“Just me and Jolly.” He leaned back against the sink. His arms were crossed loosely, and the bandage on his left forearm was gone now, replaced by a thin, raised line of healing skin that caught the overhead light. “The training work continues. The rest of it is done.”
Something in the way he said it made me set down my tea.
“The rest of what?”
He looked at me direct, unhurried, completely present.
“There’s something I want to tell you. About why I’m here. The fuller picture.”
I waited.
“The police chief brought Citadel in because he suspected a security problem inside the department. Operational information was getting out. Cases going sideways, evidence disappearing, drug traffic climbing while arrests stayed flat. He couldn’t say for certain which of his own people he could trust.”
Ben’s voice was level. No preamble, no buildup. Just the shape of something I hadn’t known existed.
“Donovan and I weren’t just here to train K9 handlers. We were evaluating the department from the inside. Trying to identify where the leaks were coming from.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“It’s been resolved. The person responsible has been identified and removed from the force. But there was another layer for me underneath the training, and that layer is complete now.”
I didn’t say anything for a long moment. My hands were on the counter behind me, and I was rearranging the shape of the last several weeks inside my head.
I picked up my tea. Set it back down without drinking. My fingers stayed on the rim.
“How long?”
“From the beginning. It was already in play when I moved in next door.”
“So the K9 training was fake.”
“No.” He didn’t hesitate. “The training was real. The work I’ve been doing with the department, with Jolly, all of that was genuine. The investigation was the confidential layer underneath it. Both things were true at the same time.”
I nodded slowly. Not agreement. Processing. Sorting the shape of this new information, turning it over, pressing on the edges to see where it held and where it gave.
“The stitches on your arm.” I looked at the scar. The short, thin line that ran along the outside of his forearm, healed now but still visible. “You told me it was a training exercise.”
A beat of silence. His jaw tightened once.
“No. It wasn’t. A suspect pulled a knife during a raid. He was going after Jolly, and I got between them.”
“So when I brought you dinner that night, and I asked what happened. And you said training exercise. You knew that wasn’t true.”
“I knew.”
“And you said it anyway.”
“I couldn’t tell you what actually happened. Not then.” His voice didn’t waver. He didn’t look away. “I’m telling you now.”
The kitchen was very still. I could hear William’s sound machine through the ceiling, the faint white noise that helped him sleep. I could hear my own pulse, steady but harder than usual, a drumbeat I was trying not to let set the pace.
I knew I was making this bigger than it was. A classified investigation, a man who couldn’t talk about his work—that was reasonable. That was a boundary I could understand.
But my body wasn’t listening to reasonable, and the heat climbing up my chest wasn’t about operational security.
One sharp, involuntary thought cut through before I could catch it.
Craig had been someone else at the beginning too.
