“Are you saying you don’t care for Jeffrey’s interior decorating?”

Jeffrey is my ex-boyfriend. When we broke up, he left me his furniture as a parting gift. I’ve kept all his stuff to this day. Well, except for the box spring and mattress; they were soaked in blood.

“Did I tell you that he got passed over again?” I ask before Gabriel can respond to my question about Jeffrey’s taste in furniture.

Jeffrey dumped me to fully dedicate himself to the effort of becoming a partner at one of those assembly-line law firms. The kind with thousands of lawyers working eighty-hour weeks, fifty-two weeks a year. Even though our breakup was one of the best things to have ever happened to me, I can’t deny enjoying a little schadenfreude over his failure to make partner.

“No. How’d you find that out?”

“He called my father, looking for a job.”

“Did he give him one?”

“No. I think my father’s still hoping that I’ll come back to work with him.”

Gabriel nods, but I can see the wheels turning in his head. He’s got his detective hat back on.

“Do you miss it?”

Once again, classic Gabriel. Most people would ask whether I’m considering going back to work for my father. Gabriel doesn’t care about what I’m going to do for work as much as he does about what I’m feeling. I haven’t been in enough relationships to establish a statistically significant sample size, but I’m still reasonably certain that Gabriel is an outlier in this regard.

“Not criminal defense,” I say. “I could never do that again. But prosecuting. Yeah, I miss that. Thing is, I really love singing. And I’ve enjoyed having a break from a real job too, but a lot of the time my daily existence feels very self-indulgent.”

It never ceases to amaze me how Gabriel is able to get me to divulge my innermost thoughts. Whenever anyone else asks about my life, I just tell them I’m living my dream. For some reason, I don’t put on that show for him. Perhaps it’s not for some reason, but for the best reason: I want him to know the real me. Even if I don’t truly know myself.

“Is that why we’re going on a double date with Lauren Wright and her husband tomorrow night?”

Lauren is my former boss, the chief of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Special Victims Bureau. I was her deputy for four years, until I resigned nine months ago to join my father’s firm. That job lasted only three months. My sister’s murder made it abundantly clear to me that I didn’t want to devote my life to defending the bad guys.

“My only ulterior motive is introducing her to you,” I say with mock innocence.