Page 52 of Hunted in the Silence

“Yes. Through the center, probably. Something indirect. Something that lets him gauge my response before he makes his decision.” She paused, thinking. “When he does, I want to be the one who answers.”

Cole held her resolute gaze for a long moment, wanting to argue, but he knew deep down it would be a futile attempt. “We’ll talk to Silas in the morning. Build the response strategy around his profile.” He held her gaze. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.”

She stood silently, arms still wrapped around herself, measuring his answer, and apparently found it satisfactory. “All right.”

They stood in the kitchen for a moment longer. The house was quiet around them, the clock in the living room ticking away the seconds, the street outside gone still for the night. Through the window, the backyard was just a dark rectangle, a fence line just visible at the far edge thanks to a neighbor’s light in the distance.

“Tell me something,” Brynn said, her tone shifting to something less heavy and more curious.

“What?” Cole couldn’t prevent the slight bracing at the question, unsure of where she was heading.

“Something that isn’t about Devlin,” she clarified, meeting his eyes. Somewhere between their last line of conversation to this one, they’d returned to their respective positions in the small kitchen. Brynn picked up her cup and moved to the coffeemaker to pour herself another. “Something about you. Before all of this.”

He considered that, nodding when she’d held up the pot with raised brows, and he held out his cup for her to top off. He considered how she’d given him pieces of herself throughout the past two weeks, piecing it out with a little more trust each time. And now he realized she was asking for the same from him.

He’d never been a very open person with anyone, especially someone he worked with. Especially someone who wasn’t his partner. Sharing with Olivia was necessary for them to be efficient, a team, to trust one another with their lives. Sharing with Brynn was…well, he wasn’t sure if it constituted crossing a line or not. That had been blurred, and he no longer knew where it was.

But he knew to not share with her would equate to ending whatever this was happening between them, and he wasn’t ready for that.

“Minnesota,” he said, then cleared his throat. “I grew up on the edge of a lake. Small town, smaller than Blackridge. My father taught high school history, and my mother ran a hardware store that had been in her family for three generations.” He paused to sip his coffee, more for something to do, to give him time to collect his thoughts and sort through them, deciding where to go next. “We weren’t extraordinary people in any visible way. Just a family in a small town doing normal, everyday things.”

“That sounds good,” Brynn said with quiet approval.

“It was.” He looked up from his mug and held her gaze. “Abby was five years younger than me. She had my mother’s hair and my father’s stubbornness, and she was smarter than both of us put together.” He stopped, the familiar weight of emotion pressing on his shoulders. But tonight it felt different somehow, and he figured that had everything to do with the open way Brynn was watching him, listening without judgment. “She wanted to study environmental law. She had this idea about water rights in rural communities, had been reading about it since she was sixteen. She talked about it like it was her calling.” Hell, maybe it was. A twinge of regret pulled at him over teasing her about it. They were kids, he reminded himself for the countless time.

Brynn didn’t say anything. She just listened, which was exactly what he needed. It wasn’t lost on him how good she was at that, listening, the way she did with the girls who came through her center.

He continued. “After she died, I used to think about the water rights stuff. The kind of work she would have done, the cases she would have taken. All of it just gone.” He looked at his hands around the coffee cup. “I made it mean something about the work I do now. That her not getting to do her work was why I had to do mine. I’ve been living with that for seven years.”

“Does it help?” Brynn asked. The same question he’d asked her, weeks ago, about her own work.

He took a moment to think about it honestly. “Some days. Other days, it feels like I turned her into a reason instead of a person.” He looked up. “She was a person first. She was funny and stubborn, and she used to beat me at chess and act surprised every time, even after years of beating me.” A small smile twitched to life at the corner of his mouth. “She was a terrible loser and a very gracious winner, which is a super and annoying combination.”

Brynn smiled, a real one this time, the kind that reached her eyes, open and uncontrolled. “She sounds like someone I would have liked.”

“She would have liked you,” Cole said simply, knowing it to be true, and she nodded, accepting his words as fact, and as they continued to stand there in the quiet of the kitchen, the intimacy and warmth of the moment began to wrap around them like insulation from the insanity happening just outside the home’s walls.

They moved to the living room after that, because standing in the kitchen had started to feel like a decision neither of them had made yet, and the couch and the low lamp light and the slight distance of separate cushions made it easier to be honest.

Brynn tucked her feet under her, facing him, her coffee cup balanced on her knee. He sat at the other end with his arm along the back of the couch, and they kept talking the way they’d been talking, with the open, easy, unhurried rhythm of two people who had grown tired of pretending.

She told him about the first year after she escaped. The chaos of trying to exist in the world without any of the safety nets that most people built over a lifetime. No ID, no credit history, no address that lasted more than a few months. The social worker who had seen past the defensive surface of a seventeen-year-old who trusted nothing and found her a GED program and a part-time job and a therapist who wasn’t afraid of tackling the hard stuff. The years it had taken to build a foundation that felt permanent enough to stand on.

“The center,” Cole said. “How long did it take to get it open?”

“Three years from the idea to the doors.” She stared at the empty space between them, reflecting on the memory. “I was twenty-three. I had one donor, one staff member, and a lease on a space that used to be a dentist’s office. The first month we helped four women.” She paused, thinking. “I thought that was the whole world, those four women. I thought if I could just keep doing that, four at a time, it would be enough.”

“It was enough,” Cole assured her. “And then it became more.”

She looked at him. “Yeah.” A quiet recognition settled in her eyes. “That’s exactly what it was.”

He held her gaze across the couch. The lamp behind her caught the auburn in her hair, the warm brown of her eyes, the loose comfort of her in the gray pullover. She was watching him with the unguarded expression that appeared when she wasn’t actively deciding what parts to show, and he was aware of the two cushions standing between them as an increasingly insufficient distance.

“Cole,” she said softly.

“Yeah.”

“The thing Harper said.” Her expression turned shy and she twisted the cup on her knee. “I’ve been thinking about it all day.”