Claire stared at her. The waiter approached, saw Claire's face, and redirected to another table.
"You drove across the bay." Claire set her water down. "To a town you don't know. Walked into a building full of special operations veterans. And told a stranger you were Jake Walsh's girl."
"Yes."
"Emily." Claire's voice had changed. The teasing was gone. The excitement was gone. What was left was deeper, rawer, the same expression she'd worn on the steps when she'd saidyou're gone. "You've never done anything like that in your life."
"I know."
"You don't chase. You don't cross town for anyone. You barely cross the hall."
"I know, Claire."
"This isn't a fling." It wasn't a question. Claire said it like a doctor reading a diagnosis off a chart, certain and final. "This is real. This is the most real thing I've ever watched happen to you."
"It's the most real thing that's ever happened to me."
Claire's eyes were bright. She blinked twice, fast, and reached across the table and squeezed Emily's hand once, hard. Then she let go and sat back and Emily watched her best friend rearrange her face into composure that didn't quite hold.
"Okay," Claire said. "So you brought him home."
"I brought him home."
"And?"
Emily looked at her cup. At the patio. At the couple two tables over sharing a plate of fruit and not touching each other, and she felt a pity she had no right to for anyone who hadn't experienced what she'd experienced last night.
"And," Emily said.
Claire waited.
"He carried me down the hallway."
"He picked you up."
"Off my feet. Like I weighed nothing. Like I was—" She stopped. Found the word. "Irreplaceable."
Claire's hand was over her mouth.
"And he was patient, Claire. Patient in a way I didn't know was possible. Like every second mattered more than the next one. Like he had nowhere else to be for the rest of his life."
"I am going to cry in this restaurant."
"He was shaking. This man who has done things I can't even imagine, who walked into a warehouse full of Vance's people like he was going to buy coffee. He was shaking because of me."
Claire had given up on composure entirely. She was wiping her eyes with her napkin, laughing and crying at the same time, drawing a glance from the couple with the fruit plate.
"And?" Claire said.
Emily looked at her best friend. And the thing she'd been holding back, the detail that had been sitting with all morning like a secret she was desperate to tell someone, rose to the surface.
"I got a two-for-one," she said.
Claire went absolutely still.
"I'm sorry," Claire said. "Did you just say?—"
"A two-for-one. Before. You know." Emily felt heat rise in her face and did nothing to stop it. “One before the other.”
