I didn't feel remarkable. I felt hollowed out and raw and desperately, achingly alone in a way that the yellow tulips and the new locks and the stocked refrigerator couldn't touch. I felt like a woman standing in the rubble of a controlled demolition she'd triggered herself, surveying the damage and knowing it was necessary and hating every brick of it.
"What do I do now?" I asked, and the question was so small, so childlike, that it caught in my throat and almost didn't make it out. What do I do now. The question of a Little without her Daddy. The question I'd been asking in one form or another since the rooftop, since the seizure, since the first night I'd pressed my ear to his chest and let his heartbeat replace the one the drugs had tried to erase.
"Now," Anna said, "you brush your teeth. You put on pajamas. You get into bed. And you let tonight be terrible."
"That's your professional advice? Let it be terrible?"
"My professional advice is that you stop trying to make it not terrible. The terror and the grief and the wanting are going to be there whether you fight them or not. Fighting them takes energy you don't have. So let them be there. Let them sit in the room with you like uninvited guests. You don't have to entertain them. You don't have to engage with them. You just have to coexistwith them until morning, and in the morning, they'll be smaller. Not gone. Smaller. And smaller is enough."
Chapter Fifteen
Xavier
I’d lasted about fifteen seconds before I’d run after her. I needed to stop the cab. Get Molly from it and bring her home where she belongs. And…
And she’ll hate you for it.The thought hit me like a round to the chest, stopping me cold with my hand on the truck door and my keys in the ignition. The engine was running. The GPS was loaded. I knew every route between my house and her apartment because I'd mapped them obsessively during the weeks she'd been recovering, the way I mapped extraction routes, because some part of me had always known this night was coming andhad been preparing for it the way I prepared for everything: with contingencies, with precision, with the desperate illusion of control.
But I couldn't go.
I sat in the driver's seat with the engine idling and my hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel and the truth of it settling over me like a weighted blanket made of razor wire. I couldn't go. Not because I didn't want to, but because going would prove every fear she'd ever had about us. Going would confirm that I couldn't let her stand on her own. Going would take the bravest thing she'd ever done—braver than surviving the warehouse, braver than the withdrawal, braver than standing naked in front of me and dropping a towel and sayingI love you so much that it scares me—and reducing it to nothing. A failed attempt. A thing I'd overridden because I knew better. Because Daddy knew better.
Except Daddy didn't know better. That was the thing I'd been unable to see until she'd shown me, standing in my bedroom with tears on her face and steel in her spine and a suitcase packed. Daddy had been wrong. Not about wanting to protect her—that instinct was as fundamental to me as breathing and would remain so until they put me in the ground—but about what protection meant. I'd confused it with containment. I'd confused keeping her safe with keeping her close, and the distinction between those two things was the distinction between love and control, and if I drove to her apartment right now and pulled her out of a cab and carried her back to my house, I wouldn't be her Daddy. I'd be her captor. A gentler one. A well-intentioned one. But a captor nonetheless, and she'd had enough of those to last several lifetimes.
She had to choose me. Not because I'd made a bullshit condition, a defense mechanism dressed up as wisdom, but because choice was the only foundation strong enough to holdthe weight of what we were building. Everything else was sand. Gratitude was sand. Need was sand. Even love, without choice beneath it, was sand. And Molly deserved bedrock.
I turned off the engine.
Then I turned it back on.
Then I turned it off again and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel for the second time in the history of this truck. The first being the morning she'd tried to kiss me in the kitchen, which felt like it had happened in a previous geological era, and I made a sound into the leather that was somewhere between a groan and a prayer and contained zero intelligible words.
I couldn't go get her. I accepted that. The rational part of my brain, the part that had been forged in military discipline and honed by fifteen years of making decisions under conditions that would break most people, accepted it with the grim clarity of a man signing orders he disagreed with but understood the necessity of.
But nobody said I couldn't be nearby.
The thought crystallized with the tactical precision that had kept me alive through three tours and countless ops. I didn't have to go to her door. I didn't have to knock. I didn't have to make my presence known or insert myself into the process she'd initiated with more courage than I'd ever shown in my life. I just had to be close enough that if something went wrong, I could be there in seconds instead of minutes. Not hovering. Not controlling. Just... positioned. The way a safety net was positioned beneath a tightrope walker. Not to prevent the crossing. Just to catch the fall if it came.
It was a rationalization. I knew that. A thin veneer over the inability to be more than a mile from the woman I loved on the first night she slept alone since I'd pulled her off a rooftop. But it was a rationalization I could live with, which was more than I could say for the alternative of lying in my own bed staring at theceiling and listening to the silence where her breathing should have been.
I drove to her apartment.
Not fast. Not with the lights-and-sirens urgency I'd felt when I thought she was gone. Slowly. Deliberately. Taking the route that avoided the highway because the highway was efficient and I didn't want efficient. I wanted time. Time to breathe. Time to let the adrenaline work its way out of my system. Time to settle into the particular mode of operation that this night was going to require. Vigilant without being visible. Present without being intrusive. Close enough to hear her scream and far enough away that she'd never know I was there.
I parked across the street. Not directly in front of the building, but at an angle, half a block down, in a spot that gave me a clear sightline to her window on the second floor and the building's entrance while keeping the truck in the shadow of a magnolia tree whose branches hung low enough to break up the silhouette. Standard surveillance positioning. The kind of thing I could do in my sleep, even though sleep was the one thing I absolutely would not be doing tonight.
Her light was on. I could see it from the truck. A warm, yellow glow behind the new window that Boris had insisted on, the one that didn't stick anymore, the one that worked properly and therefore held none of the personality of its predecessor. She was in there. Alive. Safe. Behind Boris's locks.
I settled in. Adjusted the seat back two clicks to ease the tension in my shoulders without compromising my sightline. Checked the mirrors. Scanned the street in both directions, cataloging the parked cars, the pedestrian traffic, the rhythm of the neighborhood at this hour. A couple walking a terrier. A teenager on a bike. An older man smoking on a stoop three buildings down. Nothing that pinged. Nothing that warranted concern. Just a quiet residential street on a Thursday evening,utterly indifferent to the fact that my entire world had relocated to a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor.
I sat there for forty-five minutes before I got out of the truck.
Not to go in. I wasn't going to go in. I'd made that decision, and I was holding it with the same white-knuckled grip Molly had used on the towel, on the pillow, on my wrists. But sitting still had never been my strong suit. Not in the Rangers, not in the field, not in any context where the people I was responsible for were on the other side of a wall I couldn't see through. Sitting still felt like dereliction. So I got out. Stretched my legs. Walked the perimeter of her building.
Just once, I told myself.
I walked it four times.
Each circuit took approximately three minutes and covered the full footprint of the building. Front entrance, east side along the narrow alley that separated it from the neighboring structure, rear access where the fire escape descended in a zigzag of rusted iron that I made a mental note to inspect more thoroughly in daylight, and the west side where a chain-link fence bordered a small parking area with five spaces and a dumpster that needed emptying. I checked the ground-floor windows. Tested the rear door, but the frame was soft, which bothered me. Noted the security camera mounted above the front entrance that I hadn't noticed from the truck, and the second one at the rear that was positioned to cover the parking area and the fire escape simultaneously.
