“I'm scared.” Not of him leaving. Not of Valeria. Not of any of the things I can name. “I'm scared of who I'm going to be by the time this is over.”
Ian's arms tighten around me. He doesn't say it'll be okay. He doesn't promise me anything. He just presses his lips to the top of my head and holds me with the steady certainty of someonewho has decided that this—right here, this wreckage—is exactly where he's supposed to be.
“You're going to be the woman who survived it,” he says finally. “That's who you're going to be.”
I cry until I have nothing left.
Until the sobs slow to shaking and the shaking slows to stillness and Ian's shirt is completely wrecked and the tequila is half gone and the lollipop is still in my hand.
Eventually, the stillness becomes something almost like peace.
Not better. Just emptied out. The dam broken and the water gone and the quiet that comes after.
I don't let go of Ian. He doesn't let go of me. Outside, Paris. Inside, just us. The two people he left behind to wait for him.
We're good at waiting.
We don't have a choice.
16
RETH
The job took two days.
I could’ve done it in less. But the target was careful, and careful men require patience, and patience is the one thing I have in quantities that never run out.
Rowan's jobs are always clean—no theatrics, no drawn-out suffering, nothing like what Valeria sends me to do. Just a target, a window, a clean exit.
Rowan's message came an hour later.
Stay two days. Make sure it's clean.
I stared at it for a long moment. Thought about what two more days in Brussels means. What two more days means in the context of what's waiting on the other side of them—a flight back, Valeria's compound, the performance of a man who spent a week in Paris with a woman he loves and is now required to pretend he doesn't.
I texted back one word.Understood.
So I stayed.
The hotel Rowan chose is the kind I hate. Glass and marble and staff who make eye contact in a way that means they've been taught to treat every guest like the most important person in the room. Everything on display. Nothing to hide behind.
Give me a backstreet motel any day—the kind where you pay cash by the hour and nobody remembers your face and the sheets are thin and the lock on the door requires actual attention. Those rooms, I understand. They don't pretend to be anything.
This room pretends to be everything.
It wants you to believe it’s curated, personalized, exclusive. The bedsheets are white on white on white, layered in that excessive way of hotels that want you to understand how many thread counts they can afford. A single chocolate on the pillow like punctuation at the end of a sentence nobody asked for. And there’s a painting over it that tries to convince me colors can have feelings.
The tub had a brochure beside it, rolled like a scroll, for Christ’s sake. It detailed the sixteen essential oils and the origin stories of every single one in the bath salts they provided. It’s a four-hundred square feet box, and I’m suffocating.
I've been sitting on the chair in the corner for an hour staring at the wall.
No contact with Paris. That's the rule—mine, not anyone else's. No calls, no texts, nothing that can be traced or intercepted or used. The silence is operational. Correct. And it's making me want to climb out of my own fucking skin.
I don't know how she is.
I don't know if she found the lollipop and understood or if she found it and fell apart. I don’t know if she cried—if she’s still crying. I don’t know if she’s angry, lonely, if she’s eating. And the not knowing sits in my chest like a coal that won't cool, like something alive and burning that discipline can't quite reach.
What I do know is that Ian’s there, ready to hold the pieces if they’re falling apart. And I hate that. I appreciate it, but I hate that he’s there and not me. I hate that he gets to see her every day while I sit and ache for her in ways I never thought humanly possible. Some parts of me miss the days when I felt nothing. It was easier. Cleaner. Functioning on routine, muscle memory, calculations. Not emotions and hope and love.
