat, reading something on his phone. He peeped at me as I got in, embarrassed, though by now the tearstains had faded and his eyes were only a little swollen.
“I’m sorry I lost it,” he said. “It’s been a really stressful day.”
I waved the apology away and said, with no preamble, “What if I hired you for the rest of the summer?”
He let out a startled bark of laughter. “Yeah, because today has gone so well.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “You could come in on your off days from the pizza place, once or twice a week. We could get to know each other a little more naturally, over time.”
He looked uncertain. “I’m not sure I’d be good in a, you know, cutthroat kind of environment.”
I realized I didn’t even know what he’d been studying at Berry, and felt ashamed of how little I’d asked Julian about himself. Not at this morning’s meeting, or even earlier, on Facebook. So I said, “What’s your major?”
“Psychology. I want to be a therapist, eventually. I’m sure not cut out to be a lawyer.”
“It’s not always this high stress,” I told him. “Take the internship. It’s only until the end of summer. I can promise you some delightfully bland phone answering when Verona goes to lunch. There’ll be quite a lot of very dull filing.”
“Okay, now I’m sold,” he said, but I had gotten a smile out of him.
“Did I mention it pays twenty bucks an hour?”
“Holy crap, I suddenly love filing!” He cut his eyes at the ugly colonial house. “For twenty an hour, I might even love Ms. Winkley.”
Money was so relative. It was a fortune to him, but I could pay him out of my pocket, like Catherine did when she hired her oldest son for the summer, and never feel it. The job would let me funnel cash to him. If the water got too cold, too deep, too full of sharks—hell, just too wet—he’d have the means to flee back to the sheltered world of Berry College.
I didn’t think he would, though. The kid had metal in him, and he shared my driving urgency to find Hana. I had to respect that and find a way to merge our visions of the future.
“Deal?” I asked.
He nodded, and as we shook hands on it the guy from Nick’s PI firm pulled into the drive behind us.
Turned out, Clark had removed an alarm contact from an upstairs bathroom window and reprogrammed the system not to register it. To reach the window, he had to sneak through a neighbor’s backyard, climb a tree, and slither and roll across the back of the perilous, steep roof. The PI tested the route and found it possible, but dangerous as hell. Clark had to be both in good shape, physically, and in bad shape, mentally, to take it. He’d literally risked his life, more than once, to pee in Oakleigh’s makeup case and spoil her shoes.
I had them plug the hole. As much as I’d love to install nanny cams, I didn’t trust him not to creep in one night and strangle her. And that was assuming that she wouldn’t get another gun and shoot him right on camera first.
The next morning, I took Oakleigh’s check and contract to the office. I tossed them on Nick’s desk, casual, as if I were the Paula of yore, who delivered BANK clients and retainers on the regular, and I was rewarded with his familiar grin. In this brave new world where finding Hana might have an after, I needed to mend fences with my partners, stat. I’d need time off when I had a sudden sister to resettle. I spent the next ten days getting current on our every open file, reconnecting with our client list, and billing monstrous strings of hours. As I got my files in order, I had a disturbing thought: perhaps this was what nesting looked like, when I did it.
I felt eyes on me all the time, though, that faint electric skin-crawl that haunted the watched, as Nick kept popping by to check things that did not need checking. As the days rolled past with zero panic attacks, and I took on exactly zero pro bonos, both my partners relaxed. The chilled air of our offices rewarmed.
When I felt anxious, when my heartbeat sped up, beating out the call to find her, find her, find her, I reminded myself that I was not alone in feeling it. Julian was waiting, too, and Birdwine was on the job.