"Okay."
Then, all in a rush, like it had been pressing on a door: "I could really use a drink."
And I sat there a second with both hands on the wheel, going careful, because I could feel the whole shape of the danger in front of me and it had nothing to do with the FBI.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to get swept up in her. I'm not a stupid man and I'm not a blind one—I could see how she was looking at me, had felt it building under everything since the water, and it wasn't that I didn't want her. God knows. The want had been sitting in me like a coal since her hand closed on my arm in the cold Atlantic.
But this woman had been standing at an altar in a white dress beside another man before the sun was high. Hours. Not weeks, not days—hours. Whatever was running hot between us in the dark of that car, she was raw to the bone and grieving a life she'd just set fire to, and a man who'd take advantage of that wasn't a man. He was exactly the thing her family was afraid she'd run off with.
I wasn't going to be that.
So, I put the car in gear.
"Come on," I said. "Let's go get you a drink."
11
MARY CATHERINE
The bar he found was called Liquid Courage, which, under the circumstances, felt like the universe attempting humor.
It was on East Bay and it was exactly the kind of place I would never have walked into on a regular Saturday—loud and cheerful and unapologetically itself, the air thick with tequila and pineapple syrup and the warmth of a crowd that had been at it since happy hour and had no plans to stop.
Someone had a playlist running that didn't take itself seriously. The regulars looked like people who had long ago made their peace with bad decisions and found them agreeable. A bartender the size of a small building—tattooed, six-foot-something, the kind of face that had seen everything twice and developed opinions—glanced at us when we came in, clocked Brock with the brief, professional assessment of a man who sorted trouble at the door, found nothing worth escalating, and went back to his work.
It was, I realized, exactly right. The noise gave us privacy in a way a quiet bar never could. Nobody in this room was listening to anyone else.
I asked for whiskey. Irish, neat. It felt appropriate.
Brock got the same without looking at the menu.
We found a corner table near the back. His back went to the wall before he'd finished sitting down, facing the door, and I watched him do it the way I'd watched him do everything—with the efficiency of a man who didn't think about these things anymore because they'd been absorbed so deeply into the body that they ran on their own.
I thought about what I'd said on the pier. Lucky guess.
The whiskey arrived and I wrapped both hands around the glass and looked at it for a moment.
"I drove my car to the studio first," I said. "Before I called the car to take me back to meet you. I Ubered to the house." I paused. "I didn't want to have to think about logistics tonight."
"Smart," he said. Then, after a beat: "The bag?”
I looked at him.
"It's a handbag," I said. "Women have them. It's not a thing." I paused. "It's in your backseat, actually. I only brought my wallet in with me.”
It wasn’t just a handbag. For some reason, I’d wanted it with me instead of at my studio.
Something crossed his face—not quite a smile, but adjacent to the satisfaction of a man whose read on a situation had just been confirmed. He'd noticed. Of course, he'd noticed. He probably catalogued everything the way other people breathed.
"You trusted me with it," he said.
"I trusted you with my life off a pier this afternoon," I said. "A bag felt like a reasonable next step."
"It was packed."
I held his gaze for a moment. “A change of clothes. My charcoal pencils. A sketchbook." I paused. "A photograph."
Something moved in his face. Recognition, maybe. Or the stillness of a man who had packed that exact bag—different contents, same impulse—more times than he'd ever say out loud.
