Page 74 of Hunted in the Silence

He reached across the table and took her hand and they drank their coffee, while outside, Blackridge was gray and cold and going about its business, just as it always had and always would.

***

Maddox Consulting opened its doors in a second-floor office on Fourth Street in February, three weeks after the lease was signed. Carson’s name wasn’t on the door, but everyone who mattered in Blackridge law enforcement knew about his involvement. Dax came on part-time, which in practice meant he was there four days a week and available the fifth. Finn took two cases in the first month on a consulting basis while maintaining his position at BPD, which Carson allowed because he understood that the line between his department and the firm was a resource rather than a boundary.

Olivia sent three referrals in the first six weeks from cases the Bureau had closed without fully resolving. Cole took his time, reviewing things carefully rather than with the restricted urgency of a federal caseload, and found things in all three that the original investigations had missed.

He came home at reasonable hours, which was new. He either made dinner or picked it up, and he always sat at the table with Brynn and talked about things that were not exclusively about work, even though it was what had brought them to together at the table in the first place, but it wasn’t the only thing anymore.

And Cole could only imagine what Abby would have had to say about it if she were there.

They got married in June.

Not because it was planned or particularly significant, but because Carson and Nora offered their backyard when it was at its best. And when Cole asked Brynn if she wanted to wait for something more formal, she looked at him and said, “I’ve been waiting for things my whole life. I’m done waiting,” and that was the end of that.

It was small. Thirty people in Carson and Nora’s backyard on a Saturday afternoon, the kind of day that delivered everything the start of summer promised—warm and clear with enough of a breeze that the heat was pleasant rather than oppressive. Nora had put flowers on every surface she could find, which was a lot, and Mae had opinions about where everything should go and Nora incorporated most of them.

Brynn wore a dress she’d found in a shop on the east side on a random Tuesday while window shopping. It was ivory, simple, and looked like it had been made for her.

She’d shown Cole a photo of it the night she found it, and after a long moment he said, “Yes.”

“You’re not supposed to see it before the wedding,” she’d replied with a note of worry in her voice.

“I didn’t see you in it, I saw a photo,” he attempted to sooth her.

But she was having none of that. “That’s a technicality,”

“I’m a consultant now, technicalities are my business,” he’d countered, and that had been the end of that conversation too.

Silas and Harper drove up from the city. Harper looked at Brynn’s dress and declared it, “Perfect.”

Olivia was on time for once, which meant she was one of the first people there, and she found a chair near the aisle and sat in it with her hands in her lap and watched everything unfold around her. And when Brynn walked through the back door of Carson’s house and down the steps toward the garden, Olivia’s expression did something new that Brynn didn’t have words for.

Quinn and Dax sat in the third row. And because she’d asked him three weeks before the wedding, Carson was the one who walked Brynn down the aisle. He’d gone very still for a moment and then said yes in a quiet, direct way that said he was moved by the request. He offered his arm at the back steps, and she looped her hand through it, and they walked through the garden toward the small arch Nora had covered in white flowers and the man standing under it who stole her breath every time she laid eyes on him.

Cole wore a dark suit and no tie because she thought he was even more handsome without one. It still made her smile when she thought about his dramatic, “Thank God,” because Cole secretly hated them.

He turned when she came through the garden gate and looked as if she was the thing he’d been moving toward his whole life.

She understood that look more than words could say.

The ceremony didn’t take long. The officiant was a judge Carson knew who kept it short and sweet, and when she asked if they had anything to say to each other, Brynn had something prepared, but it shocked her when Cole announced he did too.

Brynn went first.

“I spent a long time believing that what I was building was enough.” She was looking at him as she spoke, and the people surrounding them had gone utterly quiet. “The center. The work. The life I made from what was taken from me. And it was enough. It was real and it was mine and I was proud of it.” She paused to take a steadying breath. “And then you came through a door I was holding open, and I started building something else without deciding to. Something I didn’t have a blueprint for.” She held his gaze. “I’m glad I didn’t have a one. I think it came out better that way.”

Cole’s smile was warm and gentle, and he swallowed several times before he spoke. “I came to Blackridge because of a case. I stayed because of you. I resigned from the only career I’d had as an adult because of what I understood about myself when I was with you. I started a firm because of the stuff we talked about at the kitchen table at seven in the morning.” He paused. “Every good decision I’ve made in the past eight months has had you somewhere in the middle of it. I don’t think that’s going to change.” He paused again. “I don’t want it to change.”

The judge finished having them recite their vows, then called on Mae, who had been sitting very still in the front row in a dress she’d picked out herself, for the rings. When Mae said “yay” in a voice that was not quite a whisper but close enough, someone laughed, and then everyone laughed, and then it was done.

Cole kissed Brynn in the middle of June in the backyard with the breeze moving through the flowers Nora had put everywhere.

Afterward, at the table with the food Carson had made too much of, Brynn sat between Cole and Quinn and across from Harper, and Olivia was two seats down talking to Silas about something that required her to draw a diagram on a napkin, and Mae was asleep in a chair against the fence that Carson had put a blanket on.

Brynn took in the picture at the table. At the people around it.

She thought about a hot chocolate on a cold night and a teenage girl who had come through the center’s door and started everything. She thought about Caitlin Marsh saying it’s okay, we can go. She thought about Dana Pryce saying something funny and being surprised by her own laugh.