He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t argue with. Patient, certain, immovable.
“I’m not going anywhere, Fallon.”
The guilt didn’t leave. She was the reason he’d left his team. The work mattered to him—she’d seen it in the way he moved through a room, the way his whole body sharpened when he was on the job. And he’d walked away from it for her.
She couldn’t fix that. She couldn’t undo it. And the worst part was that if their positions were reversed, she’d have done the same thing.
“I want to take you somewhere,” he said. “A place I go when I need to get away from everything. A…fishing cabin, up in the mountains.”
“A fishing cabin.”
“It’s quiet. Remote. Good place to let your body rest without anyone bothering you.”
Something in the way he said it—a careful vagueness, a slight hesitation beforefishing cabin—told her there was more to the story. She filed it.
“Okay,” she said.
His eyebrows went up. He’d been ready for a fight. She could see the prepared arguments stacking up behind his eyes, and she’d short-circuited all of them with a single word.
“Okay?”
“I don’t have a better plan. My body needs rest. You’ve been saying it, Cass has been saying it, and my wrist has been screaming it.” She looked at her hand on the pillow. “And I want to go somewhere with you.”
She hadn’t meant to say that last part. It came out before the filter caught it, honest and unguarded, and once it was in the air she didn’t take it back.
Isaac held her gaze. The tiredness in his face shifted into something warmer.
“But first,” she said, “I need to go to my apartment. Clothes, laptop, essentials. I can’t leave town with nothing.”
“I’ll go. You stay here.”
“I’m going with you. I know where everything is and I know what I need. Plus, I’ve been cooped up in this safehouse for days, and I can walk fine.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Recognized the futility and let it go.
“Quick in-and-out,” he said. “Ten minutes, max.”
“Ten minutes.”
The closest parking spot was two blocks from the apartment she’d rented.
Isaac pulled into it and killed the engine. The street was residential, quiet in the mid-afternoon. A dog barked somewhere behind a fence. A woman pushed a stroller on the opposite sidewalk without looking at them.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay in the car?” Isaac asked. “I can grab your stuff. Just tell me what you need and where it is.”
She reached for the door. She wasn’t going to live like an invalid. “No, I can come. I know exactly what to grab and where it all is. You’d be opening every drawer in the place.”
He didn’t like it. She could see that. But he got out, and she got out, and her knee protested the transition from sitting to standing with a grinding objection that she absorbed and overruled. She shut the door and fell into step beside him.
Her gait was careful but steady. Isaac matched her pace without making it obvious, which she appreciated. They covered a block. Turned the corner toward her building.
Something was wrong.
She registered it before she could name it—a disruption in the rhythm of the area. People near the entrance of the apartment building, just standing around watching.
Then the details sharpened. Uniforms. Two officers near the front door of her place, evidence bags in hand. A third on the sidewalk, radio in hand. A patrol car parked with its lights off.
Fallon stopped. Isaac stopped beside her.
