Chapter 14
Jenna
It’s 1:17 in the morning.
I know because I’ve been lying in our bed watching the minutes stack up, listening for footsteps that don’t come.
He said he’d be up soon. That was ninety minutes ago.
I know this man. He’s not coming up. Not until he’s run the dashboard one more time. Not until he’s cross-referenced Marlon Ennis’s name against a dataset he’s already cross-referenced twice. Not until he’s satisfied that the edges of our world are sealed and nobody can slip through to me in the night.
He’s been holding the weight of an entire day on his shoulders. He held Daniel when Daniel didn’t know he needed holding. He held Gabriel’s reputation when the forged signature came up. He held the case together with both hands while I did what I do best and built the architecture.
And he hasn’t let anyone hold him in return.
I pull on one of his flannels. The cuffs hit my knuckles, but I don’t roll them up.
I go downstairs.
His office door is open. The blue-white light from the dashboard catches the lenses of his glasses and makes him look, for a second, like a statue of the man I married—hands on the keyboard, shoulders set, face unreadable.
He hears me before I’m through the door. “I’ll be up in twenty.” He doesn’t turn.
“You said that at eleven.”
“I’m finishing. I’m just?—”
“Ethan.”
He finally turns, his glasses low on his nose, stubble that wasn’t there at breakfast. Exhaustion in every line of his face, the kind he doesn’t let anyone see except, apparently, me.
I cross the room. He watches me come. My fingers find the edge of the laptop lid, and I close it. Slow enough that he could stop me. He doesn’t.
“Jen—”
“My turn.”
He frowns. “Your turn?”
“My turn to do the holding. My turn to close the file. My turn to be the one who decides when we’re done for the night.” My hands find his shoulders. The muscles are wound so tight that they feel like rope. “You’ve been carrying people all day. Carry nothing for the next hour. That’s an order.”
He quirks an eyebrow. “You’re giving me orders now.”
“Tonight I am.”
I reach for his glasses. He goes still the way he always does when I touch them because nobody else has ever been allowed to.
“Off,” I say.
“Yours too,” he murmurs, already lifting his hand to my face.
I let him take mine off. He sets both pairs on the desk beside the closed laptop. The world blurs at the edges, and I don’t care. For once, I don’t need to see everything to know where I am.
I know where I am. I’m with my husband.
I climb onto his lap. His hands find my thighs automatically, and he starts to lift me, always in motion, always taking over.
I press my palm to his chest. “No.”
