Then I grabbed a towel off the rack and held it out without looking directly at her as she climbed out. She took it and wrapped it around herself and stood there dripping on the concrete, three feet away from me. The last time I’d seen her she’d been in a black dress at her sister’s funeral.
Three years. She looked different and exactly the same, and I couldn’t think about any of that right now because my ribs were screaming and my hands were trembling, and I had about twenty minutes of functional capacity left before my body shut down whether I gave it permission or not.
It had been a long fucking night, and this was not how I’d expected it to end.
“Come upstairs.”
“Travis, I need to explain?—”
“Get dressed and let’s go upstairs. Now. Whatever this is, it’s not happening down here.”
She heard something in my voice that made her stop talking. She dried off as best she could and slid her clothes on. I led her up the stairs and through the hallway, and I was conscious of every step, every door she might have opened before I got home, every part of this level she might have already seen.
The control room door was closed. I checked it without breaking stride. Still locked. Gear room, locked. Just the pool corridor open, which was exactly what she’d found.
The kitchen was annoyingly bright. I pulled a chair out from the table and she sat down, clutching the towel around her shoulders, her hair dripping onto the floor. Her hands were wrapped around each other in her lap, fingers laced too tight, and the skin under her eyes had that bruised, translucent look that came from too many hours without sleep.
“How did you get through my gate?”
“The keypad. I guessed the code.”
“You guessed an eight-character alphanumeric code.”
She looked down at the table. “I tried Treasure.”
The word landed somewhere behind my sternum. A place I thought I’d sealed off, concreted over, buried under three years of silence and concrete walls and the specific kind of forgetting that required constant maintenance.
Treasure.
“Naomi mentioned it once,” Sera said. “The nickname. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have used it. I shouldn’t have come in at all. I tried calling you first. Multiple times. You never answered.”
“I don’t answer my phone.”
“I noticed. You didn’t return my calls either.”
No, I hadn’t. We both knew it, so I didn’t say it.
The silence stretched. I’d typed that word into the keypad three years ago when I’d moved out here and set up the system,because my fingers needed something to hold onto and that was all I had left of Naomi.
I should have changed it since. Any of a hundred nights when I was down here running diagnostics and could have swapped it for something that didn’t mean anything.
I hadn’t. That was a problem for a version of me that had the capacity to think about it, and that version didn’t exist right now. White spots were dancing in front of my eyes.
“What are you doing here, Sera?”
“I need your help. I’m a contractor with the FBI now, data analysis, and I’ve been building something for the past two years?—”
“Stop.” I held up a hand. “Not tonight.”
“Travis—”
“I can’t do this tonight. Whatever you came here to tell me, I need you to understand that I physically cannot process it right now. Tomorrow. First thing. I’ll listen to every word. But not now.”
She studied me. I turned slightly so the left side of my jaw with all the bruising was angled away from the overhead light. Casual. Just a man leaning against his kitchen counter at three in the morning. Nothing to see.
“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
She was still shivering. Wet hair, damp towel, sitting in a kitchen that I kept at sixty-four degrees because I never had reason to keep it warmer. My hands needed something to do that wasn’t shaking, so I put the kettle on.
