“What about it?”
“Don’t do that. You knowwhat about it. I’ve been worried since the night you told me about him, and now the job is done and there’s no reason to stay. Except that phone.”
“I’m not?—”
“You’re emotionally attached to a security operative who works the same events you do. A man who has seen you steal. A man who works for a firm with the kind of resources that keep me up at night.” Her voice cracked, just barely, before she steadied it. “Every day you keep that phone in your pocket is a day closer to something going wrong.”
“He doesn’t know what I actually do. He thinks I’m a pickpocket.”
“And that’s the only reason we’re havingthisconversation instead of a much worse one. But you know how this works. We finish a job, we leave. Every day after the press release hits is a day where someone could start looking, and you need to be gone before that happens. That’s always been the plan. The only thing that’s changed is that now you don’t want to follow it.”
Fallon had no answer for that. Cassandra had been right since the night Fallon had first told her about Isaac, but being right hadn’t made any of it easier to hear.
“I’m not arguing with you,” Fallon said. “I’m not fighting you on this.”
“I know.” Cassandra’s voice dropped. “That’s how I know it’s bad.”
The apartment was quiet around her. The same apartment she’d moved into weeks ago with two suitcases and a laptop and the understanding that she’d leave it the same way. She’d hung curtains. Bought a second monitor. Found a coffee shop with fast internet and terrible lattes.
None of that mattered. What mattered was a burner phone on the nightstand with a photo of a broken vending machine on its screen.
“Where will I be going?” Fallon asked.
“Chattanooga, I think. I’ve got someone who fits the bill I’ve been researching for a few weeks. I’ll have everything to send to you in a few hours.”
“Okay.”
“Fallon.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
Cassandra didn’t apologize often. When she did, she meant it with every piece of herself.
“Don’t be. You’re doing your job. You’re keeping us safe.”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t mean I enjoy watching you lose something.”
Fallon’s vision blurred. She bent forward, elbows on her knees, and pressed the heels of both hands against her eyes until the pressure pushed everything back down. Her breath came in short, shallow pulls that she couldn’t seem to deepen.
“I’ll be ready by the end of the week,” she managed.
“I know you will. Get some rest.”
The call ended.
Fallon sat on the edge of the bed and didn’t move. The gemstones glittered beside her. Isaac’s last text glowed on the nightstand. The apartment held its silence around her like a fist.
She’d done a good job. A job she was proud of. A job that mattered. A job that would put money back in the hands of two hundred families who’d been robbed by a man who smiled at charity dinners while their children died.
And that good job was the thing that was taking Isaac from her.
Or taking her from him. She was the one who had to go. She was always the one who had to go. The work demanded it. The work was always bigger than what she wanted.
She picked up the phone. His messages stared back at her. The vending machine. The Sprite. The small, ordinary complaints of a man who had no idea that the woman he was texting had just robbed a safe and was planning to vanish from his life.
Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. She wanted to type something. Anything. Even justgoodnight. Even just his name.
She set the phone down. Rolled the leather case closed, secured the strap, and put it in the lockbox under her bed.
Then she turned off the lamp.
She didn’t sleep. She lay on her back with her hands flat against the mattress, the way she’d once watched Isaac sleep in a hotel room in Boston, one arm stretched across the space where she’d been.
She’d left that night, too. She was always leaving.
But this time she felt it in a place her body couldn’t absorb—not her joints, not her muscles, not any of the hundred points of pain she’d learned to catalog and manage and push through. This was in her chest, behind her sternum, a crack running through something structural that wasn’t going to heal the way bones and tendons healed.
She’d never heal from this.
