"You've been waiting for someone to believe you," she says.
"I stopped waiting."
"Start again."
I look at her for a long moment. She's not asking me to revisit the investigation or the commendation. She's asking me to let the weight of not being believed be something I can set down. She's telling me she believes me, stated plainly, without qualification.
I decide to.
I move from the bed to the chair and take her face in my hands and kiss her. Slowly, deliberately. There’s no urgency in it, nothing that needs to be resolved, just the choosing of it.
She kisses me back the same way. Her hands come up to my forearms and rest there. We stay like that in the low light with the Mississippi night outside the window and neither of us is in any hurry to be anywhere else.
When I pull back enough to look at her, she's looking back at me with the thing in her face she's stopped hiding.
"Stay," I say.
She stands, takes my hand, and we go to the bed and lie down in the dark. She’s against my chest, the night is outside, and the operational plan with its two gaps is still waiting on the table somewhere.
"The intelligence is good," she says quietly. "I know it is. That facility is the one in my frames."
"I know."
"Seven days."
"Yes."
Her breathing slows. I feel the exact moment she goes under; the specific shift in her weight, the way her hand stops being deliberate where it rests on my chest. I lie with her against me and look at the ceiling.
Kell. Webb. Broussard. Harding. Yuen. Crane.
I run them the way I always run them. Then I stop at the end of the list, and I let it be finished, and for the first time in six years I close my eyes without the names still moving.
I sleep.
Chapter 13
Jesslyn
The compound has a specific quality on the night before something that matters.
I've been here long enough now to know the difference between the ordinary nighttime quiet and this; the coiled-spring stillness of people who have done everything they can do and are waiting for morning to close the distance between preparation and action.
Recon ran the perimeter twice tonight. Stitch restocked the medical kit without being asked. Kourtney made enough food for twice the number of people actually here, the way she does when she can't fix the thing that needs fixing and cooking is what she has instead. Sisco's office light was on until almost midnight, and when it finally went off the compound felt slightly less anchored.
Nobody talks about tomorrow directly. They talk around it; logistics, equipment checks, the kind of technical conversation that sounds like planning and is also a way of not saying the thing everyone is thinking. The operation is in fourteen hours.
The Chalmette facility has been confirmed by Recon's ground surveillance, which came back exactly the way I said itwould. I don't mention that. This isn't the time for being right, and it doesn't change what happens in the morning.
I sit in the common room until the last brother drifts out. Kourtney squeezes my shoulder on her way past without saying anything, which is more than words would have been.
Cora leaves a cup of tea on the table in front of me. Remy, coming through with her arm still in a brace, meets my eyes from across the room and nods once. It’s the nod of a woman who has decided something about another woman and is done deliberating.
I nod back.
When the compound settles into its nighttime sounds, I sit for another few minutes and think about the bayou at sunrise, the herons lifting off the water, my hand moving on the camera before my brain had registered what my eye was seeing.
I think about how much has happened since that morning.
