Cruz stayed perfectly still beside me, his eyes on the valley rather than my face.
“I’m still not entirely sure what to do with the version of myself that is sitting on this porch,” I continued. “Pregnant. With a man who jumped out of a plane in the dark to come home to me.”
Cruz was quiet for a beat—the silence that meant he was making a calculation, weighing risks against benefits, deciding exactly how much of himself to put on the line.
Then he said, “You could start by admitting it’s home.”
The words landed between us like something with weight—not quite physical, but present enough that I had to look down at the mug in my hands to hide whatever had just happened to my face.
I didn’t answer right away. Looked at the valley instead—at the greenhouse glass catching the last of the afternoon light, at the mountains going blue in the distance, at the sweep of land that had belonged to me for just a few months, but somehow felt like it had always been mine.
Then I said, “Yeah.” Just that. One syllable. Cruz’s hand settled over mine on the armrest of the chair—warm and callused and exactly the right size to make mine look smaller by comparison. I turned my palm up and let him, feeling the pressure of his fingers against my skin.
We stayed like that while the light finished going out of the sky—gold to amber to the deep purple that meant full dark wasn’t far off. The baby moved once against my palm—a small, insistent pressure that meant growth rather than trouble—and I pressed back gently, the way the doctor had shown me.
Then, from inside the house, Cruz’s phone rang—the specific tone that meant Sterling, not the general ring that came for everyone else.
Cruz got up with careful attention, squeezing my hand once before letting go. “I should get that,” he said, his voice level.
I nodded, understanding without being told that Sterling didn’t call unless something was happening—the sound of “operational” rather than “social” suddenly too present to ignore.
Cruz went inside, pulling the door mostly shut behind him. I stayed on the porch, watching the last of the light fade from the valley, feeling that whatever was happening inside the house was suddenly too present to ignore.
After a minute, I could hear Cruz’s voice through the door change register: clipped, operational, the tight syllables that meant the call was not routine.
I got up from the chair and moved to the hallway just inside the door, close enough to hear without being in the room. Not quite eavesdropping, not quite respecting privacy, just the listening for the difference between “this is fine” and “we have a problem.”
“—not a cleanup operation,” Cruz was saying, his voice carrying through the half-open door. “Different cell. Different approach pattern. They’re running a separate team, not connected to the Istanbul network.”
A pause while Sterling said something I couldn’t quite make out.
“Three weeks, minimum,” Cruz replied. “Maybe longer, depending on how many leads they’ve got and how deep the network runs.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“I understand the timeline,” Cruz said, his voice going flat as if he was working hard to keep himself together. “I’ll be ready to move at 0600.”
I stood in the hallway with one hand resting low against my stomach, listening to Cruz’s voice go flat and focused on the other side of the door, and understood that the thing we had just settled on the porch was about to meet the first real test of whether it held.
Not a cleanup operation. Not a loose thread from the Peterson network. Something new. Something that wouldrequire Cruz specifically. Something that was not a short assignment.
The kind of call that came with “this is what I do” rather than “this is who I am”—the difference between the job and the man suddenly too present to ignore.
I moved back to the porch without Cruz hearing me, sat down in the chair with careful attention, and watched the last of the light fade from the valley. The baby moved again—another roll, stronger this time.
I sat on the porch with my hand on my stomach and my eyes on the dark valley, and tried to make sense of what was happening. Behind me, through the kitchen window, Cruz moved around preparing for whatever came next—something he’d done it a hundred times before.
The perimeter wasn’t alarmed. The system wasn’t triggering. And somewhere in the three weeks since Cruz had walked through my front door, I’d stopped wanting it to.
Now, I was terrified I’d need it back.
Chapter Seventeen
~ Cruz ~
I’d been rehearsing this conversation since before dawn, running the words in my head while I made coffee, while I stood at the kitchen window watching the greenhouse grow lights click off on their timer.
None of the rehearsals helped.
