3.
Kalinda hovers in the middle of the room and watches Sophia go, hips and ass shifting beneath her cream-colored skirt. Once Sophia is safely out of sight, once Kalinda's reassured herself that everyone else in the building is watching the auction, she allows herself to sink into a chair near the window that looks as if it's covered in tapestry. Edward VI or who the hell knows.
She's tired, the kind of tired that uses sharp teeth to gnaw out hollows behind her eyes. The last few nights she's watched the digital clock flip numbers for as long as she can handle, then slipped out of bed and through her front door, walked several miles down Roosevelt, and wandered the lakefront path alone in the dark until the hurt subsided to a dull, distant ache. She's returned home at four or five in the morning and just managed to close her eyes before she has to face another day of watching Alicia, feeling the pulse of Alicia's hatred, the radiations of Alicia's pain as well as her own.
Kalinda has never hurt like this. Leela did, of course, but there's a reason she stopped being Leela. She knew from the minute the elevator doors shut that she had to get out of Lockhart/Gardner before it killed her, and she spent most of that afternoon in a bar (the bar where she and Alicia always had drinks, which was probably a bad idea, but it was near the office and Kalinda was having a hard time thinking of another one), considering her scant prospects for self-preservation.
Her first thought was the many job offers that Lana Delaney's tossed her way, but she dismissed it quickly—if Blake found out about Leela just by looking, she certainly didn't want to give the FBI an opening for a background check. Also, despite a sexual bluntness that borders on crude, Lana has an emotional acuity that Kalinda knows could trap her. Lana has seen Kalinda with Alicia before; she would put the pieces together in a way that Kalinda is just too beaten down to deflect, and she can't be any more indebted to Lana. She can't be any more indebted to anyone.
A woman—skinny, white, wearing a gray suit with a white cotton blouse, her gray-and-brown hair pulled into a bun—enters the room, black pumps pounding lightly on the carpet. She takes in the contrast between Kalinda and the furniture. "Can I help you?"
"No," Kalinda says. True enough. The woman waits for a minute or two, pressing her lips into a line, and finally turns on her heel.
Her second thought was going into business for herself. Sharma, LLC. She'd laughed in the bar, sending a small spurt of bourbon through her nose, but either no one had noticed or they wouldn't have expected anything else from someone on her second glass of bourbon at eleven in the morning. Sole proprietorship. Please. Kalinda now had abundant evidence that she destroys everything valuable she touches. She cannot afford to be the only thing on which her survival depends.
Now, as she hears the wealthy bidders trickle out of the auction room down the hall, Kalinda feels something small release behind her ribs. Sophia Russo was the right answer.
In fact, seeing Sophia was downright pleasant. Sophia remembers, and treats her as, a different Kalinda, a Kalinda for whom Peter was the only Florrick. She shudders a little as she remembers that—she's disgusted by Peter Florrick, what he's cost her, what she's lost—but at the same time, she remembers what it was like to have a modicum of power, not to be stripped bare every time she turned her head. She remembers the calm that would come over her as she assessed her next step, the confidence, borne out a dozen times, that she was walking on solid ground. That's who she is to Sophia.
She takes a minute to remember Sophia, Sophia's nails tracing lazy patterns on her shoulder blades in a manner that somehow awakened every nerve in Kalinda's groin, Sophia's lips against her thighs, the flesh of her stomach.
Working for Sophia, Kalinda thinks, will have fringe benefits.
From the corner of her eye, she spots the woman in the gray suit coming towards her with a broad-shouldered, buzz-cut man walking in lockstep. Kalinda sighs, breathes deeply, and rises with deliberation from the paisley-upholstered chair. As she joins the stream of bidders, she feels something like relief. Two more weeks. That's all. Then a port in the storm.