It was like she was a totally different person, or at least it was until she saw me coming, and her face lit up in a genuine smile.
“Noah.” She took both my hands. “It’s so good to see you.” She looked at me the same way she looked at me in sessions. Like she was reading things I hadn’t said. “You look well.”
“I feel well,” I said. “And I mean it. I’m not just saying it.”
“I’m so proud of you. Do you know that? Not because you’re here tonight, though I’m glad you are. But because of the work you’ve done to get here. That was you, Noah. All of it.”
I held onto her hands for a moment. “You helped.”
“I guided you, but you did the hard part.”
She squeezed my hands and let go, and I turned to look at Jackson.
“This is Jackson.” When I’d called her last week, I’d told her all about him, and my hopes and worries where he was concerned.
She looked at him and then at me and then back at him. “It’s very nice to meet you, Jackson.”
“Ma’am,” Jackson said.
A voice crackled over the speaker system, and a man announced that we were about to begin. Maranda gave me a quick hug and told me again how glad she was I was there, before she left to go find her seat.
We found our table. I sat, and Jackson sat beside me, and for a while I simply watched the room.
“Corvane is here,” Wolfe said in a calm, steady voice. No panic, just letting us know he was here.
“Where?” Jackson asked.
“Third table from the front, second row over.”
I searched frantically until I found him.
The chatter continued in my ear as other members of the team located him, but I ignored it all. Instead, I took in this man who lived in my nightmares.
I recognized him from the photograph in Wolfe’s conference room. Anton Corvane was in his late fifties, silver-haired, the kind of broad through the shoulders that I was sure came from a gym because I doubted the man had ever worked a day in his life. He was wearing a suit that probably cost more than my car, and he wore it with the ease of a man who’d never once in his life felt out of place anywhere.
Beside him was a woman I didn’t recognize from any briefing.
She was younger than him by twenty years, at least. Dark-haired, composed, in a deep blue gown. She held a glass of champagne in her hand and was smiling at whatever the man to her left was saying. It was a perfectly good smile.
But I knew what genuine looked like, and that wasn’t it.
I knew it the way I knew the sound of footsteps on a staircase, and the click of locks on a basement door. The body remembered things the mind tried to forget, and my body was telling me something about the woman in the deep blue gown that no briefing file would have caught.
“Who’s the woman?” I asked.
“His wife, Imogen,” Gator replied.
“Jackson,” I said quietly.
A pause. Then, lower, “I see her, too.”
I shifted my attention to Corvane then. Noticing the confident way he sat there, like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like he owned the air around him. The woman beside him laughed at something and touched his arm, and he didn’t even bother to look at her, like she wasn’t even worth so much as a glance.
“Don’t,” Jackson said quietly, and I realized he was reading my face.
“I’m not going to do anything.”
“Noah.”
