Not Bureau Chief to asset—Sam to Ryan.
“I’ve had better months.”
He nods like that’s exactly what he expected to hear and doesn’t try to improve on it. “The funeral,” he says after a moment. “I know that was—”
“Don’t.” My voice stays level. “We don’t need to go through it.”
He looks at me steadily. “Ryan.”
“I said I’m fine, Sam.”
“I know what you said.”
Leaning back in the chair, I look at the ceiling for a moment with similar cracks but a different room, and then back at him.
“She was crying,” I say. “When they lowered the coffin, her knees went.”
Sam doesn’t say anything.
“Tate caught her.” A pause. “He’s good. He’s going to look after her.”
“I know he will.”
“She doesn’t know that yet.” I look down at my hands on the table. “She’s going to struggle for a while before she finds her footing. And I can’t—” I stop, then start again. “I can’t do anything about that from here.”
“No,” Sam says. “You can’t.”
I appreciate that he doesn’t try to soften it, tell me it’ll be okay, that she’ll be fine, or that time fixes things. Sam has never been that kind of man, and I’ve never needed him to be.
“Riley,” I say after a moment, shifting back to ground I can stand on more steadily. “Tell me everything you didn’t put in the file.”
Something briefly moves behind Sam’s eyes. He controls it fast. Six years together, and I catch everything he thinks he’s hiding.
“She went in deeper than the original parameters,” he says. “Clemente trusts her. More than we anticipated.”
“How much more?”
A pause.
“She’s not just in his circle, Ryan. She’s his.”
The words land heavily in the quiet apartment.
Looking at the closed file between us, Riley’s photograph is somewhere inside it with sunglasses on and completely composed.
“She knew what she was signing up for.”
“She did.”
“That doesn’t make it easier.”
“No,” Sam agrees. “It doesn’t.”
Picking up the passport again, I turn it over in my hands and run my thumb across the name embossed on the cover.
Marco Reyes.
A man who never existed until he needed to.
