“He always does,” I say, remembering the times she would rant about him, but she knows his work makes hers better.
“But the bones are solid,” she adds on.
“It’s good?”I ask.
She looks at me with the directness she reserves for things she’s certain about.Her confidence is never lacking when it comes to her work.“It’s the best piece I’ve ever written,” she says.“I know that sounds immodest.”
“You’re the humblest person I know, so I know it’s accurate.”
She exhales slowly, sitting back in her chair.The tension in her shoulders is more pronounced tonight.She’s carrying not just the coiled frustration of being trapped but the burden of carrying a heavy load for too long and can almost see the place where she gets to set it down.
Almost.
“How were the docks?”she asks brightly.
A little too brightly.
“Productive,” I say.“Josie found some anomalies worth following up on.”
“Mmm.”She turns her pen over in her fingers.“Must be nice.Getting out.”
She says it lightly, but I hear the envy underneath it and I’m not going to pretend I don’t.“Yeah,” I say simply.“I know.”
She tilts her head, studying me.“You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“Agree with me instead of arguing.”The corner of her mouth curves.“The old Cole would have told me the building was perfectly comfortable and I was being ungrateful.”
“The old Cole was an idiot,” I say.
She laughs, surprised and unguarded, her eyes lighting up for a few precious moments.“And you’re the most self-aware man I know.I appreciate that about you, you know?”
I ignore the compliment as she’s said it to me more than once over the years.I push off the counter and move toward the table, pulling out the chair beside her and sitting, close enough that my knee finds hers underneath.
“How much longer?”I ask, nodding at the laptop.
“The article?”She glances at the screen.“Tonight maybe.Tomorrow morning at the latest.”She pauses.“And then I wait for Simon, and then I wait for legal, and then I wait for print,” Tessa says with the impatient resignation of someone who has made peace with the last mile of a long road, then blows out a long breath.“I’m just ready to be done with it.”
“It’s almost over,” I say.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”I reach over and close her laptop gently.“Tessa.Look at what you’ve built.Financial trails, the SAPG connection, Vega tied to the breach, Pelham and DelRey linked through blood as well as business and damning emails.”I rest my forearm on the table, angling toward her.“When this publishes, there’s nowhere for them to go.The FBI investigation starts the same day.The public pressure and the legal pressure hit simultaneously.It’s over.”
She looks at me steadily.“You sound very certain.”
“I am certain.”
“About the case,” she says.And then, more carefully.“What about after?”
The question settles between us without urgency.There’s no demand or ultimatum in her tone but a weighted curiosity.It feels like she’s been turning it over for days, but then again… I’ve been doing the same.Tessa and I never had a problem with was communicating our fears and desires.
I don’t look away from her.“What about us, you mean?”
“We haven’t talked about it,” she says with a soft smile.“We’ve been—” She gestures between us.“Whatever this is, and it’s been good.Really good.But I have a job that is always going to involve some level of danger, and you have a job that is always going to involve some level of danger, and neither of us has said anything about what happens when this particular danger is over.”
“What do you want to happen?”I ask, a bit of a cowardly way out of laying out my feelings first.
