The driveback to Malibu takes forty minutes and feels like four hours. Jade sits in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap and her face turned toward the window, watching the city move past without seeing it. I keep one hand on the wheel and one on hers and don't try to fill the silence. The freeway lights strobe overhead at regular intervals, painting her face in alternating light and shadow, and I watch her in the periphery of my vision.
She saved my life.
The simplicity of it sits in my chest alongside everything else, the fear and the relief and the cold weight of Torres and the longimpossible hours of not knowing. Underneath all of it that is a single clean fact: she saved my life.
At home I run the bath without asking. The bathroom fills with steam and the scent of the salts she keeps on the shelf. She stands in the middle of the bathroom and doesn't move and I undress her carefully, gently, the way you handle something that has been through too much, and I try not to react visibly to the bruising across her ribs, the deep purple spreading from her left side across her stomach.
I lower her into the bath and sit on the edge and clean the blood from her wrists and her face with a cloth, working slowly. She lets me do it without speaking. The water turns faintly pink. Her eyes stay somewhere in the middle distance, focused on nothing.
When the water cools I wrap her in a towel and put her to bed and get in beside her and pull her back against my chest, my arm across her, and lie in the dark and listen to her breathe.
She falls asleep within minutes. Exhaustion winning over everything else.
But two hours later, she wakes up gasping for air.
The sound of it goes through me like a current, and I have her in my arms before I'm fully awake, my hand in her hair, her name in my mouth. She fights me for a second, still inside whatever the dream was, and then her hands find my arms and grip them and she comes back, pressing her face into my chest.
"I've got you," I tell her. "You're home. You're safe."
Her breathing slows by degrees. The shaking takes longer.
“It’s going to be okay," she says into my chest, and the way she says it isn't a question exactly. It's the sound of someone turning something over repeatedly.
"You saved us," I confirm.
"I killed someone."
"You survived. There's a difference."
A long pause. "Is there?"
I don't answer. I hold her tighter and press my lips to the top of her head and stay awake long after she drifts back under, staring at the ceiling, turning her question over in the dark.
She wakes screaming again before dawn.
The days that follow have a particular texture, muffled and slow, like moving through water. Jade gets up and makes coffee and sits with it at the kitchen counter without drinking it. She opens her laptop and stares at the screen for an hour without typing. She goes through the motions of eating, of showering, of responding when I speak to her, but the responses come from somewhere slightly removed, like a translation of herself rather than the original.
I don't push. I stay close and stay quiet and let her move through it at whatever pace she needs.
On the fourth day Dad calls. All twelve backup locations found and wiped. Dominic's cloud accounts closed. The recording is gone, every copy, every server, every trace of it. He tells me this in the same tone he uses to report quarterly earnings and I thank him and hang up and go find Jade on the back deck watching the ocean.
I stand beside her and tell her it's over. The recording is gone. Dominic's disappearance has already been absorbed into the general noise of a man who had enough enemies that no one is looking too hard.
She nods. Looks back at the water. The waves are large today, gray-green and serious, breaking hard against the base of the bluffs.
"It doesn't feel over," she says.
"I know."
She turns to look at me, and for the first time in four days I see something in her eyes that isn't the vacancy, something that is reaching toward the present rather than trapped in the past.It's brief and fragile and I don't say anything about it because pointing at fragile things tends to break them.
That night she reaches for me in the dark.
Her hand finds my arm first, then my chest, and I go still and let her set the pace because this is hers to lead, whatever she needs it to be. She moves into me slowly, carefully, like someone learning to trust their own weight again, and I keep my hands gentle and my mouth soft and follow every signal she gives me.
She needs to feel something other than that darkness. I understand that without her saying it. She needs her body to belong to something other than fear, and I intend to give her all of it, for as long as she needs.
I start with my mouth at her throat, feeling her pulse against my lips, fast and alive. My hands move slowly over her shoulders, down her arms, learning her again the way you relearn something you were afraid you might lose. She exhales and some of the tension leaves her body, not all of it, but enough.
