“Yes.”
“Where did they go?”
“East.Off the county road.I’ll have more by this afternoon.”He leaned against the truck beside her.Not too close.Close enough.“Are you all right?”
“I had a conversation with a woman who’s been trafficked through four hospitals in three months.She trusted me enough to give me a code and not enough to give me her name.And then they took her while I was thirty feet away charting vitals that won’t exist by morning.”She looked at the coffee in her hand.“I’m fine.”
“Maren.”
“I know I’m not fine.I’m stating the expected answer for the expected question so we can skip past it and talk about what happens next.”
The clarity of that—the refusal to perform being okay when she wasn’t—was the thing about her that got to him every time.
“What happens next is you go home and sleep.”
“I slept nine hours yesterday.I don’t need more sleep.I need to know that woman is going to be found.”
“She will be.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on the fact that I have a plate number, a location, and a team that doesn’t stop until the job is done.”
She turned her head and looked at him.The parking lot lights caught the green of her eyes and the line of fatigue beneath them.
“A team,” she said.“That’s the most you’ve told me about whoever you work with.”
“It is.”
“You’re not going to tell me more.”
“Not yet.”
“Because you don’t trust me, or because you’re protecting me?”
The question landed between them.Graham looked at his hands.He’d been gripping the tailgate without realizing it, his knuckles tight.
“Neither,” he said.“I trust you more than the situation warrants, and I stopped being objective about your safety somewhere around Wednesday.”
The silence that followed was different from the ones that had come before it.This one didn’t have the work to hide behind.
Maren looked at the coffee in her hand.Then she poured it out on the asphalt, slow and deliberate, and set the empty cup on the tailgate beside her.
“Wednesday,” she said quietly.“That was when you came to my house.”
“Thursday.”
“You said Wednesday.”
“I said I stopped being objective.The house was Thursday.The objectivity went earlier.”
She was quiet for a long time.A car turned into the parking lot—day shift, early arrival—and parked on the far side.The driver got out, stretched, and walked toward the entrance without looking in their direction.
“I should go home,” she said.
“Yes.”
She didn’t move.Neither did he.
