He was thinking of the fact that he’d yet to buy Lisa a Christmas present, which allowed his mind to wander back to last night, to feelings he’d easily avoided by calling Randie Winston halfway around the world. What was that between Lisa and Greg? They were his oldest friends; they’d known one another since high school. There was no way he would have missed something going on between the two of them, would he? The evidence was light and circumstantial, but damn if it wasn’t compelling. The look on Greg’s face when he grabbed Lisa’s arm. The want there. Not for sex so much as for forgiveness. Of what, Darren didn’t know.

When she called back, he picked up on the first ring. He fought an urge to demand to know what she and Greg had been talking about when he’d walked out of the steak house last night. Instead, he listened to his wife whispering from where she sat in the Harris County Civil Courthouse, as if even mentioning another firm’s business was breaking some kind of attorney-client privilege. “Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene is, as you said, your standard civil law practice, nearly identical to my firm. Contract law, tort litigation, some IP lawsuits. But Brendan Chafee, before becoming a founding partner, was a DC lobbyist, so I can only imagine that some part of that business spilled over into the current firm’s work, even if it’s not being advertised.”

“Like what?”

“People who need shit from the government probably,” she said, breathing more heavily. He imagined her standing and gathering her things. “Look, Darren, I really, truly have to get into Caselli’s courtroom right now.”

“What about nonprofit work? Trying to get a historical landmark set up?”

“Shit like that usually happens at the state level. Chafee’s work was federal all the way, dealing with the Treasury, HUD, Department of the Interior.” She paused here, thinking, hmming under her breath. “That could be it, where you would go to protect a federal site. But I don’t know about a firm like Chafee, Humboldt working for a nonprofit. You’re talking about Texas?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know, Darren, but really, I have to go.”

“Thanks, Lisa,” he said.

She stayed on the phone long enough to say, with what he took for soft sincerity, “You’re welcome,” adding with a lilt of uncertainty, “We’ll talk later, right?”

“Lisa,” he started, wanting to reassure her or himself of something.

But by then she had already hung up.

Since he had nothing else to go on, he tried to find a phone number or an address for the Marion County Texas Historical Society, but nothing came up on either Google or Bing, which for a small-town nonprofit didn’t surprise him much. He slid his phone into the pocket of his slacks and walked back through the hospital’s sliding doors, feeling the rush of disinfectant-scented air-conditioning as he went hunting for a county phone book. He’d found them to be more accurate than anything online. For small-town business folks, it was still a point of pride to be listed in print; it made you legitimate in a way that a computer—which not everyone had access to—just couldn’t.