Page 16 of His Wall

I set my pen down. "Who are you today?"

"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Cross."

"You called me Julian an hour ago."

"Did I?"

"You did."

She turned the page. "Page seven. The noncompete language. They've come back at fifty miles. We can hold, or we can move."

We worked through it. I got a grip on myself somewhere around page eight and started reading the words on the page instead of the curve of her ear. We made it to noon. She was good. She was very good. She caught a clause on page eleven that would have cost the client $300,000 on a triggering event we were going to push through next quarter, and she flagged it without inflection and made a note in her book.

When we finished, she closed the folder and set it on her lap.

She didn't get up.

She sat there with her hand flat on the cover of the folder and her chin a little lower than she usually held it. The sun had come around the building and was hitting the corner of my desk.

She was quiet for long enough that I looked over.

"Claire."

"Sorry."

"You okay?"

She didn't answer right away.

"I grew up in a town in eastern North Carolina. About four hundred people. We left when I was eight." She said it to the folder. "My father was a career Army. He moved us every two or three years after that. Fort Bragg. Fort Hood. Hawaii for one year. Germany for eighteen months. By the time I was sixteen, I had been to nine schools."

She turned the watch on her wrist a quarter-turn with her thumb. "You learn how to leave. You don't learn how to stay."

I had put my pen down.

She lifted her eyes to mine.

They were wet. The shine before the crying. The gray going glassy around the edges, the lashes a little dark, the upper lid pink.

"I took this job because I needed something steady. And sometimes…" She let out a small breath. "Sometimes the same building every day, the same people. I don't always know what to do with that."

Her voice broke.

I don't think I have ever, in four months, heard her voice break on anything.

"Hey." I lowered my voice. I leaned my elbow on the arm of my chair, so my shoulder was an inch from hers. The grin was off my face. "Claire. That sounds like a rough way to grow up. Moving around like that, never getting to settle. I'm sorry. Are you okay?"

She looked at me. And for half a second, something behind her eyes moved.

The tears were what she wanted me to see. Beneath them, something else flickered — quick, real, gone before I could name it.

She straightened in the chair.

She lifted the folder off her lap, picked up the notebook, and tucked the pen into the spiral. She composed her face one feature at a time — mouth, jaw, and eyes. When she looked back up at me, she was Claire Kent again.

"Sorry. I don't know where that came from. I'm fine."

"Claire — "