I reached across the table. Took his hand.
His fingers were rough with calluses, warm and solid in my grip. He went still at the contact, looking down at our joined hands like he wasn't sure how they'd gotten there.
His hands were different now. Rougher than I remembered. More scars, more calluses—the hands of a man who'd spent years pulling people from wreckage.
He turned his palm up and laced his fingers through mine.
We sat like that for a long time. The case files spread around us, Emma's face glowing on the laptop screen, the city humming outside the windows.
I didn't let go.
Neither did he.
My apartment felt empty when I got home.
I went through the motions of getting ready for bed. Washed my face. Brushed my teeth.
Changed into pajamas that felt wrong after the softness of Garrett's sheets.
Sleep didn't come.
I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and thought about Emma Marsh.
Eight years old. Crying through the smoke. Waiting for someone to save her.
Garrett had gone in. Climbed stairs and fought through heat and gotten close enough to hear her voice. Ten feet from her door. Ten feet from saving her.
And the floor had collapsed.
I thought about seven years of documentation. Seven years of filing reports that disappeared. Sending letters that were ignored. Watching buildings rot while officials looked the other way.
Seven years of trying to get someone—anyone—to care about the systems that had killed a child
He'd never told anyone. Carried it alone, the way he carried everything alone. Building his case in silence. Compiling evidence no one wanted to see. Fighting a battle no one else knew he was waging.
And I thought about what I'd done to him.
The depression I couldn't name. The darkness that had swallowed me after the miscarriage, so complete and so consuming that I couldn't see past it.
I'd convinced myself I was poison, that staying with him would only drag him down, that leaving was the kindest thing I could do.
So I left.
And then I stopped calling. Stopped writing. Let the silence stretch into months and then years because I was too ashamed to break it. Too convinced that I'd already ruined everything. Too afraid to face what I'd done.
I put him through hell.
The realization wasn't new. I'd known it for years, carried the guilt like a stone in my chest.
But sitting in his apartment, holding his hand while he told me about Emma—it hit different. Heavier.
He'd lost me, and then he'd lost her. In the same period.
While I was in DC, trying to put myself back together, he was here watching a child die in a building that should never have been allowed to stand.
And he'd never stopped caring about me.
The newspaper clippings on his coffee table. The food he ordered without asking. The way he'd carried me to his bed and slept on a too-short couch because he couldn't bear to wake me.
