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“That’s weird. So is Ronan,” I said, walking into the living room where my bag and all my jewelry was spread across the couch. The clothes I’d been wearing were in a pile in front of the window. The bag Ronan had been packing for me was forgotten on the floor. God, the plane and now having sex against this window.
Being Mrs. Ronan Byrne was turning me into someone new. I liked her. She was ballsy and sexy and owned all of that. It still felt a little bit like I was pretending, but I imagined change didn’t happen overnight. I needed to remember that when it came to Ronan, too. He could not change simply because I wanted him to. And it seemed, a little, like he wanted to, too.
“He’s…” Zilla sighed. “He’s a nice guy. And he…gets me. Like I don’t have to hide anything from him. I don’t have to pretend.”
I realized in her voice that pretending must be a large part of her life and I ached for her the way I always did. And I was proud of her and how strong she was. “That’s amazing, Zilla.”
“He’s still scary as fuck, but it’s not hard hanging out with him. He laughs at my jokes.”
“Good,” I said, and started picking my shit up off the floor.
“How are you and Ronan?”
I laughed because that was some kind of complicated. “Good,” I finally said, choosing not to go into the war we were wading into. “I think. I mean, I think he’s coming around to the idea of us. That he can believe me when I tell him I love him.”
I didn’t tell her about Ronan working for Bryant.
“Why do you do that?” she whispered.
“Do what?”
“Love someone who has no way of loving you back. Why do you give so much of yourself away when there’s no return?”
Another sunrise through the windows. My whole world was upside down here. I slept during the day and was held at gunpoint at night. And through it all there was Ronan. Ronan holding me tight. Keeping me safe. Loving me when he didn’t know the word.
“I think he can love me back. I think he does. But I can love him enough for both of us until he feels what I feel.”
“What if…what if some people aren’t made to feel love, Poppy? Or what if it’s been taken out of them? What if…”
I heard the question she was really asking and it broke my heart.
“I don’t think it’s love that gets taken out of someone. I think it’s trust. Some people have been hurt so badly the only way to get better was to only trust themselves.” I thought of Ronan and Caroline. I thought of Ronan’s mother.
“I love you, Zilla,” I said. “I hope you find some happiness with your murder accountant.”
“And I hope you find some with Ronan.”
Me too. I couldn’t tell her how fragile my happiness was. How loving Ronan felt like an act of recklessness and at the same time the safest thing I’d ever done. Maybe, I realized, that’s what love was.
It was being terrified of the leap but being sure of being caught.
We hung up and I tossed my phone on the couch and then bent down to pick up the plastic bag with its guts of gemstones.
I picked up the necklaces and set them on the coffee table. My foot nudged the jeweler’s case for Jim’s pearls and I reached down and grabbed it by the lid. These fucking things. Jim said they were heirlooms, a gift from his grandfather to his grandmother and passed down to his mother and then to me. Every time I wore them, he made it clear that I was somehow a disappointment to him, unable to live up to his mother’s memory. She’d apparently been a strong woman, stronger, he thought, than me, because I allowed him to break my finger and punch me in the stomach.
I hated these pearls. They were chains to the past. And ugly as fuck.
I picked it up by the lid but the ancient clasp on it was unpredictable and opened, while the box was upside down and the pearls with the velvet insert the pearls rested on fell out. And with them a small chrome thumb drive.
* * *
Poppy
I looked down at that little thumb drive and nailed my hopes to the ground. There was no way the senator would store whatever information he was gathering for Bryant Morelli in a thumb drive hidden in my jewelry.
Ludicrous. But…still. I picked up the thumb drive. It was the kind that you twisted part of it and the USB came out. Part of me wanted to wake Ronan immediately, but he needed sleep and there could be anything stored on this thing.
Maybe he was writing a terrible spy novel.
