Page 73 of You Can Run

“We don't know that. We haven't –”

“Jessica.”

“We haven't exhausted every option. We could go to the FBI, we could find someone in Borya's organization who wants out, we could—” She heard herself and knew how it sounded and kept going anyway because stopping meant accepting this madness. “Miller had contacts, and even if Miller was compromised there might be someone else, someone we haven't tried yet.”

“There's no one,” he said softly.

She looked at him. “So you just decided. By yourself.”

“If I'd told you, you'd have said no.”

“Yes.” Her voice cracked on the word. “Yes, I absolutely would have said no. I would have said no because you don't get to make this decision on your own.” She shook her head. “You came back into my life three days ago. Three days. And now you're standing there telling me you've arranged to give yourself up? She's going to take you straight to him, Dante. Do you understand that? She's going to hand you to Borya and he is going to kill you.”

“I know what he'll do.”

The flatness of it silenced her for a moment.

She looked at the woman then—really looked at her, for the first time since she'd come through the door. Her features were a strange mix: olive skin, pockmarked at her cheeks, pale blue slanted eyes, black hair. A combination of Slavic and Hispanic, although she spoke with the accent of neither. She was watching the exchange with an expression that was difficult to read—taking in everything and returning nothing.

“We should go soon,” she said to Dante.

Jessica turned back to Dante. She felt the bargaining run out of her like water out of a cracked thing. All the alternative routes, the other options, the versions where this ended differently were gone.

“Don't do this,” was all she could say.

He crossed the room to her.

She felt him coming and told herself she wasn't going to let him touch her, that she was going to step back, that she wasn't going to make this easier for him by letting him hold her while he broke her apart. She stood her ground for approximately two seconds after his hands found her face, and then she went to pieces against his chest in a way she hadn't let herself go to pieces in years.

He held on. She felt how hard he was holding on, she felt him press his mouth against the top of her head, felt the long, shuddering breath he took and the way he controlled it on the way out.

He almost broke. She felt it move through him like a tremor, felt the moment it reached the surface and the moment he pushed it back down, and she hated him fiercely and completely for the strength of it.

“You were supposed to stay,” she said into his chest. Her voice was wrecked. “You were supposed to stay this time.”

He didn't say anything. He held her tighter for a moment and then he stepped back. Then he walked toward the other woman and the door and the morning outside.

The door closed behind them.

The room was very quiet and very bright and entirely empty of everything that had mattered, and Jessica stood in the middle of it and breathed, and breathed, and breathed.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Jessica saton the deck for a long time. The Gulf had gone from gold to white as the sun climbed.

She wasn't crying. What she felt instead was something worse: a blankness so total it scared her, as if the part of her that knew how to react to losing him had been cut out cleanly. What was left was just a woman sitting in a chair, breathing.

He'd walked away from her. He'd put himself between her and the thing that was coming, the way he'd been doing since the night she first met him. This time the thing that was coming had a price he could pay and she couldn't stop him from paying it.

She kept seeing his face in the last moment before he turned away. He'd looked at her like he was memorizing her. Like he already knew he wasn't coming back and needed one last version of her to carry with him into whatever came next.

Jessica looked down at her hands. The ring was still on her finger. She turned it once, feeling the smooth underside, and something moved in her chest. She pressed her palms flat against her thighs and breathed until it passed.

At some point she went inside and found the primary bedroom closet with a shelf of basics kept for guests, the kindof rental that thought of everything. Black leggings, a denim jacket, a pair of boots half a size too big. She dressed slowly, like someone performing a task that required concentration. She left the Santiago’s old t-shirt folded on the bed.

She made coffee and stood at the glass wall and drank it and looked at the water and tried to think about Corpus Christi. Her duplex. The street outside. The Bare Minimum. Her old life, the one she could return to now, the one Dante had bought back for her with his own.

She got surprisingly far with it. That was the worst part. She could see the key in her lock, the first morning back in her own kitchen. She could see herself doing it for a week, a month, a year—filling the hours the way she always had, with routine and work and the slow, disciplined effort of not wanting anything too much.