She stares at me. Her grip on the duffel loosens by a fraction.
"A safe house," she repeats.
"Three hours north. Fortified. Full security detail. Only until the Sullivan situation is resolved. That's what I was discussing with my brothers." I hold her gaze. "That’s what you heard me say."
The silence stretches. A car passes on the cross street, headlights sweeping across us and moving on.
Her expression doesn't break—not all at once. It disassembles piece by piece. The set jaw slackens. The braced shoulders drop an inch. The line between her brows deepens into something that isn't anger.
"You were…protecting me?”
“Trying to.”
"Not getting rid of me."
"Getting rid of you would require someone to surgically remove you from my heart. That's where you live now."
A sound escapes her—half laugh, half something sharper. She presses the back of her hand to her mouth.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Her voice fractures on the question. "Why did I have to feel you pull away and then jump to all kinds of conclusions?"
"Because I'm an idiot." No hedging, no qualification. "Because I thought I had more time. Because I handle every threat in the world with precision except the threat of telling my wife what she means to me."
"What do I mean to you?"
The question hangs between us, and I know this is the moment. The one I've been circling, approaching and retreating, telling myself I'd get to it when the timing was right. The timing will never be more right. The time is now, in a shuttered doorway at four in the morning, backlit by a streetlamp, with my wife sitting on cold concrete clutching a duffel bag and a burner phone.
I crouch in front of her. Eye level. My knees hit the sidewalk, and I don't care. She watches me descend with wide, uncertain eyes.
"You mean everything." My voice is rough and stripped bare—no armor, no control, nothing between the words andthe bleeding truth behind them. "I love you, Saoirse. I've never said those words to a human being before tonight. Not to my brothers, not to my mother, not to anyone. I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to be someone worth staying for. But I love you, and I'm asking you?—"
I reach out and take her hands. She lets me. Her fingers are ice-cold, and her pulse slams against my thumbs the same way it did in the laundromat that first day—fast, frantic, impossibly alive.
"I'm asking you to come home. Not because you owe me. Not because you don't have a choice. You have the money, the card, and a city full of doors. You can walk through any one of them and never look back."
Her breath catches.
"But I'm asking you to choose me. Us.” I tighten my grip on her hands. "I've spent my whole life being the man people send when they need something broken. I break things. That's what I do. That's what I've always done. But not this. Not you. Not us."
A tear tracks down her cheek. Then another. She doesn't wipe them. She lets them fall, and the sight of Saoirse crying—Saoirse, who doesn't cry, who learned too early that tears are a vulnerability—dismantles what's left of my composure.
"Come home, baby,” I say again, this time pleading. "Please."
She looks down at our joined hands.
"Every placement," she whispers. "Every single one. They'd say it was for my own good. And then I'd be in a new house with new people who didn't want me either."
"I want you. And I promise I will tell you every day for the rest of my life until you believe it. And then I'll keep saying it even after that."
Her fingers tighten around mine, holding on.
"I'm scared," she says.
"So am I."
"You don't get scared."
"I got scared tonight. When I reached for you, and you weren't there." My thumb moves across her knuckles. "That's the most afraid I've ever been. And I've been in some pretty fucking scary situations. But you, gone, that's the scariest thing I've ever faced.”
