Page 39 of You, Only You

"Lindsey."

"I need some space right now." I said it as gently as I could manage, which wasn't very gentle. "Not forever. Just... for now. I need to be in this room by myself for a while."

"Okay." He didn't argue. Didn't negotiate. Didn't try to fix it with words. He just nodded, and backed toward the door, andstopped on the threshold. "I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. But I'm..."

"I know."

He left. The door closed quietly behind him.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my palms flat against the mattress, the way I'd pressed them against the conference room table on my first day at Sterling & Steele, back when the only thing I was afraid of was a man with cold blue eyes and a reputation for destruction.

That felt like a lifetime ago. A different Lindsey. A simpler problem.

I didn't cry. I wanted to, in a distant way, the way you want to sneeze but can't. The tears were there, behind my eyes, behind the calm, but they wouldn't come. Maybe because crying required letting go of something, and I was holding on too tight to too many things.

Instead, I sat there and thought about trust. About how many times it could break before it couldn't be repaired. About my father, who'd broken my mother's trust so many times it had become a kind of chronic condition, a low-grade fracture that never fully healed. About Will, who'd promised to ask and then hadn't, who'd known it was wrong and done it anyway, who'd looked at me with fiery eyes and said "I knew" like confession was the same as absolution.

It wasn't. But it was more than my father had ever offered.

That distinction again. I kept coming back to it. The distinction between my father, who'd hidden his crimes and maintained the lie until it collapsed, and Will, who'd installed the tracker and then stood in front of me without denying it. Who'd said "I knew it was wrong" without being cornered into saying it.

My father had never said those words. Not once, in the entire unraveling. Not until the sentencing hearing, when his lawyer had coached him on what contrition was supposed to look like.

Will had said them unprompted. While I was still holding the evidence. Before I'd even asked.

It didn't make it okay. But it made it different. And different mattered, because if everything was the same, if every broken promise was identical to every other broken promise, then trust was impossible and love was a trap and I might as well go back to being the ghost who moved through investigations without being seen.

I didn't want to be a ghost anymore. That was the problem. I'd been fine with it for a decade, and then Will Steele had made me an omelet and argued about restaurant hygiene ratings and ripped a car door off its hinges, and now invisibility felt like a prison instead of a sanctuary.

An hour passed. Maybe two. The light in the room shifted from morning to afternoon.

Then I got up, went to the bathroom, washed my face, looked at myself in the mirror. The bruises were fading. The stitches were healing. I looked tired and pale and like someone who'd been having a very hard week, which was accurate.

"Okay," I said to my reflection. "Okay."

I didn't know what I meant by it. But it felt like a decision.

I walked back out to the living room and found Will at the dining table, laptop open, not typing. Just sitting there, staring at a screen that had probably gone to sleep twenty minutes ago. He looked up when I entered, and his face was a careful blank, the kind of blank that took effort to maintain, and I could see the effort it was costing him.

"The Eric Mendez operation," I said. "What's the timeline?"

Something moved in his expression. Not relief, exactly. More like the recalibration of a man who'd been preparing for the worst and gotten something else instead.

"Tomorrow night. Bates confirmed the security window. 10 to 10:15 PM at Reeves's residence."

"Then we have twenty-four hours to prepare." I moved toward my laptop, and my ribs protested, and I let them protest because pain was at least something I understood. "I found some additional financial links while I was recovering. More connections between the Cayman entities and the Delaware sub. It might give us leverage with Mendez."

"You've been working?" He sounded somewhere between impressed and exasperated. "You're supposed to be resting."

"I was bored." I pulled up the files I'd been quietly assembling. "Besides, someone had to do something useful while you were busy installing spyware on my phone."

He winced. "I deserved that."

"You deserve worse. I'm being generous because I'm injured and it makes me magnanimous."

"Magnanimous." The word came out rough, but something in his face loosened. Not a smile. Not even close. But the absence of the terrible blankness, replaced by something that looked like cautious hope. "Is that what we're calling it?"

"It's what I am." I looked up at him, and despite everything, the tracking app, the fight, the raw places we'd just opened up, I didn't want to be anywhere else. And that probably said something important about either my character or my judgment, and I'd figure out which one later. "Now get over here and help me figure out how to turn a gambling addict into an informant. We've got a trafficking ring to destroy."