My brain had filed them last night, the way it always did, tucking details into the pattern-recognition engine that ran whether I told it to or not. Travis had angled his face away from the overhead light in the kitchen. The movement had been casual enough that most people wouldn’t have registered it as a choice.
I registered choices. That was what I did for a living.
The left side of his jaw. Dark, heading toward purple. The kind of mark that came from being hit, not from hitting a cabinet. And he’d been favoring his left side all night, the subtlecompensation of a body protecting a part of itself that hurt when it breathed.
If the man never left his house, how did he have bruises?
My brain kept touching it, turning it, testing it against the model I had of Travis Hale, and the model kept rejecting it. The data didn’t fit. A recluse doesn’t come home at three in the morning with a bruised jaw and damaged ribs.
I didn’t have an answer. But the question wasn’t going away.
I showered in the guest bathroom, which looked as unused as the bedroom. The soap in the dish was still in its wrapper. I dressed in the clothes I’d packed, put my hair up because letting it dry loose would take an hour I didn’t have and patience I hadn’t brought.
My inhaler was in my bag. I took two puffs out of habit. The humid air from the pool last night had done more for my lungs than the medication usually managed, and this morning my chest felt relatively open. Small mercy.
With one more longing glance under the bed, I made myself leave the guest room.
The hallway led to the kitchen, and I heard him before I saw him. Not conversation. Just the sounds of a person moving in a space, the noises of cooking. A pan on a burner. Something sizzling. A cabinet opening and closing.
Travis was standing at the stove with his back to me. Dark long-sleeved shirt, jeans, bare feet on the kitchen tile. His hair was damp, pushed back from his face, longer than he used to keep it. Not long long, but past the sharp, cropped cut I remembered from family dinners and the one Thanksgiving where I’d spent the entire meal not looking at him.
He was cooking eggs. Real eggs, cracked into a pan, with toast in a toaster and a pot of coffee brewing from a fancy machine in the corner.
There were two plates on the counter.
I’d never seen Travis in a domestic context. At my parents’ house, he’d always been on the edges. Standing in the backyard with a beer he nursed for hours. Sitting in the chair farthest from the center of conversation. Here, in his own kitchen, his hands moved through the work without wasted motion, the spatula efficient in the pan, everything approached with the same quiet competence he brought to everything else.
He turned when he heard me. The bruise on his jaw was worse in the morning light. Purple spreading toward green at the edges.
“Coffee’s fresh,” he said. “Mugs are above the machine.”
“Thank you.” I found the mug. Poured the coffee. Stood at the counter three feet from him and held it with both hands because it gave my fingers something to do.
He slid eggs onto a plate and set it on the table in front of the chair where I’d sat last night. “Sit down. Eat.”
I sat. He put toast beside the eggs, poured his own coffee, and took the chair across from me. He didn’t eat yet. Those green eyes were on me, focused, assessing, and I’d forgotten what it felt like to be the object of that kind of attention. Not looking through me. Not looking past me to find someone more interesting. At me.
“You said we’d talk this morning,” I said.
“I did.”
I put down the coffee. Set my hands flat on the table. “After Naomi died, I took a contractor position with the FBI. Data analysis, pattern recognition.”
“That’s a change.” He said it carefully, like he was turning it over. “You were doing accounting before.”
“I was sitting at a desk running numbers for people who wanted to make more money. Naomi was out there doing something that mattered, and I was building financial models for quarterly reports.” I picked up a piece of toast and tore thecorner off. Didn’t eat it. Just held it. “After she died, I couldn’t keep doing that. I needed to be closer to the work she was doing. Even if I couldn’t do it the way she did.”
“You didn’t want to try to become an agent?”
I almost laughed. “My lungs wouldn’t clear the physical. I can’t run two miles without my inhaler, and the Bureau isn’t interested in field agents who need to stop and breathe in the middle of a foot chase.” I said it the way I always said it, matter-of-fact, the sting long since faded into something that just was. “Contractor was the door that opened. So I walked through it.”
He nodded. Not with pity. Just acknowledgment. “Analysis work is important, regardless of whether you’re an agent or contractor.”
He picked up his own coffee and drank, and I ate the piece of toast I’d been holding because my hands needed something to do, and food was better than fidgeting.
“It’s not glamorous, and nobody in that building thinks of me as anything other than a talking spreadsheet.” I pushed a forkful of eggs around the plate. “But being a contractor gave me access to the FBI system and cases. And once I was inside, I started building a predictive model on Lucian Kindt’s trafficking operation.”
Travis’s hand tightened around his mug. Just for a second, but I saw it. Of course he knew who Kindt was. Naomi had been killed on a mission trying to stop Kindt’s trafficking ring.
