Page 68 of Hunted in the Silence

She held his gaze. “Then do it.”

He nodded once. A commitment set in stone.

He went back to Pearson’s office forty minutes later, and Olivia came back to the break room and sat across from Brynn, and they drank their coffee in the quiet that had a different quality now, something settled in it.

“He’s going to be all right,” Olivia said.

“I know,” Brynn agreed.

“Are you?”

Brynn lifted her eyes and met the other woman’s directly. Olivia asked questions directly and without softening them. It was one of the things Brynn had come to appreciate about her over the short few weeks of watching her work.

“Yes,” Brynn said. “I think, for the first time in a long time, all right is exactly what I am.”

Olivia assessed her for a moment, and then she picked up her coffee and turned to her laptop and said nothing further.

Cole returned to the break room twenty minutes later and stood in the doorway and looked at Brynn, and she looked back at him. He looked lighter somehow, as if he were no longer carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and she decided she liked how that looked on him.

“Done?” she asked.

“Done,” he said.

She stood up and crossed to him. He put his arm around her shoulders and she leaned into it briefly, and then they walked out of the field office together into the afternoon, which had gone pale and thin and cold and entirely ordinary, the way days did after extraordinary things had finished happening in them.

“Olivia told me something while you were in with Pearson,” Brynn said as they reached the parking lot.

“What?”

“She said the four girls from the Harlan building all have confirmed placements. Caitlin is home with Ruth. The other three have family situations that are workable with the right support, which she’s coordinating.” Brynn paused. “And Dana Pryce.”

Cole looked down at her.

“Olivia found her,” Brynn said. “She’s been in a group home in Indianapolis for eight months under a different name. She’s alive.” She stopped walking. “She’s alive and she’s been in the system and nobody connected it because the name change was a clerical error that became permanent because nobody was looking hard enough.” She felt the weight that had been sitting in her chest since the night she’d told Cole to put Dana’s name in the record lift. “Olivia’s making the call to the group home this afternoon.”

Cole looked at her for a long moment. “You asked her to look.”

“Weeks ago,” Brynn said. “The night I told you about her.”

He held her gaze. “She did impressions,” he said quietly, remembering the detail Brynn had given him the night she’d insisted Dana’s name go in the record.

“She did impressions,” Brynn said with a soft, fond kind of smile. “And she’s fifteen and she’s alive and she’s in Indianapolis, and she’s going to have someone looking out for her from today forward.” She breathed deeply. “That’s not nothing.”

“No,” Cole said. “That’s not nothing. That’s everything.”

They stood in the parking lot in, facing each other, hands linked together between them, and she looked at him and he looked at her, and everything that had happened since they’d met sat between them, a simple truth that no longer carried the weight it once had.

“Carson called me this morning,” Cole told her as they resumed their walk across the lot and reached his car. “Before the meeting with Pearson.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked how I was. And then he said, and I’m quoting directly, that if I found myself doing this work outside the Bureau, he’d like to have that conversation.” Cole looked at the car and then at her. “He’d heard about the inquiry through Finn. Small town.”

“Small town,” Brynn agreed. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him I’d call him next week.” He opened the passenger door for her. “I think we might have the beginning of something.”

She got in and he came around and they drove out of the field office lot into the ordinary afternoon, and she thought about what he’d said. The beginning of something. She’d been thinking in those terms her whole adult life.