Jake's hand came up and covered hers, gently pulling it away from the cut. "Nothing happened, Em. I promise you. A tree branch was the only hostile I encountered the entire time."
She searched his face. Ran through every tell she'd cataloged over these weeks, every micro-expression she'd learned to read in a man who was trained to show nothing he didn't choose to show. His eyes were clear. Tired, but clear. No tension in the muscles along his jaw, no guarded quality behind the warmth. He was telling the truth.
"A tree branch."
"It was dark. I was moving through brush near a property line and a live oak took a clean shot at me." The corner of his mouth lifted. "I'd give it a seven for technique. Solid ambush positioning."
"This isn't funny."
"It's a little funny."
"I haven't slept in two days, Jake."
The humor left his face. Not abruptly, not like a door closing. It drained out, just as warmth leaves the air when the sun goes behind a cloud, and what remained was the thing underneath that he carried when he thought nobody was paying attention.Except she was always paying attention now, and they both knew it.
"I know," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize. Come here."
She pulled him toward her and he went. His arms closed around her with the pressure of a man who understood exactly what the last two days had cost and was not going to pretend they hadn't happened. Emily pressed her face into him, into the smell of road and old coffee and pine resin that might have been the tree that cut him, and felt her body give up a tension she hadn't been able to name because naming it would have meant admitting how far it reached.
He held her. In a parking garage, under fluorescent lights, with his bag still in the back seat and the engine ticking as it cooled. He held her how he held everything that mattered to him. Completely. Without qualification. Without glancing over her shoulder to check whether anyone was watching.
They stood there. Emily counted to ten because she needed a number, a boundary, a unit of measurement to contain what she was feeling, and ten seemed like enough. She got to six and gave up counting.
"I found him," Jake said into her hair.
Emily went still.
"He's at the cabin. Never left. He's been there the whole time."
She pulled back far enough to see his face. "How?"
"I'll tell you everything. Ray needs to hear it too." His thumb traced her cheekbone, the gesture she'd learned to recognize as the thing he did when he wanted to look at her without needing the excuse of a conversation. "But I needed this first. Before the briefing, before the plan. This."
Two days ago she'd straightened his collar in a government hallway because it was the only way she could touch him in abuilding full of colleagues. Now she was standing in a parking garage with both hands on his face and his arms around her waist and a missing witness located, and the order of operations told her everything she needed to know about what Jake Walsh considered mission-critical.
Her. Before the case. Before the debrief. Her.
"Ray's in his office," she said.
"Figured."
"He's been patient. Unusually patient, which means he's worried."
"Ray worries by being calm. It's his worst quality."
She almost smiled. Touched the cut one more time, gently, tracing the edge of it with her fingertip as you'd trace the border of a country on a map, memorizing the shape of it, filing away the proof that two days in the field had cost him nothing worse than an argument with Florida vegetation. She filed that proof in the space between relief and the silent fury of a woman who'd been given back the thing she'd spent two days being afraid of losing.
"Let's go," she said.
She didn't step away from him. She turned within the circle of his arms and walked toward the elevator, and he fell into step beside her with his hand settling against the small of her back, the warmth of it reaching her through her blouse as it always did. In the elevator she pressed the button for Ray's floor and stood next to him and said nothing, because the silence between them now was a different species entirely than the silence of the last two days. This one had texture and the density of two people occupying the same air again after an absence that had rearranged things neither of them had expected to be rearrangeable.
Jake reached over and took her hand. He didn't look at her when he did it. Just found her fingers and laced them throughhis, the manner you pick up a book you'd set down mid-sentence, knowing exactly which page you were on.
The elevator doors opened. Emily let go of his hand before they stepped into the hallway. Not because she wanted to, but because this was still a federal building and she was still a prosecutor and the lines between personal and professional served a purpose even when you'd spent two days wishing they didn't exist.
Ray's door was open.He was behind his desk, jacket off, reading a brief on his screen with the focused attention of a man who was working because the alternative was waiting, and Ray Crawford did not wait well when someone he cared about was in the field.
