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Ema is in Europe when she gets the news that Phoenix Wright has been disbarred. She’s eighteen. She rolls her eyes at the sensationalist headline—Mr. Wright and his shenanigans. They’ll issue some retraction in a week or three, and Mr. Wright will be back in the courtroom, saving hapless mystics and cross-examining parrots. She doesn’t give thought to it again.
Seven years later, the Chief Prosecutor tells Ema she’s been assigned to Klavier Gavin’s first case since his return. She doesn’t complain, because getting labeled difficult to work with would kill any chance of a transfer to Forensics.
She hates his office. Guitars along the wall, a jabbing reminder that he’s special in two ways. Three screens of evidence, because he takes three cases at once. It’s all so insistent and loud.
“I wish you would take your job more seriously,” Ema says.
He glances up at her through his lashes. “You know I do. That is not why you dislike me, Fraulein Detective.”
“Enlighten me.”
“You’re a detective,” he says, and like everything he says, it holds a different meaning depending on how you hold it to the light. You’re a detective—you can figure it out. You’re a detective—and not a forensic scientist.
Ema was a young prodigy before she failed the forensics certification. Klavier was a young prodigy and still is. The scourge of the Prosecutors’ Office. Everything she wants is easy for him.
She pushes her glasses up and asks what she came to ask. “Do you regret disbarring Mr. Wright at all?”
“He fell short of the law, and I discovered him.” He shrugs. “My own brother was a murderer. These things happens, ja?”
Klavier’s brother is a murderer. Ema’s hero is a forger. They’re on even footing. It doesn’t feel like it.
“Mr. Wright isn’t Kristoph Gavin.”
“Your Mr. Wright forged evidence again, two weeks ago. A bloody ace,” he says. “But maybe evidence tampering doesn’t bother you? Given your past.”
The office doesn’t talk about Lana much. A chief prosecutor charged with evidence tampering is a stain on them all. But Klavier is young blood and doesn’t have a reverence for old legacies.
This is the moment Ema Skye decides she needs to learn a Kristoph Gavin impression.
“Here’s the report you asked for,” Ema says, and throws it onto his desk.
Prison hasn’t treated Damon Gant well. Or maybe the etched wrinkles and flesh sagging over his bones are only the work of time—it’s been nine years. He still peers at Ema like she’s on the inside of the glass and he’s on the outside.
She doesn’t pick up the telephone to talk to him. She never does. Ema doesn’t know what she’s trying to get out of these visits. It’s not like he will magically turn back into Uncle Damon who bought the candles she was selling for her orchestra fundraising drive and picked her up after school when Lana was busy at the precinct. She doesn’t know why he still agrees to see her either. She thinks about picking up the telephone to ask. Look how much I’ve grown, Uncle Damon—soon I’ll be as tall as you!
Gant blinks hawkishly. Ema fiddles with her glasses. She remembers wanting pink-tinted ones because Uncle Damon had a pair like that. Rose tints.
The guard’s name is Michael. Ema got dinner with him once, after a case that saw them both sustaining minor injuries when the defendant started throwing shit. She doesn’t remember him being a gossip. He was very sweet. Gave a sincere oh, I’m sorry when Ema mentioned her parents were dead.
In the end, the telephone remains a piece of plastic and Damon Gant remains a reminder that there was a before when the world is so keen on submerging her in the after.
Klavier visits Kristoph too, sometimes at the same time Ema visits Gant. It’s easy to pretend they don’t see each other.
Three hundred years ago, Isaac Newton sat beneath an apple tree and got hit hard enough to produce the theory of gravity.
The story of an apple falling from a tree has many modern implications: inspiring Ema’s interest in science, sparking circular discussions about historical oversimplifications versus accessible anecdotes, and supporting a host of metaphors about whether people are ever free of their family influences.
Klavier is not actually Ema’s least favorite person in the office. That honor goes to Detective Oliver Frodd. Frodd insists on reinvestigating Ema’s crime scenes because he says skepticism is good. He tells her she should leave the forensics to the real scientists.
He reaches over, plucks her fingerprint powder from her hands; she’d been about to dust a letter for prints. “We should be getting this back to Forensics.”
“But—”
He waggles a finger at her. Powder spills from the container. Ema cringes. “It’s good that you’re being so thorough, though. Only though careful dissection of the facts can we ever have the truth in our hands.”
“It’s my—"
“Keep up your good work, and you’ll be in forensics in no time, Miss Ema. Good day.”
She’s too stunned to do anything besides say it’s Detective Skye and watch him disappear down the hallway with her evidence and her powder. Her fingers close around open air. When she finally hunts him down to ask for her powder back, he shrugs and says he must’ve lost it, not that she should’ve had it in the first place.
So when Ema takes a week off to visit Lana and comes back to find Frodd assigned to Klavier’s newest case, she starts looking forward to work for the first time in her miserable career.
On the first day, Frodd is crowing at the water cooler about how this is the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership. Oliver Frodd and Klavier Gavin are apparently the Steel Samurai and the Pink Princess of the Los Angeles Prosecutor’s Office. By noon, everybody knows every detail of the PawsRUs theft. Two parrots, one cat, seven hamsters, and eleven geckos.
On the second day, Frodd has bloodshot eyes and fistfuls of torn-out hair in his hands. “It turned into a triple homicide,” he says.
On the third day, Ema can hear Frodd’s sobs from outside the men’s bathroom.
It’s not exactly surprising when Klavier finds her at her desk. “Please, Fraulein,” he says. “He’s incompetent.”
“That sounds terrible,” Ema says. “I’m already assigned to a case.”
“You villain! But the Chief Prosecutor will reassign you if I speak with him.”
Ema leans forward, perching her chin on her interlaced fingers. “Oh, is it terrible to work with a LARPing moron putting on a grating fake accent?”
Klavier groans. “Fraulein, if I have to work another day with that imbecile, I will wring his neck.”
Ema allows some sympathy for Frodd.
It’s not that Klavier is tyrannical. He’s charming. But he took the bar at the age teenagers should be developing their senses of self; he became a lawyer before he became a person. He hates when people make mistakes he never would’ve. He picks bizarre cases. He’s never late and gets snarky if others are. The soundproofed walls are for his music, but they’re an apt enough metaphor for the rest of him too: they keep the best and worst parts of him contained to the people who enter.
Klavier produces her fingerprint powder and sets it in front of her. It’s been refilled. “Please.” When Ema scowls, he adds, “If you’re called to testify in the murder of Oliver Frodd, you will have less time to study for your forensics exam.”
“How did you know I was retaking it?”
He shrugs. “I know you, Fraulein.”
Ema was accused of murder before she learned to drive. She’s intense; it surprises the other prosecutors she works with, because Klavier writes generous things about her in his reports. She worked her first cases under Mr. Edgeworth and Mr. Wright; now, anything slower than breakneck bores her.
And besides, she’s not immune to being wooed.
Her fingers close around her powder. “Fine.” She looks up at him and thinks that their disparate pieces might even form a whole person. “By the way, I think the murder weapon was hidden in one of the geckos.”
“Ach, my guess was the cat.”
It takes a surprisingly long time for Ema to meet up with Mr. Wright. Scheduling is hard now. He works odd hours at the Borscht Club, and Ema doesn’t always get weekends off.
But Ema snaps at Klavier to stop showing off in the courtroom for just the one day and he does—Ema privately takes great glee in the idea that the Wocky Kitaki trial shook him—and she heads over to the Wright Anything Agency.
She’s still not used to seeing Mr. Wright like this. Unkempt, like he’d been picked up off the street. Ema has to remind herself that this is the man who saved her when he clambers into her car with the grace of a dislodged boulder.
“Oh! Mr. Wright, I never got to thank you for the fingerprint powder.”
He chuckles, but there’s something impenetrable about the sound. “Ah hah hah, don’t mention it. Not like I’ll be needing it anytime soon, huh?”
Ema frowns.
She tries: “Mr. Edgeworth was the one who gave me my first fingerprinting powder. Remember how stiff he looked?”
She swears Mr. Wright freezes in her periphery. But it passes and he’s slumped against the seat again. “That was a long time ago, wasn’t it? My memory’s not what it used to be.”
Ema remembers that trial in crystal clarity. “I wish he’d visit.”
“Good old Edgeworth.”
“Did he do something?” Ema hopes she won’t have to revise her opinion of him.
“Nah. Having a good time in Europe, I’ve heard. Left the office in good hands.”
“I keep getting assigned to Klavier’s cases,” Ema says.
“Oh, him. Always nice to hear him on the radio.” Mr. Wright scratches his nose. “Bailed out Apollo in that last trial. Gotta talk to the kid about not letting the prosecution make your points for you.”
It’s like pouring vinegar and baking soda into a plastic volcano and not getting a reaction. “Mr. Wright, he stripped you of your badge.”
“Did he?” He delivers it like a joke.
Ema feels like she’s going crazy. It’s not fair that she hates Klavier more than Mr. Wright does. Or maybe he’s just as bitter and hateful as her but thinks she’s still a little girl who can’t take it. That’s worse.
She says, “Do you think we could do coffee instead of lunch? I had a lot of Snackoos during the trial and I just remembered, one of my housemates needs me for, um, emotional support. She just broke up with her boyfriend.”
It’s rude. Mr. Wright doesn’t seem to mind. Just shrugs and says, “Trucy will be happy to see I’m back early enough for her run-through.”
Ema notices the pile of forensics books stacked in the corner of Klavier’s office the moment she enters. She manages a conversation about the latest office gossip for the minimum time that politeness dictates before she gives in.
“What are those?”
He cocks his head as if to say ah, finally. “I was recently on a trip to Germany; they are doing such fascinating work in the universities there—all the newest forensic techniques—and I thought of you,” he says. “Consider it my apology for Sunshine Coliseum.”
“You’re making less sense than usual. What are you apologizing for?”
“I asked you and Apollo to be there, and a gun was fired only a room over from you.”
“You didn’t fire the gun, idiot.”
“Ach, don’t be magnanimous now, Fraulein Detective, you complained about it plenty when I asked you to be on security detail.” He makes a dismissive gesture and puts on a smile. “There are some researchers at the university who are asking to speak with you for a field perspective of their proposals.”
That’s the thing with Klavier: he’s honest but not forthright. Everything he’s saying is true. None of what he’s saying explains the way his grip tightens around his pen when he looks at her.
“If Daryan Crescend had blown my head open with that 45-caliber, it still wouldn’t have been your fault,” Ema says.
Klavier makes a noise between a cough and a choke. “I brought the guitar with the cocoons, and I didn’t see that my own friend was a smuggler. Don’t free me from the crime of association.”
“Association isn’t a crime.”
A shadow halfway to irritation crosses his expression. “I suppose you’d believe that, yes.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you,” Ema says. She goes home and carefully shelves the books among her stacks and thinks a lot about olive branches and half-open wounds and splinters.
Apollo sips his coffee. “I thought there’d be more of a shock about Detective Crescend with the DA. It shocked me.”
“Really?” Ema doesn’t mean for it to come out condescending, but she really hadn’t given it a second thought. She clarifies, “The office hasn’t historically been full of saints. Von Karma and Godot killed—"
“Who?”
“You ever watch your new boss’s old trials?”
“No? He hasn’t done anything in seven years.” Apollo furrows his brows like Ema’s the weird one. “Have you?”
The nights in Europe she played Mr. Wright’s trials to remind herself that there was still someone looking out for her suddenly feel lonely and pathetic. She redirects. “Look. The law grinds us all down. Attorneys forge. Detectives kill—or they get shoved into the job even when they didn’t want it, which leads back to point A. Prosecutors make shit up to protect their own family.”
“You don’t mean Prosecutor Gavin?”
He doesn’t know about Lana. It makes Ema feel so old. Apollo’s not much younger than her.
She doesn’t correct him. “I just think you’re lucky he wasn’t on your first case.”
Apollo protests; Ema shrugs. Lana had thought Ema killed Neil Marshall, and it hadn’t mattered to her. The law will always bow to love. Klavier Gavin isn’t immune to love.
“There are more states of chess than atoms in the universe, you know,” Klavier says at office board game night.
Gumshoe squints. “How do you know that.”
“Picked it up somewhere.”
Ema doesn’t look up from her phone. “The second half of the fact is that there are more states of go than atoms in the universe, squared.”
The first time Ema sleeps with Klavier, she’s tipsy enough to tell herself it’s the alcohol and sober enough to know it’s a flimsy excuse. It’s some holiday work party, and the knowledge that it’s inappropriate is like a shot of whiskey against the back of her throat. Klavier is talking to the Chief Prosecutor when she slides into their conversation, her hand resting against the small of his back.
Oh, to drink the surprise from his expression, flared eyes and parted lips. He leans into her touch. He's tipsy too. Ema watched three flutes of champagne travel down the delicate muscles of his throat.
“Fraulein Detective,” Klavier murmurs. “We were just speaking on departmental morality clauses.”
Ema lip curls. “Goodness, that proposal’s so overdue that my sister was the one who proposed it.” This is not something she would’ve said if she was sober.
It takes the Chief Prosecutor a moment to realize he’s been insulted. He leaves with a hmph and a remark to Klavier that they should pick up this thread later.
Klavier turns to her. He shows no ire that she chased off his conversation partner. “Forensics seems to have gathered over there.” He nods at the chocolate fountain and the easily impressionable people around it. “If you want that transfer, you should mingle.”
Ema thinks back to her conversation with Apollo. “I could go private, you know. I don’t have to keep doing this.” Private investigators get paid much more. That’s what the offer she keeps pinned above her desk tells her every day.
She plucks the champagne flute from Klavier’s hand, finishes it off.
His gaze flicks down to her mouth. “And the office would lose a capable detective. But you didn’t interrupt my scintillating conversation to tell me about how you’re thinking of selling out.”
“My necklace came undone. If you’re not too busy glimmering up to the big suits, I was wondering if you could help me.”
“Fraulein, you really must learn not to hide your requests beneath insults; I might begin to think you don’t like me.”
But he follows her away from the politicking bodies. They pass beneath the mistletoe. Someone wolf whistles. Ema ignores them; Klavier blows them a kiss. He takes the necklace, sucks in a soft breath when she sweeps her hair to the side.
Ema likes that his gaze licks down the curve of her neck. She likes that he pushed her attempts at comfort away before but can’t resist letting his touch linger now, as he pulls the chain around her neck. Fuck him.
She shivers.
His voice is dulcet, and Ema suddenly understands how he always gets what he wants. “Does this trick usually work on the men you wish to take home?”
“I’m not trying to seduce you.”
“It’s only a side effect, then.”
“It’s a litmus test,” Ema says, “for how clever your fingers can be.”
“You’ve seen me with the guitar.” He reclasps the necklace without fumbling.
“You’re not terrible.”
He gives her a wide smile. “Ach, the air in here is so stuffy, you know. I’m going to step out for a bit.”
The next phase of the night passes in flashes. A blazer borrowed in the wintery chill; in the darkness of the car backseat: a hand snaking up the other’s thigh; dirty promises in velvet tones; fingers hooked around a silver chain, tugging the other closer; a smirk smothered by an irritated kiss; a dress unbuttoned by deft fingers; silver rings set carefully onto a nightstand.
Now, Klavier laughing at himself in the mirror—at the fretwork of bruise-marks across his neck—as Ema pulls his shirt from his torso. Now, Klavier with his catlike gaze, mouth carved for pleasure, warm and substantial in the sheets beside her. “What do you like?” he says.
This; you.
“This,” Ema says, and guides his face between her thighs.
It would be easier if he was a brat about it. Held her beneath saltwater shame until her lungs gave out. If he taunted her: what would your darling hero think, what would the office say if they heard you saying yes, don’t stop, I need you, please Klavier. But his eyes are bright as he gets her to the edge and denies her again and again; she pulls his hair from its twist and all he says is is this good for you, laughter brimming on his lips. She says you are so fucking annoying and he says I can stop, if you want. Shall I stop?—no.
But the turnabout: the prosecutor beneath her, the friction of their bodies terrible when the orgasm made her soft and sensitive, pliant in surrender, his eyes flashing triumph; but she sucks his guitar-string calloused fingers and moves her hips over his boxers and he’s not smug or grinning anymore.
“Ema,” he’s saying. “God, Ema.”
Of course she wants to be desired by the man everyone wants. To wring words of adoration from an easy stroke of her fingertips, to take between her teeth the man who cracked her world open at eighteen. He looks at her without animosity and she’s so close to liking him.
He says haven’t you been enough of a tease; she considers him, and he shifts, makes a shameless sound from the back of his throat. It’s so natural to want to take him into herself. “You’ve done this with so many girls,” Ema says.
“I have,” he says.
Glimmerous fop.
“So this doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s just another roll in the sheets,” Ema says, because she needs it to be true.
He smiles like she’s showed her hand and it’s made of the exact cards he thought she’d have. “It’s generally a good idea to play along with the woman straddling you, ja?” Twirling a strand of her hair around his finger, “You are no different from any of the girls who scream my name from the audience. You are only here tonight because your dress was very flattering and I couldn’t resist.”
Hurt twists; pleasure squirms. He’s Klavier Gavin and she’s a convenient body. That’s it; that’s all.
Only—the mind pretends and the body betrays: he runs his hand over her skin too deliberately for a woman he cares only to fuck, and she says his name too viciously for it to only be the name of a singer she’s been distantly fantasizing about, and when it’s done, he holds her with the fragile curiosity that calcifies over months of imagining a thing, the desperate relief of finally cupping your hands around the shape of it. He doesn’t seem to mind that she doesn’t reach back.
There are a lot of reasons this can’t happen. “You’ve written whole songs about your other paramours. I don’t care enough to compete with that,” Ema says, like it’s the rockstar part of rockstar prosecutor that stops her from pulling him closer, into every tender part of her.
“If you wanted me to write you songs, you could have asked, Fraulein.”
“I’m not asking.”
“A song for a night,” he says. “I will be your Scheherazade, and you will be my tyrant king.”
“Mm, don’t get it twisted, fop. I’m not looking for something serious—and the Chief Prosecutor would never let us on the same case again if it came out.”
He nods, though Ema thinks she sees the dark shape of disappointment beneath the lake-sheens of his eyes. “We can do casual.”
Ema dates other people. So does Klavier. Ema rolls her eyes when she sees his latest infatuation in the tabloids. Klavier gives a bland smile when she brings her boyfriends to happy hour.
Separately, there’s a supposed leak of Klavier’s music files. The trade magazines dismiss it, because it’s impossible he’s written this many songs when he hasn’t even announced a solo career.
Ema was thirteen when she told Lana she wanted to work in law. Lana had been Chief Prosecutor at the time. Ema had expected her to be happy, but her face clouded over.
“Don’t,” Lana said.
“But I want to be like you,” Ema said. “I want to find the truth. I want to help people.”
“You’ll never be happy. The media loves to harp about demon prosecutors, but none of them are good, not really. Attorneys, prosecutors—this place grinds them all down.”
“But you’re a prosecutor,” Ema said. “And you’re good.”
She didn’t understand why Lana looked away from her.
When Mr. Wright asks Ema to be on the jurist trial, of course she says yes. What surprises her is that he also asks Klavier. Even more that Klavier says yes.
“So you think he’s a liar and a cheat, and you’re still doing him this favor?” Ema says flatly. Klavier’s papers are scattered around the floor. Ema’s bra is hooked around the neck of the nearest guitar.
Klavier shrugs. “Herr Wright got what he deserved, and this jurist trial is bigger than any of our grudges. And”—he flexes his hand—"there must be a reason the man who forged his evidence is dead, and he has chosen this case.”
The doorknob rattles.
“Maybe he’s trying to take you down a peg. Someone should.”
“I just want to understand,” Klavier says.
The office is quiet the night after Kristoph Gavin’s second trial.
There is no light coming from the crack beneath the door of Klavier’s office. Ema pushes it open anyway, and derives no joy when she’s greeted by the sight she’d been expecting. Likewise, Klavier doesn’t look surprised when he drags his gaze up to meet hers.
He’s sitting on the floor, slumped against his desk like a marionette with its strings snipped. The cheap yellow of streetlights trickles through the windows, dyeing his skin a sickly shade. The whiskey in his hand glitters like bottled topaz.
“You should be celebrating with the rest of Herr Wright’s crew,” he says. “But I suppose you deserve your time to mock me.” He lifts his chin; golden bangs slide over blue eyes, sunlight over water.
“Not everything is about you, fop. I left my forensics kit in here,” Ema says.
Klavier’s shoulders shake with a laugh, but his mouth doesn’t twitch. “Best fetch it, then.”
They both know she keeps too tight a grip on her kit to leave it behind. Here, least of all.
Ema crosses the room, stands above the table, above the prosecutor sitting against it. “You must have made me so upset I forgot to take it with me.”
“Because of my glimmerousness, ja?” he supplies.
“Right.” She nods. “Maybe you knocked the kit to the floor with your foppish carelessness.”
“I’ve been quite careless of late, haven’t I?”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
And under the thin pretense of searching for the kit, she lowers herself to the ground beside Klavier, sits close enough that their shoulders could brush, if either of them were bold enough. They’re not; they’d both be happier if they were; they could give a name to this tenderspun thing spiderwebbing between them instead of making up ridiculous reasons to be sitting on the floor of his office at one in the morning when they have no problem kneeling in dusty courtroom closets.
I thought you’d defend him, she could say. I was so scared.
“You know,” she says, “out of anybody, I’d be most likely to understand. If you wanted.”
“Ah, but you despise me, Fraulein. I may be drunk”—he swishes his drink deprecatingly—“but I haven’t forgotten.”
He has always made it so hard to know him. Ema leans her head against the table. “Well, you have me now.”
A soft sigh. A sip of his drink, as if bracing himself.
“I am jealous of you,” he says, the alcohol making him forthright when he has only before been honest. “I have always been.”
He takes another swig.
When Ema reaches for the bottle, he passes it over easily. The liquid burns, but not more than the memory of his hands pressing into her.
“Why?”
“Your sister forged evidence because she loved you. My brother didn’t even love me enough for a fair fight; he would have presented falsified evidence against me for the promise of Grammarye notoriety.”
Ema picks at the hem of her lab coat.
“Unless I’ve misread you,” Klavier says.
When she was in Europe, her classmates would ask if she had siblings—you seem like such an oldest child—and that would inevitably lead to the why isn’t she here with you and Ema took a perverse delight in saying she’s serving time, actually, so don’t get on my bad side! because if she made a joke of it, she couldn’t also be ashamed of it, that’s how it works. They always looked so shocked too.
“I hated my sister, and I hated that I hated her. I was in Europe and I was so lonely—I didn’t know anybody, and everything was so big, and I was so small—and all I could think about was how I wouldn’t have been there if not for her. I knew I was being so unfair. That she’d made every shitty decision to protect me. At least you get to hate your brother with a clean conscience.”
“Did you ever forgive her?”
“Not really,” Ema says.
Klavier snorts. “You don’t have to lie to make me feel better. I can accept that your family is more functional than mine, Schatz.”
“I was a different person before the case. Believed such pretty things about law and the people in it,” Ema says, because she remembers Klavier at the prosecutor’s bench, watching his kingdom fall around him. “She—that trial—took them away from me.”
“Ah.”
“Then I failed the forensics exam.” Ema can’t help it, bitterness cutting her tongue. And Mr. Wright was disbarred. And Police Chief Damon Gant blackmailed her sister for years. And Kristoph Gavin is a murderer and a forger. And, and, and. The law has chiseled her into the cynic Lana said it would. “Not the same as yours, I know.”
Klavier holds his hand to the yellow light, traces the lines of his palm with his other thumb. “There must have been some moment I could have stopped him and didn’t.”
“Probably, but finding it won’t make you happier.” Ema offers a shrug. “Again, at least you can toast to that motherfucker’s painful death.”
Klavier huffs a laugh and lifts the bottle. He drinks, and then she does. The alcohol is already making her sway—she can’t imagine what it’s doing to him. Their hands brush with the exchange of the bottle. Warm skin on warm skin. She hears his breath catch.
“Ema.” He rolls the sound across his musician’s tongue, his whiskey-bright mouth. Finally, he sounds intoxicated.
“Yes,” she says, softly.
He takes her chin in his calloused fingers, tilting her up to the moonlight and examining her as if she is a confession whose meaning will rearrange into something like absolution if he only beholds her at the correct angle. For a moment, she thinks she will have to stop him from kissing her, but he releases her, a small smile settling across his lovely mouth as if he has found her wholly to his satisfaction, nothing wanting.
They sit like this until morning.
Ema doesn’t realize she’d mentally filed Klavier besides Mr. Wright and Lana Skye and Damon Gant and every other lawyer who’s broken her heart until she runs into Apollo at their latest crime scene.
“What can you tell me about this?” He hands her a cowbell.
“And where did you get classified evidence?” Ema says.
“Prosecutor Gavin gave it to me.” He says it like it’s obvious.
“Huh.”
“Is that surprising?”
“He just found out his entire career’s been built on a lie. I’d expect”—for him to go rotten—"for him to, I don’t know, crack down harder. Prosecute to win. I’m glad he didn’t, obviously.”
She’d have to help him if he did.
Apollo looks thoughtful.
“Yes?” Ema prompts. An ostrich squawks behind them.
He presses his finger against his forehead. “We all have a core belief we need to be true, right? Prosecutor Gavin’s is that if he does everything in his power to find the truth, he’ll be a good person. He helps the defense so he can tell himself he’s better than his brother.”
Apollo is a sweet kid. Sharp, too. It’s why Klavier has a soft spot for him; the prosecutor is good to people quick enough to keep up with him.
“Is he okay, do you know? I mean, you just talked to him, how do you think he’s holding up with”—Ema makes a frenetic gesture—“everything?”
“I feel like you’d know better than me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re not as subtle as you think you are.” Apollo adjusts his bracelet. “Also, you totally pull your lips over your teeth when you talk about him.”
Ema pouts. Apollo grins.
“What’s yours?” Ema says.
Apollo shrugs. “If I work hard enough to belong, I won’t have to move again.”
Klavier is talking to Kristoph when Ema leaves after her visit with Gant. Kristoph’s gaze knifes into her over his brother’s shoulder. Ema is gone by the time Klavier turns around.
“Ema,” Lana says when they have their weekly call. “How are you?”
Ema has a speech prepared. You were wrong when you said the law grinds everyone into ash. It was what you needed to believe to live with yourself, but you had no right to impose it on me, and there are good people here, Edgeworth is better now and there’s Apollo and there’s—
“Ema? Are you there?” Lana says.
Ema swallows. “I’m good,” she says. “How about you, sis?”
Ema tosses the offer from the private investigation firm. She stops visiting the prison. Michael tells her that Gant asks after her. He mentions that they should do dinner again sometime.
The office is quiet after six. The room is dark by choice. Ema’s only companions are the textbook and her steady circle of lamplight. Then the door opens and hallway light floods in and Ema thinks that the janitor has come early—he usually comes closer to eight—but a familiar jaunty lilt makes her stiffen.
“Ah, Fraulein Detective, I thought I might find you here! Tucked away from the rest of the world—"
“I told you, I can’t do tonight. Go find one of your groupies who thinks you walk on water or something.”
He gives no sign of offense. The door falls shut behind him. “It’s the fourth of July,” he says, and pulls the curtains back from the windows.
“As you’re so fond of reminding us, you don’t celebrate frivolous pagan American holidays,” says Ema, who had closed the curtains for a reason.
He is watching her with a tension in his brows, in his lips. “It should matter to you, though.”
“It’s just an excuse for people to get together and paint their faces and get drunk. General foppishness.”
“Still, people must be missing you.”
Ema has colleagues; she doesn’t have friends. “My exam is next week,” she says. “I need to study.”
“A break is deserved, nein?”
What does Klavier Gavin know about the uncrossable chasm between who you are and who you want to be—Klavier, wunderkind and rockstar prosecutor and darling of the DA? Ema is surrounded by Klaviers and Edgeworths and Von Karmas and Lanas, for whom success is as easy as perfect marks on an exam at 17, practicing law before they are of age to vote. She has always longed to join the pantheon.
Ema tells him this, diplomatically.
“If you want to use your sister and Edgeworth as motivation for your masochism, I can’t stop you, but I’ll beg you not to think of me in that way. I shouldn’t have been given such power at seventeen, we all know that now.” He twists one of his rings. “A good man lost his badge because I was too young to doubt my brother.”
Ema flinches. “You should leave.”
He doesn’t argue. The curtains sway as he brushes past them, crossing the room again in easy strides. His chains are so loud.
He grasps the doorknob. Pauses, head bowed like a scythe.
“I never called it pagan,” he says.
“I embellished.”
Ema wants him to leave; she wants him to fight to stay.
The curtains come to a still.
A click as the doorknob turns. Ema braces for an inflow of light; it doesn’t come.
Voice soft as the shadows, Klavier says, “Do you want to see the fireworks, Ema?”
They don’t exist outside of the law. Klavier has his music, but that’s only paper folded into smiles, fans with grasping hands. Ema had her friends in Europe, but she left them for America and for Mr. Wright.
They could try to.
“Sure,” Ema says.
Four hundred years ago, Galileo dropped objects of unequal weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove all things fall at the same rate. Ema knows this anecdote by heart. Gravity is indiscriminate. Nothing is immune to falling.
Neither of them want to go to Griffith or some other firework viewing party; Ema hates crowds and crowds hate Klavier. She gets into his car.
Silence settles. It’s the awkward kind. They have no case to fill the space between them, and conversation isn’t a muscle they exercise otherwise. Klavier makes some passing remark about the 7-11 decorations when they stop for snacks. Ema gives an obliging chuckle. It’s slightly embarrassing when the woman in front of them in the line sniffs and says, “Sorry I’m such a mess, it’s just that my mother passed away last week,” and Klavier just says um and it hits Ema that death to them is a line on an autopsy report, a dead body in a park. Triple homicides are exciting.
“This is the finest parking garage in LA,” Klavier says as they pull in.
“And what rubric are the poor parking garages being graded on?” Ema inquires.
“Location. Height. The placement of the pillars.” He winks. “Whether the attendants will let me in for free if I ask nicely.”
Ema narrows her eyes. “You’ve backed into a pillar before.”
“Ach, what gave it away?”
“Personality.”
“Fraulein Detective, if I didn’t know of your inability to express affection in any other way, your words would hurt me very deeply.”
Klavier drives them up to the roof, and insists that it’s really fine, they can sit on top of his car, it’s expensive but it’s seen dirtier things—good God, Fraulein, get your mind out of the gutter—and so they clamber up. They place the Snackoos between them.
This high, they can see fireworks shows for miles in every direction, each cluster a celebration by its own community. They make a game of pointing to every new burst. Klavier’s better at it.
The night churns on, rhythmic and languid. Until—
“My sister used to take me to Griffith every year,” Ema says.
“Ah.”
In the distance, a car siren goes off. They both smile. Maybe they’ll see the report on their desks tomorrow.
“Do I remind you of her?” he says.
Ema isn’t stupid. She knows that this is a very close approximation of a date, but if she tells him yes, it won’t be. He’s offering her an out. They never have to do this again.
Another city sends up its fireworks. They flower in indigo, teal, brilliant pink. Fireworks, Ema reflects, are unnecessary, and ridiculous, and impractical, and loud, and wholly overconcerned with the performance of a thing.
They’re also a lovely addition to a night. So there’s that.
“No,” she murmurs.
“Tell me?”
Ema hugs her knees to her chest. She doesn’t want to talk, but she wants—she wants to stop cutting her thoughts off when they stray too close. Let possibilities breathe. She wants to do something like this again. “After my sister was tried, they wrote up a report of all her transgressions of the law while under Damon Gant.”
“And you memorized it,” Klavier says, because he must have done the same with Kristoph’s court proceedings.
“Kind of. When I was in Europe, there was this game I would play when I was lonely. I would fold a piece of paper in half. On one half, I wrote out all the terrible things my sister had done. On the other, I wrote all the good things Mr. Wright had done. I was waiting for the day Mr. Wright’s list was longer than Lana’s list.”
Klavier isn’t looking at the fireworks anymore.
Ema won’t meet his gaze. “I don’t play it now.”
He lifts his hand, maybe to touch her, maybe to sweep the hair from his face, maybe to point at another set of fireworks—he knocks over the Snackoo bag. Brown puffs tumble to the cracked asphalt. Klavier curses impressively. Ema grabs the bag too late to save any.
“I’m sorry,” he says, with a desperation that isn’t proportional to the spillage. “I’m really sorry.”
“I forgive you.” She brushes crumbs from her pants. “You didn’t know. I don’t hold it against you.”
He lets out a breathless laugh. Ema looks up at him. There are stars and colors in his eyes. He is looking at her. The night holds its breath.
Ema loved science before she cared for the law. She lets gravity win.
She bunches the Snackoo bag in her fist and closes the distance between them. Klavier goes still. She rests her head on his shoulder; he pulls her against him. She tells him a story about Galileo and high places and the objects that fell from them; he chuckles and says the poets discovered that long before, nein? Ema watches colors splatter against the LA skyline and absently wonders when exactly Klavier Gavin became someone she wanted to know better.
Mr. Wright isn’t surprised when Ema tells him she’s thinking about going serious with Klavier, which lends credence to Apollo’s statement about their lack of subtlety. Edgeworth isn’t blind.
“I will never like him,” Mr. Wright says. He doesn’t wear the beanie anymore. “I can’t ever, you understand that, right? Doesn’t matter if I’m irrational for it. I know it wasn’t his fault. But Apollo gets lunch with him after their trials, and Trucy sends him tickets to all her shows. I don’t stop them.”
“I know that,” Ema says.
Mr. Wright leans forward. “So Ema, why are you asking me for permission?”
“Mr. Wright—”
“You’re not my subordinate, you know. We’re peers. You can call me Phoenix.”
“Phoenix,” she says, and the shape of his name doesn’t sit in her mouth correctly, because he’s her savior, he is the man who held to the law when her sister didn’t, so many years ago. He is all that is right in the world. She has never forgiven him for being otherwise.
That’s it, she thinks. She hates him the way she hates Lana, the way children hate their parents when they’re old enough to be angry at all the ways their heroes aren’t perfect. He is supposed to be the only thing in the world that was uncomplicated and good. He’s not.
It had still thrilled her when he asked her to be part of the jurist trial.
“I guess I’m not,” she says, “asking you.”
Ema plans to broach the subject with Klavier.
Constance Courte is dead.
Klavier sits hunched over at his desk, fingers folded over his head. Four record players play four different records. He doesn’t look up when Ema kneels beside him.
“There is so much noise,” he says.
Ema gets called to Khura’in and Klavier announces a world studium tour—he tells Edgeworth that the music calls to him and tells Ema that if he stays here any longer he’ll blow his fucking brains out—and they don’t see each other for a year.
They call, though. Ema gets used to holding Klavier Gavin’s voice in her hand or the counter, when she narrates her cooking process to him. With the time zone differences, one of them drifts to sleep on call more often than not. Ema smiles when she tunes into the Oscars and sees one of Klavier’s old flings win best featured actor; she watches a grainy livestream of his concert and recognizes some of the songs.
Klavier picks her up from the airport. He chuckles at her insistence that she can load the luggage herself, takes it anyway, and pulls her into a one-armed hug. “How are you, Fraulein Detective?” he says. “I missed you.”
“I miss In-n-Out,” she says, because she’s a good blue-blooded Californian, born and raised. “But it’s good to be back for good this time.”
In the car, there’s a bag of Snackoos and her regular order from her favorite pretentious matcha café waiting for her. Klavier puts his sunglasses on and grumbles about LAX traffic.
Then: “I thought—ach, worried, even—that you might have decided to stay in Khura’in, with Herr Forehead.”
Ema had considered it. But she likes Los Angeles, and Phoenix and Athena are coming back too. “The company here’s better.”
“And the prosecutors?” he says.
“Shut up,” Ema says. “You didn’t work a single case while I was gone.”
He makes some good-natured joke about not being able to do it without her but she says how are you, though and he says it’s easier now, I think. It’s been long enough that she needs to type in the address to her apartment into his maps app.
They talk about everything and nothing. There’s another wellness company doing IV drip therapy, and Klavier has a few free months if she wants a go. Ema’s got into crochet, and yes, she might be making him something but no, he can’t know what it is beforehand. Wow, we’ll really miss Apollo, won’t we? They arrive at Ema’s apartment too soon.
“Come in?” she says.
“Surely you don’t have more IKEA furniture you’d like me to assemble before we test its structural integrity?” His tone is teasing and his gaze is unsure.
She could say yes and he would come in and they could pretend it’s only chemistry between them. His smile is too practiced for that to be what he desires most. Sympathy pricks at her; maybe growing up with Kristoph Gavin is incompatible with the vulnerability to vocalize what you want.
Ema can be forthright. “If you want to, we can,” she says. “But I was thinking we could catch up and maybe get dinner later. If you’re busy, we can do some other day. But I do like spending time with you.”
Klavier smiles. “There’s a place a few minutes away I’ve wanted to try for a long time.”