"Yeah. I really am." Mara couldn't help the smile that spread across her face.
Quinn pulled up her tablet. "We have three new potential targets. Been waiting for you to get back."
And just like that, reality came rushing back. The work. The missions. The reason L'Abri Sûr existed. Mara felt the shift inside herself, the operator returning even as part of her heart stayed in New Orleans.
"Alright," she said. "Let's see what we've got."
The week with Logan had been perfect. But now real life was waiting. She had a job to do. People depending on her.
But she also had Logan. Had his voice every night. Had whatever this thing between them was becoming and the promise that distance wouldn't kill it.
It wouldn't be easy. Nothing worth having ever was.
But for the first time in years, Mara felt like she had something worth fighting for beyond the mission.
That was worth whatever came next.
LIES BY OMISSION
Three Months Later
Mara's phone buzzed at 0200 while she was in a surveillance vehicle outside Atlanta watching a warehouse that Quinn's intelligence suggested held three trafficked women from Honduras. She glanced at the screen. Logan. She couldn't answer, not now, not when they were minutes away from moving in.
"You need to take that?" Nadia asked from the driver's seat.
"No. He'll understand." Mara silenced the phone and focused on the warehouse. The mission came first. It always came first. Logan knew that. Just like she knew that sometimes he'd go radio silent for days or weeks when his team deployed and she couldn't ask where or why or when he'd be back.
The extraction went smoothly. Three women secured, transported to a safe house, and handed off to local contacts who'd help them navigate the system. By the time Mara got back to L'Abri Sûr, it was almost dawn. She crashed for four hours, then woke up and called Logan.
He answered on the second ring. "Hey. You okay?"
"Yeah. Sorry about last night. I was working."
"I figured." His voice was warm, understanding. "How'd it go?"
"Good. Three out. All safe." She couldn't give him details about where or who or what organization she was with, and he never pushed. Just accepted what she could tell him and filled in the blanks with trust. "How was your day?"
"PT was brutal. Risk is convinced I can get full range of motion back if I just push harder. Pretty sure he's actually trying to kill me." Logan paused. "But the arm's getting stronger. Doc says another month and I should be cleared for operations."
"That's great." Mara meant it even as part of her worried about what that would mean for them. Cleared for operations meant deployments. Meant weeks or months where they couldn't talk. Meant the dangerous work that defined both their lives. "You must be relieved."
"Yeah. I miss it. Miss my team. Miss doing the job." He was quiet for a moment. "But I'm also going to miss having time to call you every night."
"We'll figure it out. We have so far."
They had. Three months of video calls and texts and voice messages left when they couldn't connect in real time. Three months of good morning messages and goodnight calls and sending each other photos of random things throughout the day. Three months of learning how to be together while being apart.
It wasn't easy. There were nights when Mara wanted nothing more than to feel Logan's arms around her. Days when she'd see something funny and reach for her phone to tell him only to remember he was in a briefing or training or asleep on the other side of the country. Moments when the distance felt impossible and she wondered if they were both crazy for trying to make this work.
But then he'd call and his voice would make everything better. Or she'd get a text that said something ridiculous andshe'd laugh despite the exhaustion. Or they'd video chat and just exist in comfortable silence, both doing their own thing but together in the way that mattered.
They'd developed routines. Logan would send her a photo every morning of his terrible breakfast at the DFAC with increasingly creative complaints. Mara would send back pictures of whatever she was looking at, whether it was the sunrise over the bayou or the chaos of the ops center or Winter doing something stupid during training. They'd established a code for when one of them was on a mission and couldn't talk. A simple text that just said "working" so the other wouldn't worry about the silence.
Logan had started learning about trafficking, reading articles and statistics and trying to understand the world Mara operated in. He never asked for specifics about her operations, but he wanted to understand why it mattered. What drove her. Mara did the same, researching special operations and the kind of work Delta did, even though Logan couldn't tell her details about his missions either.
They learned each other's schedules. Mara knew that Tuesday and Thursday mornings Logan had PT with Risk that left him too sore to do anything but complain afterward. Logan knew that Mara ran intelligence briefings on Monday mornings and that she was always grumpy until she'd had at least two cups of coffee. They found pockets of time that overlapped and protected them fiercely.
But they also learned that sometimes the work had to come first. That missions didn't wait for convenient timing. That deployments happened with little notice and no guarantees.
