I kept talking for another minute—described the greenhouse, the rootstock, the way the light had looked coming through the trees that morning—then stopped the recording and sent it without listening to it first.
The reply came back three minutes later:“Thank you.”
Two words. Not “that’s amazing“ or “I can’t wait” or any of the statements that would have made the next conversation simpler. Just “thank you”.
It was enough. More than enough.
The conversation continued for another twenty minutes after that—Cruz asking about the perimeter checks, about whether the brothers from town had finished the irrigation line, about whether I’d called my mother back after our conversation in the greenhouse.
I answered each question as best as I could.
When I finally set the phone on the nightstand, the room was different by some small, but measurable degree. The lamp threw the same warm light it had twenty minutes ago. The journal still lay open on the bed where I’d left it. The window still showed the same slice of dark sky it had shown since sunset.
But something had shifted—the weight of the space between the bed and the door, the careful distance I’d been maintaining since Cruz walked out of it at 5:17 that morning.
I turned off the lamp and lay in the dark with my hand resting on my stomach, feeling for movement. The baby had gone quiet again—settled somewhere low and central again.
I thought about the note, about three weeks that would feel like three months, about the fact that I’d told Cruz about the baby moving before I’d told anyone else—before my mother, before Rawley, before anyone.
I turned that fact over once, examining it.
Six months ago, I would have called it a tactical error—revealing too much too soon, showing my hand before I knew what the other player was holding.
Six months ago, I would have classified vulnerability as weakness and connection as complication, would have kept the truth of what was happening inside me exactly where it belonged: filed, irrelevant, not worth the energy it would take to address.
Now I lay in the dark with my hand on my stomach and my eyes on the ceiling, and tried to make sense of what was happening. I was still not entirely sure what to do with the version of myself who called his mother and texted the father of his child and means both of those things.
I was less unsettled by it than I expected to be, and that—more than anything else that had happened today—was the last thing I was thinking about when I fell asleep.
Chapter Nineteen
~ Cruz ~
I sat at the safe house kitchen table, a fluorescent tube flickering above my head, and watched the financial dossier that had been open in front of me for three hours.
The mission was clean—the kind of work Sterling didn’t farm out unless he needed someone who knew how to follow money without leaving fingerprints—and we were already eight days in with nothing but routine progress to show for it.
The problem wasn’t the mission. The problem was my personal phone, sitting at an angle I could see without picking it up, which I’d checked eleven times since breakfast.
The kitchen was narrow—the kind of space that had been designed for people who used microwaves instead of stoves and drank water straight from the tap.
A single window above the sink framed a perfect slice of city traffic—cars inching along a gridlocked street, pedestrians moving in tight clusters between crosswalks. The refrigerator hummed at a pitch that settled somewhere between headache and back-of-mind irritant.
The coffee in my chipped mug had been brewed sometime yesterday and tasted like someone had filtered it through a military-issue sock.
The financial trace was where it needed to be—Gerald Hughs’s shell companies turning out to be not that well-hidden after all, the money flows running in patterns that a civilian forensic accountant would have missed, but that read like highway billboards to anyone who’d spent years following terrorist funding.
I’d spent the morning confirming what I’d known since day two: Hughs was the ceiling above Peterson’s network, themoney behind every legal pressure campaign and contracted harassment that had come through the ranch’s fence line.
I’d read that dossier so many times the corners were soft. I knew it cold. That wasn’t why my attention kept sliding to the right, to the phone that hadn’t buzzed since 2:17 that afternoon.
I picked it up with careful attention—made sure my finger hit the power button rather than the message icon—and navigated to the text thread with Jackson.
The conversation sat exactly where I’d left it: my last message—“How’s the rootstock?”—sent at 11:42 that morning, followed by Jackson’s reply at 1:03—“Healthy. Stronger than the soil test predicted. Going to transplant some to greenhouse 4 next week.”
The exchange before that was about the brothers from town—how the taller one had fixed the barn door track after it had frozen shut. Before that was Jackson’s description of the doctor’s appointment—“Everything’s fine. Heartbeat’s strong. I’m measuring exactly on schedule for thirty weeks”—which I’d read at 2:17 in the morning and answered at 2:19 with“That’s good. What’s your blood pressure?”
Not “I wish I was there” or “I’m sorry I’m missing this” or any of the clean statements that would have made the next conversation simpler. Just “That’s good” and “What’s your blood pressure?”
