Page 36 of You, Only You

It did tell me something. I just wasn't ready to hear it yet.

So I put the phone down, and I held her hand, and I watched her breathe, and I ran scenarios in my head about Mendez and surveillance windows and security protocols, because that was what I knew how to do.

The other thing, the thing about how the sound of her breathing in a hospital room was the only thing holding me together, I put that in the same locked room as everything else I wasn't ready for.

It was getting crowded in there.

9.Lindsey

Recovery, it turned out, was boring. Excruciatingly, mind-numbingly boring, punctuated by stabbing pain whenever I forgot about the cracked ribs and tried to do something radical like laugh or breathe deeply. The concussion had faded to a dull ache behind my eyes, the stitches on my temple itched constantly, and my body was a watercolor of purple and yellow bruises that made getting dressed feel like a contact sport.

"You need to rest," Will said for approximately the fortieth time that morning, appearing in the doorway of the guest room with a cup of tea I hadn't asked for.

"I've been resting for four days." I accepted the tea anyway, because it was the good stuff and I wasn't a martyr. "I'm going to lose my mind."

"Better than losing your life."

"Debatable."

He almost smiled, that ghost of amusement that I'd been tracking like a market indicator for weeks now, and retreated to give me space. That was the strange thing about this new reality: he was always there, but never suffocating. He appeared with tea and ibuprofen before I knew I needed them. He changed my bandages with careful, steady hands that somehow made theclinical process of wound care feel like something else entirely, something I was not going to name while he was holding gauze against my temple and his face was six inches from mine.

"Hold still," he'd said the first time, his fingers light against my cheek to keep my head angled toward the light.

"I am holding still."

"You're fidgeting."

"I fidget. It's a personality trait."

"It's a hazard. If I tape this wrong, you'll have a scar."

"I'll tell people I got it in a bar fight."

"You got it from a three-ton SUV."

"The bar fight story is better."

He'd looked at me then, his fingers still on my cheek, and something had crossed his face that made me very aware of how close we were and how quiet the room was and how his thumb was resting against my pulse point, which was doing things that were medically concerning.

"Done," he'd said, and stepped back, and the room had gotten about ten degrees colder.

That was the pattern. He'd get close, the air would change, and then one of us would retreat. Usually him. Sometimes me. It was like a dance we'd never choreographed but somehow both knew the steps to: advance, retreat, pretend nothing happened, repeat.

The police investigation had been absorbed into the federal case. Bates had appeared at the hospital, spoken to the detectives, and suddenly the uniformed cops at my door were replaced by people who moved like they'd been trained to clear rooms rather than write parking tickets. The message was clear: local jurisdiction no longer applied.

The penthouse had transformed while I wasn't paying attention. New locks on every door, including the interior ones. A security panel by the entrance displaying rotating camerafeeds that I definitely hadn't consented to but was choosing to fight about later because I only had enough energy for one battle at a time. Men who came and went, doing mysterious things with wiring and sensors. Will orchestrated all of it with the same focused intensity he brought to everything.

I should have found it suffocating. That was the part I kept getting stuck on. I should have been climbing the walls, citing my principles, delivering speeches about autonomy. And some of it did bother me, the cameras, the men in the hallway. But the rest of it, the tea, the bandages, the way he appeared with ibuprofen before I asked, the way he left the guest room door open so he could hear me if I called out in my sleep, which I'd done once, from a nightmare about the SUV, and he'd been in the doorway in seconds...

That part didn't feel like suffocation. That part felt like something I'd been missing for so long I'd forgotten it existed.

Which was exactly why I needed to be careful.

The phone was the first red flag.

It was a new device, sleek, secure, top-of-the-line, that Will had given me the day after the crash. "Your old one was damaged," he'd said, and I'd been too exhausted to question it. But by day three, I noticed something odd: the battery was dying at an alarming rate. By 2 PM, I'd be down to fifteen percent despite barely using it.

Now, most people would have assumed it was a defective battery. Most people don't spend their professional lives looking for things that don't add up. Most people's fathers didn't teach them, inadvertently, that the device someone gives you for free is usually the device that costs you the most.