"Anna."
She looked up.
The smile was gone. The warmth was gone. What was left was the thing underneath all of it, the thing he'd been circling for twenty years without ever landing on.
"What if she finds out who I really am? What I did. And it scares her away."
Anna set the pencil down. She didn't smile. The expression that crossed her face was harder to name, hurt and care braided together, the look of a woman who'd been waiting a very long time for him to stop performing and start talking.
"Now you're telling me the truth."
She came back to the table. Took his hand. Held it the way she'd held it when he was twenty-two and shipping out for the first time, not tight, just present, justthere.
"I don't think this one will run, Jake. I think she already knows more than you've told her." She paused. "The question is whether you want to give her the real story or make her write that chapter on her own."
Jake sat with that. The restaurant held its mid-afternoon silence. The ice machine cycling. A car outside. His own breathing, slower now than when he'd walked in.
He thought about Emily Callahan and the words on his phone and what it would cost to sit across from her and say the things he'd never said to anyone. The faces. The names. The rooms. All of it.
He thought about what it would cost not to.
"I don't know how," he said.
"Yes you do." Anna squeezed his hand once and let go. "You just start. She'll do the rest."
CHAPTER 15
The Anchor was wrong. Emily knew it from the parking lot. Friday afternoon, pre-rush, and the building had the energy of a bar winding up for the night. Trucks in the gravel. A delivery van by the side door. Music already playing inside, muffled by the walls.
But no Range Rover.
She parked and sat with her hands on the wheel of the Yukon and her heart doing things her brain couldn't regulate. Ray had said she'd know where to find him. She'd driven here on instinct, the way you drive to the place that matters, and the place that mattered didn't have Jake's car in the lot.
The interior was dim and half-lit and smelled like fresh-cut limes and wood polish. A few regulars were stationed at the far end of the bar. The pool table in the back was empty, cues racked and waiting. The booths were clean, the napkins folded, the choreography of a Friday night being built before the crowd arrived.
No Gator behind the bar. No Jake in any booth. No Tommy telling a story to an empty room.
The man behind the bar was in his mid-thirties, compact, efficient, moving with the economy of someone who'd beendoing this long enough not to waste a step. He had a towel over his shoulder and a case of bottles he was working through, stocking the wells with the rhythmic precision of a mechanic rebuilding an engine.
"Help you?" He didn't look up. Not unfriendly. Focused.
"I'm looking for Jake Walsh."
"Haven't seen him today." He slid a bottle into place, reached for the next.
"Is Gator here?"
The question made him look up. Not fast. Slow, the assessment of a man deciding what to do with the person standing in front of him. His eyes moved over Emily's face with the focus of someone reading past the surface into the thing underneath.
Whatever he found there changed him.
"You're Emily."
She didn't ask how he knew. Didn't ask who he was. The way he said her name told her he was part of this world, the one Jake had built, the one that operated on a frequency she was learning to hear.
"Yes."
He went back to the glass he was polishing. Slow circles with the towel, repetitive motion that looked like ignoring but wasn't. Emily stood at the bar and waited because she'd learned, in the last few weeks, that the people in Jake's life operated on their own timelines and pushing didn't accelerate anything.
