Page 56 of You, Only You

"All good," I said.

"Good."

He went back to his side of the table. The soap smell lingered for another thirty seconds, which I timed, because I timed everything, because my brain was a prison and I was serving a life sentence in it.

That night I couldn't sleep.

This was not new. I hadn't slept well since the hallway, which was a polite way of saying I hadn't slept well since Will Steele had kissed me like I was the last true thing in the world and then walked away from me like a man walking into a burning building on purpose.

I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling, which was white and featureless and offered no insights. The safe house bed was fine. The sheets were fine. Everything was fine and I was wide awake at midnight with my heart doing something complicated and my brain running the same loop it had been running for four days.

The loop went like this:

He kissed me. He meant it. I felt what he meant in the way his hands held my face, in the sound he made against my mouth, in the trembling that hadn't stopped even when our lips met. That was real. That was the realest thing I'd experienced in years, maybe ever, and I would stake my professional reputationon the authenticity of that kiss, which was saying something because my professional reputation was basically all I had.

Then he walked away. And the walking away was also real. The shutting down. The door closing. The transformation back into Professional Will, smooth and competent and empty, like watching someone put on a costume and zip it up to the throat.

Both things were true. He wanted me and he wouldn't let himself have me. He'd opened the door and then bricked it shut from the inside.

I knew this pattern. I'd grown up inside this pattern. My father had been the master of the double truth: loving father, secret criminal. Warm smile, cold calculations. The man who held your hand and the man who stole from your future, living in the same body, wearing the same face.

Will wasn't my father. I knew that. The logical, analytical part of my brain had done the comparison and rejected it. Will's secrets were different. His reasons were different. The shape of his deception was different.

But the feeling. The feeling of someone showing you one face and then another. The whiplash of closeness and withdrawal. The exhausting work of trying to figure out which version was real and which was the performance. That feeling was exactly the same, and it lived in a part of me that didn't care about logic or analysis or the important differences between a thief and a man who hunted thieves.

That part just remembered what it felt like to trust someone who kept changing the rules.

I turned over. Stared at the wall instead of the ceiling. The wall was equally unhelpful.

The stupid thing, the thing I couldn't admit to anyone including myself, was that I wasn't angry. I wanted to be angry. Angry was clean. Angry had structure and direction and a clearly identified target. Angry would have been so much easier thanwhat I actually felt, which was something closer to grief. The specific grief of almost having something and then watching it be taken away, not by circumstance or fate or bad luck but by the person who was holding it, who looked at what they had and decided to set it down.

He'd chosen to walk away. That was the part I kept snagging on. Not that he was scared, not that his reasons made a certain kind of twisted sense, but that when the moment came, he'd chosen the fear over me.

My father had made choices too. Different choices, different stakes, but the architecture was the same: a person deciding that their own calculus mattered more than the person standing in front of them.

I rolled onto my back again. Stared at the ceiling again. The ceiling remained neutral.

Around one in the morning, I gave up on sleep and went to find something to eat. The kitchen was dark, but light spilled from the living room, and when I turned the corner I found Will on the couch, laptop open on the coffee table, not typing. Just sitting in the blue glow of a screen that had probably gone to sleep twenty minutes ago, staring at nothing.

He looked up. I looked at him. We were both wearing the particular expression of people who'd been caught not sleeping by someone they were pretending to be fine around.

"Couldn't sleep," I said, because it was obvious and therefore safe.

"Me either."

I went to the kitchen. Got a glass of water. Stood at the counter and drank it slowly, aware of him in the next room the way you're aware of weather. He didn't come into the kitchen. I didn't go into the living room. We maintained our zones like rival countries observing a ceasefire.

I put the glass in the sink and went back to bed and didn't sleep for another two hours.

The breakthrough, when it came, arrived wearing the costume of a normal workday.

Day four. I'd been digging through Meridian Tech's internal communications, the ones Bates had obtained through a warrant after our initial evidence gave him probable cause. Metadata analysis. The tedious, granular work that most people found mind-numbing and I found almost meditative, the way some people found knitting or long-distance running. My brain liked the repetition. Liked the way patterns emerged from noise if you sat with the noise long enough.

The pattern that emerged was this: certain emails from Reeves's personal server were being routed through an encryption protocol that didn't match the company's standard security. A private channel. Hidden in plain sight, the way the best hiding places always were.

"Will." His name still felt heavy in my mouth. Too many associations packed into one syllable. "You need to see this."

He came to my side of the table. Maintained his six inches of distance, which I was aware of the way I was aware of his soap and his breathing and the exact angle at which light hit his jawline, all of which was information I had not requested and could not return.