"That's for work."
"You don't use a second phone for work." She turned now, still crouched, the phone in her hand. "You give your clients your real number. You gave the fire captain your real number. He texts you pictures of his grandkids."
"Kris."
"Who is J?"
He came back toward her. Not fast. But he came with his jaw set and his shoulders up in a way she had seen him use on drunks in parking lots and on the one client who'd gotten handsy with a teenage girl at the front desk. It was a body that was used to ending things.
"Give it to me."
It wasn't a request. It was low and flat, and he held out his hand, palm up, and stood over her where she crouched by the bench, and for one cold second she understood, in a way she had never had to understand before, exactly how much bigger he was than she was.
She did not give it to him. She closed her fingers around it.
He didn't grab. She would remember that later, would turn it over and over and hold onto it, because it mattered and because it didn't make anything better. He did not grab. His hand stayed open in the air between them. But he didn't lower it either.
Then the phone buzzed in her palm.
An incoming call. The same photo, larger now, filling the top of the screen: the silver-blonde woman, the laugh lines, a cardigan the color of mustard. J.
And Kristen knew her. It took a moment to place her because the face was out of context, the way the dentist looks wrong at the grocery store. She had seen that woman on a porch two hours north of here, waving with a garden trowel, saying, You must be the big sister. I've heard all about you.
"That's my sister's neighbor," Kristen said.
Brock said nothing. He had gone very still behind her shoulder. She could feel him there, the heat of him, the tension coming off him like something electrical. He looked, she thought later, not like a man who'd been caught. He looked like a man who was afraid of what the phone was about to say.