I have to leave.
The thought arrives cold, final and it sits in my chest like a stone.
I pick up the mug again. My hands are still shaking.
Through the window, Reid is still watching the road. Still guarding the perimeter. Still protecting a woman who is already deciding how to disappear.
30
REID
"It's bullshit and you know it."
Jace is standing by the window. His feet planted, shoulders tight, hands opening and closing at his sides like they're looking for something to grip.
Owen is in his chair. Glasses off. Staring blankly at a point on the wall.
Maya's desk is empty. Has been empty for eighteen hours. The sketchpad is still on the desk where she left it. The pencil cup. The tablet screen dark.
When we came back from returning the snowmobiles, the white truck was in the driveway and three strange men were standing in front of the cabin. Maya was on the porch steps with her arms wrapped around herself and something in her posture that I read from fifty yards as wrong. Not the posture of a woman giving directions. The posture of a woman holding herself together by force.
I saw the lie. It was in her eyes, in the fraction of a second between my question and her answer, in the careful way she heldmy gaze while saying it. Maya is many things. She is not a good liar. The words came out smooth but her body told a different story: her hand gripping the porch railing, her weight shifted back on her heels, the fine tremor in her shoulders.
I stood in the driveway, watched her walk inside and I let her go. I have been making operational decisions all my life and this one might be the worst I've ever made.
Since then. Nothing.
She said she had a headache, needed some space and went to her room. The door closed. I knocked at dinner time. She said she just needed rest. I knocked at breakfast. Same answer.
Eighteen hours of silence.
"We need to do something," Jace says. He's pacing now. Three steps to the window, three steps back. "We can't just sit here while she..."
"What do you wanna do?" Owen's voice is flat. The tone he uses when he's building a wall, brick by brick, word by word. "She asked for space. We're giving her space."
"This isn't space. This is a siege."
"She'll come out when she's ready."
Owen jaw sets. I watch him retreat behind his eyes, the familiar withdrawal, the systematic shutdown of a man who learned at fifteen that the safest response to pain is to stop being reachable. I've seen it before. I'd hoped I wouldn't see it again.
"We knew," Owen says. Quiet now. Not looking at either of us. "We knew from the beginning that she was hiding something. Running from something. We saw the signs and we chose to overlook them because what was happening between us felt more important than whatever she wasn't saying."
The words land in the room and sit there.
"Everybody has secrets," Jace says. Quieter now too, the anger banking down into something heavier. He stops pacing. Facesthe window. His reflection in the glass looks older than thirty-one. "I just wish she'd let us in. Whatever it is. We can take it."
The room holds the silence. Three men, each processing the same information in different ways. Jace through motion and frustration. Owen through withdrawal and analysis. Me through the habit of command, the reflexive need to identify the problem and assign a solution.
There is no solution I can assign. The problem is behind a closed door and the closed door is her right and her right is something I will not override no matter how much the silence is costing us.
I look at Jace. He looks at me. We look at Owen.
The thing that passes between us doesn't need words. It's the shared recognition that we are all, equally and completely, in too deep. That what started as attraction, became something more and has now reached the part where the depth becomes dangerous, where the water is over our heads and the woman we care about is drowning in a different part of the ocean and we can't reach her.
A knock on the office door.
Soft. Tentative.
