The penthouse

(Naomi POV)

“You came.”

Julian said it the second he opened the door, like he’d been standing on the other side of it long enough to hear the elevator arrive.

“You invited me,” Naomi said.

“I wasn’t sure you would.”

“Neither was I,” she admitted, and something in his face eased slightly at that, like honesty from her was a language he hadn’t heard in a while and had missed more than he expected to.

She’d stood outside the building longer than she meant to before she made herself walk in. The doorman recognized her. He didn’t say anything about it, just nodded the way he always had, like six years hadn’t ended and two more hadn’t passed since.

The elevator still smelled the same. Brass and something faintly citrus, the scent she used to associate with coming home from depositions too tired to talk.

The hallway hadn’t changed either. Same runner on the floor, same painting she’d chosen in their second year, the one with the water that neither of them could ever agree was a lake or an ocean. She’d expected it to feel like walking into a stranger’s life. Instead it felt like walking into her own, except she was the one who’d become the stranger in it.

Julian had changed out of whatever he wore to the office, just a plain shirt, sleeves pushed up, the kind of undone she used to only see late at night, after the version of him the world got had already gone to bed. Seeing it now, in the middle of the afternoon, on the other side of everything, did something to her chest she wasn’t ready to examine.

He stepped back to let her in. She hesitated on the threshold a half second longer than necessary, the way you hesitate before stepping into cold water, and then she went in anyway.

The apartment was too quiet. No sound of anyone else there, no sign of Selene, nothing to explain why he’d chosen this particular version of the space to show her, empty and unarmed.

“Where is she?” Naomi asked, before she could stop herself.

“Not here,” Julian said. “I didn’t want an audience for this. Neither, I imagine, do you.”

She followed him down the hallway toward the study, past the kitchen where two coffee cups used to sit out most mornings before she remembered there was no reason to set out two anymore. He didn’t look at the kitchen as they passed it. She noticed him not looking, the same way she’d noticed his eyes avoiding her mouth in his office weeks ago, and understood, with a small, unwelcome ache, that he was navigating this apartment as carefully as she was.

“You kept everything the same,” she said. It wasn’t really a question.

“I didn’t have the energy to change it,” Julian said. “Or the reason to.”

“You could have sold it. Started somewhere that wasn’t full of me.”

He stopped walking, just for a second, in the narrow hallway that put them closer together than either of them had planned for. “I thought about it,” he said. “I got as far as calling an agent once.”

“What stopped you?”

He was quiet long enough that she thought he wouldn’t answer. When he did, his voice had dropped into the register she used to hear only when it was just the two of them, unguarded in a way his public voice never allowed itself to be.

“I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else living in the rooms where you used to be,” he said. “I told myself it was about the study. That I needed to keep this floor because of what’s in that room. It wasn’t, entirely.”

Naomi didn’t trust herself to answer that. The hallway felt smaller than it had a minute ago, his shoulder close enough to hers that she could feel the warmth off him, could smell the cedar she’d catch herself missing at odd hours for months after she left and never let herself admit to anyone, not even Priya.

Neither of them moved for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.

“The study’s this way,” Julian said finally, and stepped back, and the moment folded itself closed the way it always did between them now, arriving and then refusing to become anything more.

She followed him the rest of the way in silence, her pulse still not entirely back to where it should have been.

The study door was already unlocked. Julian’s hand rested on the handle a moment before he turned it, the same hesitation she’d seen in him in his office weeks ago, a man about to do something he couldn’t take back.

“Whatever’s in here,” he said, not quite looking at her, “I need you to know I’m finding out at the same time you are. I haven’t looked. Not really. Not in eleven years.”

He pushed the door open.

The room was exactly as she’d imagined it from the outside, file boxes, a single reading chair, walls lined with case documents his father’s name typed across every tab. But it was the desk that stopped them both, a single folder sitting in the center of it, newer than everything else in the room, unlabeled, placed there by someone who clearly wasn’t Julian.

He hadn’t left it there.

“That’s not mine,” Julian said slowly. “I’ve never seen that folder before in my life.”

Naomi looked at it, and then at him, and understood, in the same instant he clearly did, that someone else had access to this room. Someone who’d been inside it recently enough to leave something behind.

Someone who wanted them to find it together.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​