CHAPTER 1

After a long and tiring day, spent completely on her feet in the courtroom and out, Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper was ready to call it a day by the time the clock in her office struck 6. She leaned back in her chair trying to get the knots of tension out of her neck that were the results of the continuous stress which woke her up every morning and slept with her every night as part of her job.

She had just wrapped her direct for her third witness in a domestic abuse case and knew that she was still some way away from getting the jury on her side. The state was representing Kara Wheeler, a college dropout 26 year old who had been married for 6 years to Dr. Logan Wheeler, a practicing psychiatrist in the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan. For 5 of those years, she had been a prisoner in a sound-proofed room in the basement of their town house – where her husband – the shrink was playing his very own mind games with her. During one of his trips outside the house, Kara found to her surprise that the door was not locked properly. She was thanking fate on a lot of counts. That she was a prisoner for 5 years without trying to escape before today had lulled her husband into a sense of security. And the fact that she had tried today of all days to give the heavy door a push.

She practically ran out of the town house with nothing but the clothes on her back to the nearest precinct. The detective in charge setup a series of events to catch the husband the following week. This was 2 months back. Mercer Wallace, Alex's close friend and a first grade detective who caught the case setup a meeting for Kara with Alex – who headed the District Attorney's Special Victims Unit.

The case had come to trial in the last week and Alex had to butt heads with her mentor – Lem Howell the Third, who had been hired by the wealthy, upstanding psychiatrist in an attempt to discredit the charges and his wife completely. The trial would not be a long one, but it would definitely be difficult – given how jurors were willing to side with the handsome medical professional husband, who must have had a solid reason to hold his uneducated young wife so that she would not meander through the city and get lost in her ways.

Alex rubbed her forehead, knowing the early signs of a headache. She thought about her plans for the evening. She could go out and have dinner with her friends or she could go home, steep in a bath and hit the sack early.

The former involved sitting through dinner with Detective Mike Chapman, who although was Alex's best friend and partner was someone she was trying to avoid spending time outside of work with. Their friendship had been complicated to begin with, but Alex had been feeling the strains of their relationship over the past year or so. The constant biting and sniping that Mike kept up in front of others or alone, the stream of random hook-ups since his fiancé Val's death. Alex thought that somewhere he felt the same attraction, same tension that she did. It was there in the way he turned up to babysit Logan with her last year, in the way he worried about her and how her job affected her, and in the way that he kissed her that one night on the arsenal rooftop in Central Park. That last bit of action had Alex confused more than ever. Even though Mike had kissed her and asked her to spend the night with him watching the stars, he had not really followed up on it. He had got embroiled in the Judge Pell matter and even when that had cleared up; he seemed to go out of his way to act as if nothing significant had happened between the two of them. So much so that Alex started having second thoughts on whether the night at Central Park really happened or was just a part of her imagination. Somewhere along the line, she decided that she could not add a permanent question mark regarding this relationship to the thousands of questions that plagued her at work anyway.

So, a couple of months back, she decided to take the problem by the horns and made her way to Mike's apartment one Saturday evening to get it all out in the open. When a surprised Mike let her in and asked her the reason for her out-of-the-blue visit, she decided to be as truthful to him as she needed to be to herself.

"What are we doing, Mike?"

"You are in my apartment Coop, and asking the obvious. Why don't you tell me what you are doing here?"

"It's a Saturday night, Mike. Why aren't you and I having a dinner date somewhere nice?" Alex had asked the question. She wasn't very worried about any self-embarrassment at this point. She just wanted to get rid of the angst.

"Are we supposed to be somewhere that I forgot? I don't recall having asked you out on a date, Coop". Mike had offered her a glass of wine, which she had declined. Alex really did not see this as a romantic or even social call.

"That's exactly what I am asking Mike. Why not? Why have you not asked me out on a date? It's been two months since that night at Central Park. Why have you not kissed me again? Why are we not practically living at each other's apartments yet?" Alex could sense the desperation in her voice, but couldn't help keeping it out.

"Coop, you know that wouldn't be very appropriate for us. I don't think Mr. B would appreciate us crashing at each other's place more often than is needed on work" Mike was starting to give vague answers, and Alex knew he was the last person who cared about what everyone else thought of anything. She put her hands up in frustration at getting nowhere in the conversation and had turned around to leave. That's when her eye caught up with the rest of his apartment.

After Val's death, Mike had made a shrine to her in his apartment. It was almost as if she lived there with him – her books, her shoes, her clothes – everything used to be spread out across the apartment. It didn't look like a serial killer's shrine that day – but Alex made out the 3 photographs of him and Val by his bedside as well as the photographs taped on his refrigerator. She couldn't see if the shoes and clothes were still occupying his cupboard, but had felt that what she saw was enough.

Clearly, Mike hadn't moved on. And Alex had been a friend of Val's. That day she felt like she had betrayed the memory of a sweet friend who had such tough luck in life. She had turned around and caught his eye – where she saw a mixture of emotions – of doubt, of longing. Whether the longing was for Val or for her, Alex couldn't tell. But she could clearly see that the doubt was reserved for her exclusively. She had turned away before he could see the intense hurt that came into her eyes and had left the vicinity of his apartment as quickly as she could.

Since that Saturday evening, Alex had tried to put up her game face on and kept her interactions with Mike completely platonic. She still had to have dinner with him, have him sleep at her place; go on long rides with him – that was all a part of their job. But she kept herself from thinking about him in any other sense. Her reminiscing was interrupted by the buzzing of her cell phone. She saw that it was the object of her thoughts calling her. Alex had decided to not behave in any way that could be construed as whiny, self-pitying or plain bitchy. She had decided to be as normal as possible. With that in mind, she switched the phone on.

"Hello?"

"Your day still not over, Coop? We're waiting for you at your favourite Primola, and won't start ordering before you come in."

"Just order the soup for me, Mike. I'm on my way."

With a click of her cell phone, Alex got up from her desk – switched off the lights and went out to dinner with her two best friends.