Wyatt pours two fingers into each glass and settles beside me on the couch. His warmth radiates through the space between us. Both of us face the dark windows, the city lights scattered below like fallen stars. The house is quiet around us. Just the hum of the refrigerator, the whir of the furnace kicking on to combat the chill in the air.
I drain half my glass in one swallow.
“Easy,” Wyatt says. “That’s not cheap stuff.”
“I’ll buy her another bottle.”
He doesn’t push. Just sips his own drink and watches the city lights. The silence isn’t uncomfortable, exactly. Just loaded with unspoken words.
I refill my glass.
“Hell of a day,” Wyatt says eventually.
“Yeah.”
More silence. The bourbon warms my chest, loosens the tension in my shoulders. Wyatt’s profile is sharp in the low light. Jaw, cheekbone, the line of his throat. He’s not looking at me, and somehow that makes it easier.
“I kept waiting for something to go wrong,” I say. “The whole dinner. Just... waiting.”
“Nothing went wrong.”
“I know.” I take another drink. “That almost made it worse.”
Wyatt glances at me then, brief and assessing, before turning back to the window. “It was so fucking normal. Zoey running around, Marcella and Elena fussing over the food, Mason complaining about contractors. Like any other family Thanksgiving.”
“That’s the thing.” I stare at the amber liquid in my glass. “Everyone else there was normal. Genuine. Callie and Mason, Marcella and Elena—they’re not performing. They actually love each other, actually care about Sunday dinners and grandchildren and all of it.”
The realization had crept up on me somewhere between the blessing and dessert. Watching Vicente let Zoey climb into his lap and smear mashed potatoes on his shirt without flinching. The way he leaned into Arturo’s space with the ease of long intimacy, their shoulders brushing as they passed dishes. Celeste actually touching his arm during a story while her sisters maintained their polite distance. The tension was there, but underneath it all was genuine affection. Uncomfortable to witness.
“And seeing him in the middle of that...” I shake my head. “Surrounded by people who mean it. It almost made me believe he meant it too.”
Wyatt’s quiet for a moment. “Did he? Mean any of it?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out.” I drain the rest of my glass. “With Vicente, I never know what’s real and what’s the mask. Maybe nothing. Maybe all of it. Maybe he doesn’t know the difference anymore either.”
“He was watching you,” Wyatt says. Not a question.
“He’s always watching.” The words come easier than they should. Bourbon or exhaustion or just the relief of being out of that house. “That’s what he does. Watches. Waits. Figures out what you need and then gives it to you until you can’t remember how to need anything else.”
The glass is empty again. I reach for the bottle.
“Is that what happened?” Wyatt asks. Still not looking at me. “He figured out what you needed?”
I should stop talking. Should change the subject, make a joke, do anything except answer that question honestly. But the bourbon’s in my blood now, and we’re both watching each other’s reflections in the dark glass instead of looking directly at each other, and somehow that makes it possible to say things I’ve never said out loud.
“The thing about deep cover—” The words scrape out of me. “You can’t just invent a person from scratch. The lie has to be built on truth or it falls apart the first time someone pushes. So you take the real pieces of yourself—the hunger, the wounds, the shit you’ve never told anyone—and you hand them over. Wrap them in a new name and call it a cover story. But it’s still you. The parts that matter are still you.”
Wyatt’s quiet for a moment. “So what was true? The parts you gave him.”
“Someone who’d never belonged anywhere.” I laugh, and it tastes bitter. “Which sounds ridiculous, right? I had everything. Senator mother—DEA Administrator back then, so literally my boss. Surgeon father. The right schools, the right connections, the golden path laid out in front of me.”
The reflection in the window doesn’t look like me. For a second, it’s Cal Logan staring back—the man I invented, the man Vicente owned.
“But I was never just Chris. I was Katherine Longo’s son first, always. Adrian Nicolo’s kid second. Every success was because of them—their names, their connections. Only my failures were my own, and every one of them was a disappointment to the family legacy.” I take another drink. “I volunteered for deep cover because I wanted something that was mine. Something I earned without their shadow hanging over it. To prove I could be someone without the Longo name opening doors.”
I stare at my reflection, at the ghost of who I used to be.
“I gave Vicente my truth. The man desperate to matter on his own terms. Someone who’d spent his whole life chasing approval he could never quite earn. That was real. That was me. And Vicente took every piece I offered up and figured out exactly how to use them against me.”
