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“You’re the one who took it.”

“I’m also the one who can protect it here.”

“You still think those are different jobs.”

She takes the ring off. She photographs it in her palm and sets it in the leather tray beside the keyboard. The sight of her bare finger is an injury I have no right to feel.

“The engagement is suspended,” she says. “The audit continues from somewhere else. Joint planning ends now.”

“Tessa.”

“Don’t use my name as an argument.”

I stop talking.

She asks Mercer for transport. Forty minutes. My first instinct is that forty minutes is too long. My second is to pick her route and inspect the car myself. Both instincts are me trying to fix what I broke by taking more.

“What do you need from Barbed Crown to leave?” I ask.

An open gate. Written confirmation that nobody touched her truck. A scan of her things for more devices, done in front of her. No escort unless Mercer wants one.

I give the orders in front of her. They find nothing else.

She goes up to the guest room to pack. I stop at the threshold, and she lets me stand there. For a while, I hear only zippers and the snap of her case latches.

Then she stops with a folded shirt in her hands.

“I woke up in your bed,” she says, not turning around, “and you already had my route.”

I don’t say anything. There isn’t anything.

“Do you know what that stop was?” She turns. Her eyes are dry, and somehow that’s worse. “The water tank. It wasn’t work. It was the only seven minutes I’d had alone since I drove onto your land. I sat in that truck and I thought about you. I thought about whether I was stupid enough to walk into your room. I decided I was.” Her voice doesn’t shake. Her hands do, just slightly, around the shirt. “And it was on your screen. It was a line on a map that a man read over a radio to your night shift.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are. That’s not the part I’m asking you to understand.” She sets the shirt in the case with great care, as if it might break. “The last time I trusted a man with the building I worked in, he used it to bury me. I spent a year digging out. I came here with two phones and sealed cases and a lawyer on speed dial because I swore I would never be that stupid again. And I was careful. I was careful about everything except you.”

Her words leave me without a defense.

“You didn’t make a mistake,” she says. “You made a decision. Every day since the motel, you decided again. Last night I told you where your control ended, and you said you were trying to accept it, and the whole time you knew that tag was under my case.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

The true answer is small and ugly. “Because you’d have left. And I wanted you where I could see you.”

She nods slowly, as if I’ve confirmed a number she already had. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me.”

She closes the case. The bed behind her is untouched. The water glass from this morning goes into the sink.

“The room stays available,” I say. “Under the agreement. You can come back with counsel or the Ranger.”

“Housing isn’t the dispute.”

“I know.”

“Then stop proving you honored the easiest term.”