“We all saw that coming like a train wreck in slow motion,” he muttered as I glared at Emmett.
Emmett looked up from the papers in front of him and raised one dark eyebrow, his brown eyes cold. “Something to say?”
“Would it do any good?” I asked. “You fucking stabbed me in the back.”
“No, I didn’t,” Emmett said. “I did you a favor. It was only going to get worse, man. Someone needed to rip off the Band-Aid, and she deserved to know.”
“That wasn’t your call,” I said.
“If it was yours, you weren’t going to make it,” Emmett said. “Somebody had to.”
“I just needed more time,” I said, looking down the hall where Sylvie had disappeared, knowing that as much as I’d been lying to her, I’d been lying to myself even more. I hadn’t needed time, I’d needed some fucking balls. If I’d told her about Silas earlier…
But I hadn’t, and now I had to figure out how to fix this before I lost Sylvie completely.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ELI
Iwas oddly nervous as I opened the door to the safe house apartment. I hadn’t seen Sylvie since our argument in the office hours ago. An optimistic part of me hoped we were past all of that.
Just in case, I’d come home bearing gifts in the form of the sushi Sylvie had mentioned craving. A wiggle of anxiety in my gut told me it wasn’t going to be that simple. But hey, I could hope, right?
She was sitting at the table, her laptop in front of her, eyebrows pulled together. A deep line grooved between them; her teeth sunk into that full, pink lower lip.
“Hungry?” I asked, grabbing her attention.
Her eyes flicked up, landing on mine, and a wall came down. I’d never seen the hazel of her gaze so flat. Usually, there was something going on in there. Humor. Ambition. Curiosity. Intelligence. Sylvie was never flat.
Her spine straightened, shoulders sliding back, a polite smile on her mouth, and I knew sushi wasn’t going to be enough to fix this. Not even close.
“I could eat,” she said neutrally.
I held up the bag. “I got sushi,” I said unnecessarily, considering the giant illustration of chopsticks and a sushi roll on the side of the bag.
“Great,” she said, her tone not communicating any true enthusiasm.
I’d prefer she was angry and throwing things at me. I didn’t know what to do with this polite chill. She wasn’t mad. She wasn’t trying to score points. She’d just cut me out neatly, bloodlessly. She was a blank slate—not my Sylvie.
She couldn’t keep it up, I assured myself, laying out the boxes of sushi and grabbing plates. “I figured we’d split everything,” I said, arranging chopsticks, napkins, and packets of soy sauce.
Soon enough, our meal was set up, and we were eating in what might look like friendly companionship. But I knew what our meals had been like before this. We’d never run out of anything to talk about.
I tried anyway. “Did you make any progress finding a second case to focus on?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said, nodding and chewing thoughtfully.
“Did you pick one?” I probed. “Or did you narrow it down?”
“I think I picked one,” she said and popped another piece of sushi in her mouth.
Fuck.This was like pulling teeth. Before, just the first question would have been enough to get her going. She would have spilled everything, interested in a second opinion, or what I thought of the details of the case. But now she didn’t care what I thought. She didn’t particularly want to be talking to me at all.
I figured she would break before I did. She couldn’t keep up this pretense.
I was wrong. She could, and she did. Dinner stretched, silence punctuated by my barely answered questions.
I was the one who broke, my hand shooting out to grab her wrist as she moved to stand and clear the table after dinner. I had a sudden vision of her disappearing into her room with her laptop and not seeing her again till morning.
