He’d loaded my dog into his car, driven to save me, positioned himself in the trees, and waited for the window.
The most important send of Jolly’s career hadn’t even come from me.
“Briggson.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
Something crossed his face. Brief, unguarded, gone before it had time to settle. He gave a single nod and dragged Vance off the car. “I’m going to put him in my cruiser and call for backup.”
Vance was still whimpering as Briggson dragged him along. Good.
I crossed over to Kayla.
She had made her way to her feet but was still leaning heavily on the hood of Vance’s sedan, her arms pulled tight across her chest, shaking with tremors that came after the danger passed and the nervous system caught up.
I stopped in front of her. She looked up at me, and her expression broke open. Not collapsing, not falling apart. Just releasing everything she’d held behind her teeth since Vance had kidnapped her.
Her hands came up and fisted in my jacket, and she pressed her face into the hollow of my throat. The same spot she fit against when we lay in her bed after William was asleep. The same spot that had become hers without either of us deciding it.
I held on. Both arms. My chin against the top of her head. She held me back. Just as tight. Just as hard.
We stood like that while Briggson drove up from wherever he’d parked his vehicle. His voice carried across the pull-off, calling in units, reading off the location, requesting backup for a warehouse operation that was about to become the biggest drug bust in Summit Falls history.
The night wasn’t over. There was still a shipment to intercept and a syndicate to dismantle.
But the man at the center of it was in handcuffs in the back of Briggson’s vehicle. And the woman in my arms was alive and shaking and whole.
Jolly trotted over and pressed himself against our legs. Not pushing us from each other, just wanting to be part of the love. Patient, warm, present. His tail thumped a slow, steady rhythm against the pavement.
I held Kayla. She held me.
The dog held us both.
Epilogue
Kayla
Three months later
Saturday mornings in our yard had a rhythm now.
Notouryard, technically. My yard and Ben’s yard, two separate properties with two separate mailboxes and two separate front doors. But the fence between them was down to its last four standing slats.
Neither of us had seen the point in maintaining a boundary that didn’t mean anything anymore. Ben’s back door opened onto the same grass as mine. His grill sat ten feet from my deck. Jolly’s water bowl lived on my porch, and William’s muddy sneakers lived on Ben’s.
We hadn’t moved in together, and that was fine. More than fine. He came over every morning for coffee. Cooked dinner in my kitchen most nights with the intensity of a man who’d discovered a new mission, methodical, precise, slightly overambitious.
He fell asleep in my bed and usually woke up there. Hisclothes were still in his closet next door, his footlocker still in his bedroom, and that was okay too. This worked for us.
Two houses, no fence, one life spread across both.
I sat on the deck with my coffee and my sketchbook, not working, just watching, Ben going through emails across from me. William was at the base of what he called The Hill—despite our yards being relatively flat—throwing a tennis ball, and Jolly was bringing it back.
They never got tired of it, even now. Jolly’s tail was going, his mouth open in that permanent grin, already turning before William’s arm finished the throw because he knew where the ball was going before the boy did.
Ben had made it official last month, filing Jolly’s retirement paperwork with Citadel. His working harness hung on a hook at Ben’s house, not thrown away, not hidden, just set in its place with the respect it had earned. The three of us had taken Jolly to the pet store to pick out a new collar.
