"That's not random," she says. "That's not opportunistic. Someone told them." She holds my gaze. "Or someone already knew."
The coffee shop moves around us. Someone orders at the counter. Music plays low from a speaker near the door. Everything is completely ordinary and completely irrelevant.
"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
"Because you were there." Her eyes don't leave mine. "You were in that room. They hurt you." A beat. "And I've been thinking about the fact that you showed up to my hospital visit with a broken finger and I never asked you how you broke it."
The silence between us has weight.
I look at her. She’s been busy assembling a picture piece by piece, and now she's showing me what she's built so far and waiting to see what I do with it.
But she doesn't have everything.
Though she has more than I thought.
"Adela—"
"I'm not accusing you of anything," she says quietly. "I just need to know if I can trust you."
The words land somewhere soft and undefended.
Can shetrustme.
I think about Theo in the Denver locker room.Together. I think about the text I sent after that night — she's going to lean on me now, that was always the goal — and how that goal has become something I can't look at directly anymore without feeling…discomfort.
I think about the way she felt against my chest and how I lay there in the dark thinking that Theo had miscalculated something, and I wasn't sure yet if it was her or me.
It was me.
It was always me.
I lean forward, putting my elbows on the table. I glance at her across the small space of a coffee shop table and make a decision I know I'm going to have to live with.
"Not yet," I say.
She blinks. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn't that.
"Not yet?" she repeats.
"I can't tell you everything right now." I keep my voice low and even. "Not because I don't want to. Because the timing matters, and if I tell you the wrong thing at the wrong moment, it makes everything worse for you. Not for me." I hold her gaze. "For you."
She searches my face.
"But I need you to listen to me about one thing," I say.
"What?"
"Cody is going to ask you to dinner." I watch her face carefully when I say it. "At his father's house. Just the two of you." A pause. "Don't go alone."
The color doesn't leave her face. She doesn't gasp, panic, or do any of the things a person does when information surprises them. She goes very still.
"How do you know that?" she asks.
"Because I know him," I say.
She looks at me for a long moment. The coffee shop moves around us. The music plays. Seattle continues its gray, indifferent morning without us.
"Okay," she says finally.
