"Partly."
"And partly because of—" She stopped. Her jaw shifted. She was working up to something. He waited, the same way he'd wait on any approach, with the complete stillness that came from knowing that the wrong movement could send it sideways.
"I read a lot," she said finally. "Certain kinds of books. And I've always told myself it was just entertainment. Just somethingIliked.But being here, seeing Savannah, and the way you—" Her eyes came to his and then away. "You saidgood girltwice today and both times it felt like?—"
She stopped.
Rampage didn't move.
"Like something I'd been waiting to hear," she said, very quietly. Like she was confessing something she hadn't meant to confess. "And that's terrifying. And you should probably know that I think that's terrifying, and I don't know what to do with it."
The kitchen was completely quiet.
"You don't have to do anything with it," he said. "Not tonight."
She let out a breath. "That's it? That's all you're going to say?"
"What did you want me to say?"
"I don't know. Something that makes it less—" She gestured vaguely. "Much."
"It's not less anything," he said. "It's what it is. And it'll still be what it is tomorrow, and you don't have to figure it out tonight."
She stared at him. "How are you so calm about everything?"
"I'm not calm about everything."
"Name one thing that rattles you."
He looked at her across the kitchen table, at the reading glasses on the table next to her cold coffee, and the small scar above her eyebrow, and the expression on her face that was equal parts terrified and determined. At the face of a woman standing at the edge of something and trying to decide if stepping off the edge was worth it.
"Emily, you have had a lot dropped on you in a day. You don’t have to figure it all out at once.”
"I know."
She picked up her glasses. Put them back on. Opened her laptop.
He drank his coffee.
They sat there for another hour. She finished her invoices. He went through the security rotation schedule for the rest of the week. Irish's television got incrementally louder and then abruptly silent, which meant Makenzie had gotten involved.
When Emily finally closed the laptop and stood up, she picked up both coffee mugs and took them to the sink. Rinsed them. Turned around.
"Goodnight, Rampage," she said.
"Night."
She got to the doorway. Stopped.
"For the record," she said, to the door frame rather than to him, "you did answer. You just answered something I didn't ask." She paused. "I noticed."
Then she was gone, and he sat in the empty kitchen with the clock ticking, and he thought about the look on her face when he'd saidgood girlthe second time. The flicker of excitement there and gone. She felt the words and was trying to decide if she liked them or not. Her body told him the answer. She liked it.
She'd figure that out.
He picked up his phone and texted Irish:Security rotation, you're on first. Six AM.
Irish responded immediately:Bringing Clover with me.
