Page 43 of You, Only You

"I should go," Nicole said. "My dishes are still in the sink and I have a client meeting at nine. But Will?"

"Yeah?"

"The fact that you called me about this instead of building a spreadsheet of solutions? That's new. That's you reaching for a person instead of a system."

"I'm not sure calling my sister counts as a breakthrough."

"It does. Trust me." Her voice went warm. "And call me tomorrow. Tell me how it goes. Not the operational stuff. The real stuff."

"The real stuff."

"The scary stuff. The stuff you'd normally put in that room in your head where you keep everything you don't want to deal with."

"How do you know about the..."

"Will. I'm your sister. I know about the room. Everyone who loves you knows about the room." A beat. "Maybe it's time to start letting some of it out. Goodnight."

The line went dead.

I put the phone down. Stood there for a while longer, doing what Nicole said: sitting with it. The fear. The guilt. The image of Lindsey holding up the phone with that terrible calm on her face. The awareness that I'd confirmed every suspicion she'd carried since she was twenty-four years old, and that no amount of tactical planning could undo it.

The scotch was still on the counter. I poured it down the sink.

Then I did something I hadn't done in years: nothing. I sat on the couch in the dark living room and I let the silence be silence. I didn't plan. I didn't strategize. I didn't run scenarios. I just sat there with the full weight of having hurt someone I cared about, and I didn't try to make it smaller or more manageable or less real.

It was the most difficult hour of my life. Harder than any case. Harder than the car crash. Harder than standing in a storage unit showing a stranger seven years of my obsession.

But I stayed.

The balcony door opened sometime later. I didn't know when. I'd stopped tracking time, which was itself a kind of miracle.

I found Lindsey outside, leaning against the railing, wrapped in an oversized sweater that swallowed her frame. The night air was cool, carrying the distant hum of the city. She was staring out at the lights, her profile soft in the ambient glow.

The bruises on her face were fading from purple to yellow-green. The stitches on her temple were hidden beneath her hair. She looked tired. She looked like someone who'd spent the last two hours doing the same thing I had: sitting with something painful and not running from it.

I didn't announce myself. Just walked out and stood beside her. Not close. A foot of space between us, maybe more. Enough that she could feel my presence without feeling crowded.

She didn't startle. Didn't turn. "How long were you sitting in there?"

"A while."

"In the dark?"

"Yeah."

"Doing what?"

"Being afraid. Apparently that's a thing you can do without building a surveillance system around it. My sister told me."

She turned her head then. Looked at me. I couldn't read her expression in the dim light, but I could feel her attention, that focused, cataloging quality that was so fundamentally Lindsey.

"You called Nicole?"

"She said some things I needed to hear."

"Like what?"

I leaned against the railing, staring at the city. The answer to her question was complicated, layered, the kind of thing I'd normally edit into something strategic and controlled. But Nicole had said to try the real stuff. The scary stuff.