Who It Is

She decides that moving would put her at a disadvantage. She doesn't answer, doesn't get up, lets him pick the lock.

When he opens the door, he's backlit, and it takes her a minute to make out his face. He smiles when he sees where she's sitting.

"Oh, Leela," he says, voice as low in his throat as she remembers. And he chuckles.

What can she say to that?

He's armed, of course—as her eyes adjust, she can pick out the shape of the holster beneath his bicep and there's something about the way he's holding his right ankle. Armed well enough that the gun on her lap (he'll recognize it, even with the serial number filed off; it's the one they used when he taught her to shoot) is meaningless to him, even though they both know she's a quicker and better shot than he is. He slides all the way into the apartment, closes the door, and now her eyes will have to adjust once again.

"Kalinda Sharma," he says, rolling the words over in his mouth. He leans against the wall, doesn't come any closer. "I like it."

"Yeah," she says, before she realizes it's the first word she's spoken in his presence and she would have liked to make a stronger choice.

"You look good too."

This time she doesn't answer.

He smiles at her silence and takes inventory of the room. She doesn't want to turn when he walks out of her field of vision—she's afraid she'll break if she moves—but she hears him notice all the things she would notice herself, the sparseness of the space, the weakness clear in the way she's positioned the armchair. She remembered, at least, to close the bedroom door, and she's grateful that on this go-round he doesn't touch it.

He strolls back into her sightline, leans on the wall of the vestibule. He's wearing a pair of jeans distressed by work rather than fashion, a black button-down shirt that seems suspiciously clean and pressed.

"So the Florrick wife is representing you?"

Her breath catches. "Yeah." So he doesn't understand about Alicia yet. Alicia's a cagey attorney in his mind, nothing more. She has to keep it that way.

"Nice." His smile leaks into his voice. "Very nice. I've been reading about them. He's made quite a comeback."

"He has."

"He's an interesting man."

"He is."

"You know him?"

There's an edge there. "In passing," Kalinda says, trying not to let the skipping of her heart rise up through her throat.

"Kalinda Sharma plays in the big leagues."

"Kalinda Sharma doesn't play."

He laughs at that. This time she meant him to, although she doesn't smile.

"So his wife is your supervisor? At Lockhart, Lyman, and Associates?"

"No."

"Diane Lockhart?"

Now he's just showing off. There's something he needs to know, something he's hoping she'll let it slip. "I get the job done."

"I don't doubt it."

He smiles fully now, knowing they've established the terms, and she almost smiles back.

"The only thing I don't understand is the check," he says.

She doesn't say anything. She realizes that he taught her to listen like this. Late nights and early mornings, oddly comfortable hours on Saturday afternoons, he would talk to people, mostly men, who Leela didn't even want to be in the same room with. Just when it seemed like he was cornered he would talk his way out of it, making use of an observation so sharp and so obscure it had been unimaginable to his interlocutors that he even noticed. She listened to him, then, and she got better at it. Better than he was, as was the case with almost everything he taught her—that was how she knew what was coming.

"I thought it was a coincidence, at first, when I did the books. But I couldn't get it out of my mind."

Panic and anger flash through Kalinda when she pictures the check, pictures taking it from Alicia's hand. She has to remind herself that it was all a series of mistakes, that Alicia had no idea what she was getting them into, that there was no way she could have known.

"And I was right," he says.

For weeks, for months after she arrived in Chicago she scoured every online news source she could think of, every community she could hack. There was never a word. After three weeks she had to find legitimate work anyway, and by the time Kalinda Sharma had references and a birth certificate and a work history she couldn't have cashed the check anyway, even if everything had worked out the way she planned. She had done her best to forget. She should have shredded it. At the very least she should have sealed it in the fucking wall.

"You didn't think I was in your fire."

No, she didn't. She runs her finger over the ridges of the gun barrel in her lap. Somehow it's reassuring. She doesn't breathe.

"But you wouldn't have …"

Kalinda's trying not to remember the fire, trying to forget every second of Leela's last few weeks. She doesn't need them here.

His eyebrows shoot up. "So you thought they were going to kill me?"

She wants him gone.

He smiles again, knows he's got it. "Sorry about that," he says.

She stands up.

"Have you been up all night?" he says. "You must be exhausted."

"And you," she says. "All that traveling."

In response, he wanders over to the couch against the window, sits down. Kalinda turns on her heel, stiff now from the hours of sitting still. Her breaths are coming shallow, fast. She tries to keep them silent anyway.

"Nice place," he says.

She doesn't say anything.

"The view," he says. "Right to the lake. It's impressive."

He turns away from the window, studies her. She swallows the impulse to turn away.

"You're doing well for yourself," he says slowly. "Very well."

"Can I get you something?" she says, biting off the words.

"Oh, don't worry about it, Leela. You should go to bed." He slips off his shoes, revealing gray socks and the edge of his ankle holster, and puts his feet up on the sofa. "I like Chicago. I think I'm gonna stay a while."