Gramercy clasped his hands together. His wedding ring was a thin gold band, dull and nicked. “I don’t imagine you’re going to like it.”
“I mean, on the list of things you’ve done that I don’t like…” But KC smiled. Her stomach buzzed with nerves, uncertain she wanted more insight into a relationship that had taken so many hits at a time when she was still hurt.
“All right. Lucas was deployed seven times in the first fifteen years we knew each other. A lot of that time, I was embedded,undercover, and sometimes didn’t get home for six months at a stretch. When I became… preoccupied with thinking about how dangerous his work was—or he did the same—we told each other, ‘Someone always has to be the first to leave.’”
“Jesus, Gramercy.” Her lungs felt tight, her heart hammering in her ears.
“Death is inevitable. It’s the only certainty. We don’t know when. We don’t know how. It’s possible you won’t make it through this operation. It’s also possible you’ll be taken out by a rogue Pacific wave on a well-deserved vacation. Or you’ll outlive every one of your forebears and die holding hands with your beloved on a porch rocker forty years into your retirement.”
KC didn’t let herself paint that picture with Yardley in it. But god, she wanted to.
“Given the utter inconsequence of our opinions about when and how the end comes for us and the people we love, there’s nothing to do but surrender. Then, and only then, can we ask ourselves what we want to do in the meantime. Who we want to be. And, if you have the good fortune to love another person who loves you, you ask yourself what you can do to make space for them tobethe person you love, for as long as you have them.”
KC wiped at her damp cheekbones with both hands. “That’s awful. You’re right. I hate it.”
Gramercy stood up. He unbuttoned his jacket, reached into the interior pocket, and retrieved a crisp white square, which he offered to her.
She took his fancy handkerchief, but only balled it in her hand.
“One more thing,” he said. “Before Lucas and I learned to appreciate the gift we had both been given, we were, as I said,preoccupied with the danger and the complexities of our relationship. There was a long stretch where we might see each other for a few days every three or four months, and when we did see each other, we either fought or we… made up for lost time.” Gramercy shrugged one shoulder. “In other words, every time we saw each other, we were mostly afraid.”
KC made herself breathe, because what she wanted to do was curl up around the rock in her stomach and go to sleep. Or cry. “I never had a chance to be afraid for Yardley.”
“I didn’t know how not to be afraid for Lucas, but I knew I didn’t want him to be afraid for me. It was suggested to me by my mother, as it happens, that what we were missing wasn’t love, and wasn’t time together. It was trust. We didn’t trust the other’s intention to use our talents to stay safe, and we didn’t trust the world that had brought us together. I was so angry, because she was suggesting I do the hardest possible thing to be with Lucas. Loving him wasn’t hard. I loved him enough to bear up against the time we lost to our work. But trust?”
KC recalled her mortal fear for Yardley at the Starbucks.
She thought of the two of them arguing outside the director’s office, her throat choked with hurt. Yardley throwing her wig at the bugged portrait when KC told her she didn’t believe they would ever know what part of their relationship had been real and what part a lie.
But she also remembered how it had helped to tell Yardley about the black op. Gramercy wouldn’t be sharing any of this if it didn’t seem to him—this veteran agent, this husband with decades of practice loving another man whose life was dangerous—that KC and Yardley had something worth saving.
Or at leasttryingto save.
“Trust,” she said. “Like parachuting to a teeny-tiny target.”
“More like a free fall.” Gramercy smiled again, a sad smile of understanding. “But when it’s love, you won’t hit the ground.”
He stood up and held out his hand. “Come on. It’s going to take the time we have left to get through what we need to cover.”
She stood, accepting his hand and holding on to the sensation of his firm, dry palm against hers for a moment. “Thank you.”
“No thanks required, but appreciated.” He started walking toward a set of double doors at the back of the area they had been in, which KC had thus far seen only high-ranking uniforms and somber-faced people in suits exit. No one had entered.
She followed him to the three-phase lock, which involved a fingerprint, a retinal scan, and a code. He completed all three before looking at her. “Are you ready for your first field briefing?”
She was surprised by the whisper of anticipation that suddenly rushed up through her body like Christmas, like hearing Yardley hum in the shower before they went out, or the moment before a heavy lift when she knew she was going to jerk nearly twice her weight over her head and make it look easy. “Gramercy, I’ve been ready forever.”
That was the first time she made him laugh.
Turned out, Gramercy preferred good old-fashioned, earnest joy over a joke.
Maybe she could learn something from that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
U.S. ambassador’s residence, Östermalm, Stockholm
Yardley strode out of a ballroom full of CIA operatives. She had a problem.
