For twelve years, the work had been enough. The mission, the team, the certainty that came from knowing exactly what you were trained for and being very good at it. When operationsended, you went back to base. When deployments ended, you went home to an apartment that was clean and yours. When you left the unit, you found work that used the same skills and fed the same part of you that had always been satisfied by moving through the world with purpose.
But sitting here, with proof that would close Emily's case and photographs that would put Dominic Vance in federal prison for decades, all Jake wanted was to drive back to Tampa and tell her what he'd found. Not because she needed to know for the case, though she did. Not because Ray needed to be briefed, though he would be.
Because for the first time in his life, he wanted someone to stay.
He wanted to walk into a room at the end of the day and find Emily there. Not visiting. Not spending the night. There. In a space that belonged to both of them, with a dog that had claimed them both, in a life they'd built together one conversation at a time.
He wanted her to stay, and he wanted to be the kind of man someone like Emily Callahan would choose to stay with.
The realization sat in. He'd crossed a line he hadn't seen coming, and there was no retreat from this side of it. He was in love with her completely, not just attracted or attached or drawn to her competence and warmth. In love with her in a way that made every other way he'd felt about anyone else seem like practice.
Jake pulled out his phone. Typed three words.
Coming in. 20 minutes.
He hit send and pulled out of the boat launch, heading for Tampa and the woman who'd changed everything without trying.
The text cameat 2:47 on a Thursday afternoon.
Emily was in her office with depositions spread across the desk in a pattern only she could follow, the photo frame glowing beside her laptop. She'd stopped catching herself staring at it. That wasn't true. She noticed every time the image changed, tracked the rotation like you track the second hand on a clock when you're waiting for news you aren't sure you want. But she'd stopped letting herself linger, because lingering meant thinking about where he was and whether he was safe, and that line of thinking had been eating a hole through the center of her concentration for two days.
Her phone lit up on the desk.
Coming in. 20 minutes.
Three words. No context, no detail, no explanation for forty-eight hours of silence. Emily read them twice, and the relief that moved through her was so immediate and so total that she had to set both hands flat on the desk and hold them there until the shaking in her fingers stopped.
He was alive. He was coming back. Everything else was information she could get later.
She picked up the phone. Her thumbs moved before the prosecutor could intervene.
Parking garage. Don't make me come find you.
She sent it. Read it back. Decided she meant every syllable and didn't care what it revealed about what the last two days had cost her.
Then she stood, closed the laptop, and walked to the elevator with the intentional stride of a woman who had somewhere to be and God help anyone who slowed her down.
The parking garagewas the same as it always was. Concrete and motor oil and fluorescent lights that turned everyone the colorof skim milk. Emily leaned against a pillar near the elevator bank with her arms crossed and waited. Her heart was doing a thing she refused to dignify by naming, because naming it meant admitting that Emily Callahan, who had cross-examined cartel lieutenants without a tremor in her voice, was standing in a parking garage with her pulse visible in her throat because a man had texted that he was twenty minutes away.
She heard the Range Rover before she saw it. The specific note of that engine, the one he'd told her the Syria story about on their first day together in the field, back when she'd thought he was arrogant and interesting and a problem she didn't need. The sound grew, tires on concrete, echoing off the low ceiling, and then the black nose of it came around the turn on the second level and she pushed off the pillar and started walking toward it without deciding to.
He parked three spaces from the elevator. The engine cut. The door opened.
Jake Walsh stepped out of the Range Rover looking like he'd slept in his clothes, which he probably had. Jeans, a dark t-shirt she didn't recognize, the backwards hat that she'd once found insufferable and now associated with every version of him she'd fallen for. Two days of stubble that was heavier than she'd ever seen on him. His eyes found her immediately, as they always found her, as though she were the first coordinate his operating system locked onto when entering any space.
"Hey," he said.
Emily crossed the distance between them. Not the five feet from her apartment parking garage, that closing of a gap between two people still negotiating the terms. This was fifteen feet of open concrete and she covered it without slowing down, without measuring her steps, without performing the controlled approach of a woman who'd spent two days pretending she wasn't terrified.
She put her hands on his shoulders. Felt him solid and warm and present under her palms. Ran them up to his shoulders, his neck, the sides of his face, reading him like she would read a document that had been missing from the file and finally resurfaced. Present. Intact. Real.
That was when she found it.
A small cut just below the hairline on his left side. Scabbed over, maybe two days old, a thin line of broken skin partially hidden by the hat.
Her fingers stopped moving.
"What is this." Not a question. The voice she used when a witness changed their testimony on the stand.
