"Hi."
Kalinda looks up. She's silhouetted in profile, sitting in the dark office and lit only slightly by the glow pulsing up from the city streets behind her. Weirdly, though, Alicia thinks she can see the shape of her eyelashes.
She feels Kalinda's surprise, and Alicia's a little surprised herself. There's no reason she should be speaking to Kalinda, no reason to square off against another round of pain. But even in shadow it's clear Kalinda is tense, as hunched over as she ever gets, and Alicia feels a strange need to respond.
For a couple of days it seemed likely that the story would die down; certainly the rest of the Lockhart/Gardner staff had stopped talking about it, and Alicia thought Kalinda might be lucky enough to have had only fifteen minutes of fame, rather than the hours Alicia herself had to endure. But yesterday some enterprising member of the Associated Press—prompted, perhaps, by Agent Delaney—had gotten hold of Leela Tahiri's arrest record and even a scan of a mug shot, old enough that its edges were ragged, might have been chewed by some small rodent. Alicia hadn't read the article, found she didn't want to know.
"Hey," Kalinda says, regrouping enough to speak, though quietly. "Late night?"
"Rystock," says Alicia by way of explanation. "The last brief."
"You should go home," says Kalinda tersely, turning back towards the window. "Your kids are waiting."
"They're at Peter's."
Even in the dark Alicia can see Kalinda flinch. "Right," she says, almost too quietly for Alicia to hear.
When will a subject ever be safe?
Alicia has the strange urge to fill the space around them with talk. "I hate to say it," she says, "but I like having a few nights without them. Where I get to … learn how to be by myself. I learned how to be self-sufficient, but … I've never lived alone. I've never been alone."
Kalinda nods.
"When we got the apartment, I did feel better," Alicia says. "Safer. But it was still … I was rushing from place to place, and my mother-in-law … was my mother-in-law.
"I like the quiet," Alicia adds.
They sit in that quiet for a while. The last time Alicia left Kalinda's company she was raw and wounded, and she's been waiting for the name "Florrick" to grace Gawker once again. She hasn't mentioned the situation to Peter, figures he's following Kalinda's scandal as much as she is, if not more closely, and that even if he doesn't tell her about his connection to it, at least she was warned.
And she feels an odd appreciation for Kalinda's warning. It makes her remember what it was like to be friends with her before, how attuned Kalinda was to Alicia's needs and her vulnerabilities, how hard Alicia herself had to work to detect the same things in Kalinda.
Standing in this room now, Alicia also remembers how good she once was at listening to Kalinda, understanding her. The force of Kalinda's anger and frustration and fear vibrates through Alicia, touches off something surprisingly protective, makes her want to help Kalinda, the way she never really could, so determined has Kalinda always been to help herself.
There's an echo of Kalinda's voice in her head from what feels like a thousand years ago. "I do trust you." But even then Alicia had understood that it wasn't really true.
"I know who her source is." Kalinda's voice is closer to silence than sound.
"Yes?"
"My husband."
Kalinda's not looking at her, which is a relief, means Alicia doesn't have to react. She takes a few seconds before she decides to speak.
"Leela was married?"
"Yeah."
"Did you …" Alicia's not sure what question she wants to ask. She stops.
Kalinda just says, her voice full of fissures and hairline cracks, "He knows where I am. And—and he's known a while. I thought I had … I just …"
Alicia is not sure she's ever heard Kalinda like this, her sentences breaking into pieces. Without hesitation, she takes a few steps forward and puts a hand on Kalinda's shoulder, knowing the move is inadequate but wanting to offer the other woman an anchor. In an automatic, unpracticed gesture Kalinda reaches her own hand up and rests it on Alicia's. Alicia glances sideways at Kalinda: her face is a collage of shadows and the liquid threatening to overflow from her eyes catches glints of the light from the street.