“You needed time to get your bearings. I had the angle.” I looked at him. He was soaked, sitting on the pool deck in whatever he’d driven here in, which appeared to be the same clothes he’d worn all day. He looked wrecked. He also looked like a man who’d gone into the water without thinking about it, which was the only thing in this entire terrible night that was making my chest do something I wasn’t ready to name. “You went in.”
He looked at the pool. At Richard, now being handled by Cortez and two hotel security staff at the far end. At the water, blue-white and still as if nothing had happened. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
The police arrived eleven minutes later. Richard Sterling was arrested on the pool deck of the St. Regis Aspen, still dripping, while a junior officer read him his rights with the particular care of someone who understood that the man in handcuffs was going to have very expensive lawyers and every word needed to be correct.
Jax gave the primary statement. I sat against the wall with a hotel towel around my shoulders and my wrist in my lap and watched it happen and thought about what it meant that Asher Pierce, who had been afraid of the water since his best friend died in it, had gone in without pausing. Without the fractional hesitation. Without anything between the decision and the action.
He sat next to me against the wall. Close. Not touching. Leaving the distance there, acknowledging it.
“I should have told you about the credit card,” he said. Quiet. To the middle distance, not to me. “Jax told me to get you off your regular cards the day after the coffee shop. I said I’d handle it. I didn’t handle it.”
I didn’t say it was OK. It wasn’t. But it was also not what I was thinking about right now, sitting on this wet floor with a wrist that needed imaging, watching Richard Sterling be led away by police. “You called Reid off. You kept your word.”
“I should have kept my word and gotten you off your cards. Those aren’t the same thing.”
He was right. He knew he was right. He wasn’t asking me to tell him it was OK. He was just stating the truth out loud, which was new, and I noticed it the way I noticed everything he did these days—with the attention of a woman who was keeping a careful count of the ways a man was and was not changing.
Mia arrived at the same time as the paramedics. She had Asher’s name in her mouth before she’d cleared the door and then she saw me and stopped.
“Tell me the wrist is the worst of it,” she said.
“The wrist is the worst of it.”
She sat down on the other side of me. Asher on my left, Mia on my right. The water was still. Richard was gone. And I sat between the two people I trusted most in this hotel and let myself be grateful, which felt like something I’d been putting off for a very long time.
21
CHARLIE
The wrist was sprained, not broken.
The urgent care doctor in Aspen told me this with the particular cheerfulness of a man who saw ski injuries nine months out of the year and considered a sprained wrist a vacation. He wrapped it, gave me a brace, told me to ice it and keep it elevated.
Mia drove me. She’d appeared at the hotel room door at seven a.m. with coffee and car keys and the expression that meant she’d already made every decision and I was welcome to the illusion of input. It was exactly what Asher had done, I thought. Except Mia had never lied about it.
“Are you going to talk about it?” Mia asked on the drive back.
“Not yet.”
“OK.” She drove. Didn’t push. Mia always knew when to push and when to drive, which was why she was the person I called when the world did this—when it rearranged itself into a shape I hadn’t consented to and I needed someone who would let me be quiet while I figured out what the new shape meant.
I watched the mountains through the window and thought about the pool—the blue-white light, the weight of the water, theway sound changed when you went under. The way Richard’s hand had closed on my ankle and I’d twisted free from the muscle memory of forty certification courses. The way Asher had gone in without pausing. Not hesitating. Just in.
Someone had walked into my hotel at midnight to take me somewhere I didn’t want to go. The distinction between abduction and scare tactic felt academic from the inside.
And the man I was falling in love with had known, for weeks, that someone might.
* * *S
Back at the house. Asher had driven me from the hotel after the police finished with us, and now he was in the study with Jax. The door was closed all the way this time—no half-measures, no pretending he wasn’t managing. I could hear his voice through the door, low and urgent, and I thought about all the other closed-door conversations I hadn’t heard, stretching back weeks, all the way to a terrace in Roatan where he’d excused himself to take a call and I’d sat watching the sunset not wondering who was on the other end.
I went to the kitchen for water. Cortez was at the counter, pouring coffee from a thermos, and Reid was at the table with a laptop open. They moved through the house like it was a workspace—professional, efficient, with the comfortable familiarity of people who had been doing this for a while. Not since yesterday. Not since the coffee shop. A while.
“How’s the wrist?” Reid asked. Professional concern. Checking on the principal.
“Sprained. I’ll live.”
“Good. We’ve tightened the rotation since yesterday. Cortez has the exterior, I’m on interior and transport. If you need to goanywhere, one of us drives. Standard protocol—same as we’ve been running since we picked up the assignment.”
