"Let me lead."
He smiled. A small one, just the corner of his mouth. Then he nodded, one tilt of his head that carried more trust than words would have managed.
He killed the engine. Emily nodded. She opened her door, and the morning humidity slammed against her skin like a second layer, warm and dense with the smell of cut grass and someone's sprinkler system running two houses down.
They walked up the front path together. Emily in front, Jake a half step behind and to her left. She felt the intent of his positioning, how he'd arranged himself as support without anyone having to discuss it. The shape of a partnership that had found its own structure.
She rang the bell.
Footsteps inside. Slower than last time. A pause, longer than comfortable, the hesitation of a woman deciding whether to open a door she wasn't expecting anyone to knock on this early on a Friday morning.
Angela opened it halfway. Not the three-inch gap from last time. She stood in the doorway in jeans and a t-shirt that hung on her frame, and she looked like she hadn't slept at all, which was probably true. Her eyes went to Emily first, then to Jake, then back to Emily with the searching quality of someone trying to decide whether what had just arrived on her porch was rescue or disaster.
"Can we come in?" Emily asked.
Angela stepped back without a word.
The living room hadn't changed either. Same blanket folded on the couch. Same wedding photo on the end table, Ryan in a suit that fit, smiling the smile of a man who didn't know what was coming. The television was off this time. Angela had been waiting, not pretending.
Emily sat in the chair across from the couch. Jake stayed near the door.
Angela lowered herself onto the couch and folded her hands in her lap with the precision of someone who needed to put herbody somewhere controlled because everything else was about to come apart.
"Angela," Emily said. "We know where Ryan is."
Angela's grip tightened in her own lap but her face didn't move. She'd been bracing for this. Maybe since she'd started making those weekly drives to the property line with a cooler and two bags of groceries, she'd known that eventually someone would sit in her living room and say these words.
"He's been in the smokehouse behind the cabin," Emily continued. "His grandfather's smokehouse. The one that doesn't show up on any survey because the trees grew around it decades ago."
Angela's composure held for another two seconds. Then it didn't.
The sound she made wasn't crying, not yet. It was the sound of a burden being set down, a long exhale that carried weeks of pretending she didn't know where her husband was, weeks of driving to a tree line and leaving food and driving away without seeing him because that was the agreement, weeks of fielding phone calls from federal agents and looking them in the eye and saying I don't know while her body held the truth like a stone she'd swallowed.
"I didn't tell them," she said. Her voice was raw. "Every time someone came to the door. The marshals. The agents. I didn't tell them."
Emily didn't move. Didn't nod. Just held the space when you hold a door open for someone carrying too much.
"He made me promise."
Emily leaned forward. Closing the distance because the woman across from her was breaking open and Emily understood, with the clarity that the last two weeks had given her, exactly what that felt like. "Angela, I need to ask you to do something hard."
Angela's eyes came up. Red-rimmed, wet, holding on.
"I need you to come with us. To the cabin. Ryan is not going to open that door for a badge. He's not going to open it for a stranger, no matter what we say or what credentials we show him. He's been hiding from institutions for three weeks because institutions failed him."
"He'll open it for you."
Angela was shaking her head before Emily finished. Small movements, not refusal exactly, but the physical expression of a woman whose body was saying I can't while her mind was still processing.
"I can't. If I go out there and he sees me with you, he'll think I betrayed him. He'll think I gave him up."
"You didn't give him up. We found him. His hiding place was good, Angela. It was smart and it kept him alive. But we found him, and if we found him, Vance's people can find him too. The only difference is what happens when someone walks up to that smokehouse door."
Angela bent forward, shoulders curling inward. The fine trembling of a body running on fear and exhaustion and love, which was a fuel that burned hot but burned you with it.
"You're asking me to end the only thing that's been keeping him safe."
"I'm asking you to trade one kind of safe for a better one." Emily's voice was the courtroom register repurposed for a living room in Town 'n' Country where a woman was deciding whether to trust a stranger with her husband's life. "Witness protection. A new identity. Federal security that Vance can't reach through. Ryan testifies, Vance goes away for decades, and your husband stops being a target. That's the trade. A smokehouse and canned food for a life. A life with you."
