Peter was still on the screen, pulling data, building timelines. Isaac could hear him talking but the words had lost their shape. Seattle. Miami. Boston. Austin. Cities she'd moved through and left behind, and people who deserved what she'd done to them, and no one had ever come close to catching her.
He couldn’t tell Ryder and Peter about Fallon. Not yet.
He wasn't ready to stand in front of them and say the words out loud: that the woman he'd offered to rescue from petty crime had looked him in the eye and saidI have my reasons, and he'd nodded and changed the subject like she was being evasive instead of telling him the exact truth.
And she was gone. He already knew it. The same way she'd vanished from the ballroom the first night. The way she'd left the hotel in Boston before dawn.
The way she'd told him herself, in her own voice, on a phone call that already felt like it had happened in another lifetime:things that matter are things you can lose.
He looked at the phone one more time. The screen was dark. No new messages.
There wouldn’t be any. He put the phone in his pocket.
Peter signed off. Ryder went back to his weapon, giving Isaac the space he obviously needed. The office settled into its usual state, the hum of the lights, the rattle of the air conditioning, the particular emptiness of a temporary space that belonged to no one.
Isaac sat at his desk. The Endicott transition plan was still on his screen, cursor blinking. He didn't type.
Somewhere out there, Fallon was already gone. Or going. He didn’t know where. All he knew was that it was away from him.
He stared at the blinking cursor and felt the shape of her absence settle into the room like something physical.The Planhe'd spent days building—the money, the pitch, the future he'd been so sure he could talk her into—sat in his chest like a fist with nothing to hold.
