Chapter 23 Wyatt
Wyatt
The door closes behind her and neither of us moves.
The kitchen still smells like Marcella’s tres leches, and the dishes Nina brought in are stacked beside the sink where she left them. The faucet drips twice into the silence.
Chris is standing where he was when I told him to let go. Three feet from the counter, hands at his sides, face trained into the blankness I’ve learned to read as anything but calm. His breathing is too fast to sell it.
“What did you say to her?” I demand.
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “What did I say to her?”
“I walked in and she was shaking. You had her pinned against the counter.”
“She told me about the pregnancy.” His voice cracks on the last word. “She told me she was pregnant. That she had an abortion. A week ago.”
The words hang in the air between us. She’d barely started telling me before the chaos of the evening stopped her.
I sensed her brittleness all through dinner: the way she held her wineglass without drinking, the way her laugh came a beat too late.
I knew she was unraveling and I sat there anyway, waiting for a better moment that was never going to come.
I should have pulled both of them aside.
Found a way for the three of us to sit down and just talk.
Instead she had to do it alone, mid-spiral, and now we’re here.
“You already knew,” he says.
“She told me tonight. Before you got here. We didn’t get a chance to really talk about it though.”
“You knew and you just—what—went back to the dinner table and passed the bread?”
“What was I supposed to do, Chris? Announce it over dessert?”
He drags both hands across his face. For a second he looks less like a trained operative and more like a man whose world just tilted sideways.
“She was falling apart. Right in front of me. And I couldn’t—” He stops.
Swallows hard. “I was trying to get her to breathe. That’s all I was doing when you walked in. ”
I believe him. The way his hands were around her wrists, thumbs to her pulse points. An anchor, not a cage. Instinct, not tactic.
But that doesn’t undo the image: Nina pressed against the counter, shaking, tears on her face, and his hands on her.
“She needs space,” I say. “Time to breathe.”
“She needs someone to show up for her.”
“She knows where to find us. When she’s ready.”
“Yeah? And how’s that been working?” He steps closer. “She’s been in LA for weeks. She went through an abortion that was our fault and didn’t tell either of us.”
“She told Callie.”
“Callie isn’t us.” He holds my gaze. “You keep talking about giving her space. You just got here yesterday. When’s the last time you pushed through when she needed you to, instead of backing off the second she puts up a wall?”
I want to fire back. I want to point to every careful decision: the reassignment, the proximity, the boundaries I respected because I thought that’s what she needed.
“I’m doing what she asked for.”
“No, you’re doing what’s comfortable and calling it what she asked for. There’s a difference.” His voice is rising now. “She sat at that table all night and nobody—nobody—pulled her aside and said hey, you don’t have to hold this by yourself.”
He drags a hand through his hair. “Nina doesn’t ask for help. She never has. She retreats and she manages and she convinces herself she’s fine, and if you wait for her to come to you, you will wait forever. Telling us alone had to have been hell.”
“I was trying to give her room to come to us on her own terms.”
“You’re a fucking idiot, Wyatt.” The same words from Nina’s apartment in Denver, standing over boxes I’d packed with too much care. But this time there’s no gentleness in it. “You see someone drowning and you stand on the shore and call it respecting their space.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Was it fair to her? Sitting at that table, falling apart, while you monitored her between courses?”
Seeing it from his side changes the shape of it. Every moment I filed under giving her space rearranges into something uglier: watching her drown and calling it patience.
“Fine,” I say, and my voice is harder than I expect. “I failed her tonight. I knew she was struggling and I told myself the timing wasn’t right. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I want you to mean it.”
“I mean it.” I’m off the counter now, closing the distance between us.
“I mean every goddamn word. I should have pulled her aside. I should have pulled both of you aside. I should have done a hundred things differently and instead I sat there, and she had to carry it alone, and now she’s gone. I know. I know.”
We’re standing too close. Both of us breathing hard.
“But don’t you dare stand there and tell me I don’t show up.
When she learned you were alive, I stood by her.
Listened to her spinning her wheels over what it would mean, hearing between the words her unspoken question about whether you’d be the same man she loved when you left.
Whether you’d want her back. When she called that week after the wedding, I was there.
I packed up her apartment. I carried boxes for a woman who was leaving and I didn’t ask her to stay because she didn’t want to be asked.
Where were you? Walking out of that hotel room before sunrise.
Three weeks and not a call, not a text, not a goddamn word. ”
“That’s not what happened.”
“You had one night where you let yourself be real, and you couldn’t get away fast enough. And you want to talk about showing up?”
His jaw is set. He doesn’t deny it. He just stands there. Takes it. And that makes it worse. Because I don’t have any of that left.
“It didn’t just break her, Chris.” My voice cracks and I hate it. “It broke me too. That night meant something to me—not just because of Nina. Because of you. And you left, and I had to act like that was fine, like I was only mourning what she lost, like I didn’t lose something too.”
I stop. Because I can hear what I’m saying. And the shift in his expression tells me he hears it too.
The combativeness drains out of his expression. What replaces it is slower. Stunned. Like something he’d filed away as impossible just rearranged itself into fact.
And I want it back. Every word. Not because it isn’t true, but because I just handed Chris Longo the most dangerous thing I own and I can’t undo it.
His mouth opens. Closes. He looks away.
When he speaks, his voice is flat. Controlled. The wrong kind of steady.
“I’m going to check on Nina.”
He doesn’t wait for a response. He’s already moving—past me, toward the door. The set of his shoulders says the conversation is over. Whatever I said doesn’t rate his focus. Nina is simpler than what I just laid on him. Nina he knows how to handle.
I step into the doorway.
He doesn’t slow down. His hand comes up to push me aside and I grab his wrist, plant my weight. For a second we’re locked there, his arm in my grip, my back against the frame, everything I just confessed still hanging in the air between us like smoke.
The punch comes fast and desperate. His fist catches me across the jaw—not a trained strike, just a man with nowhere left to put what he’s feeling, who’s decided on a path and won’t be stopped.
My head snaps back. Pain blooms white across my vision. And then my body answers before my brain catches up—not training, just instinct.
We crash into the kitchen island, sending a ceramic bowl spinning off the edge and shattering on the floor.
His elbow catches my ribs. My fist connects with his cheek, skin splitting under my knuckles.
I drive my shoulder into his sternum and we hit the wall, knocking Marcella’s herb pots from the windowsill.
Soil and ceramic scatter across the tile.
“Stop it!” The voice cuts through our struggle like a blade. “Both of you. Enough.”
We freeze. Breathing hard, his shirt twisted in my grip, blood from my split lip on his collar.
Mason is in the kitchen doorway. Callie beside him. Their expressions—identical fury, identical disappointment.
“What the fuck,” Mason says, his voice carrying the quiet edge that reminds me exactly why he survived three years undercover in cartel territory.
Marcella appears behind them with Zoey in her arms, takes one look at the broken pots, the scattered soil, the two of us still locked together, and retreats toward the back of the house.
“Sit down,” Mason says. “Now.”
We separate. Slowly. Chris takes the far end of the counter, leaning against it with his arms crossed. I sink into one of the kitchen chairs. My jaw throbs and my heart pounds.
Callie looks between us. Whatever she’s feeling, she doesn’t let it reach her face. She crosses her arms. “Tell me what happened.”
Not what’s wrong with you. Not how dare you. Just—tell me.
Somehow that’s worse.
Chris speaks first. “Nina needs me. Wyatt seems to disagree.”
Callie looks at the broken pottery on the floor, the soil from Marcella’s herb pots scattered across the tile, the blood on Chris’s collar. Then she looks at us like we’re the dumbest men she’s ever met.
“She told you.” Not a question. “And you didn’t handle it well.”
“We didn’t get a chance to handle it at all,” I say. “We barely had a conversation earlier. She told Chris just before he ran her off. And now he wants to charge after her without thinking.”
Chris’s nostrils flare. He turns to his sister.
“You know her, Callie.” Chris’s voice is rough. “She’s not going to ask for help. She never does. Either you go or I go.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere tonight.” Callie’s eyes move to the cut on Chris’s cheek. “You show up at her door looking like this and she’s going to blame herself for it. You know that.”
Chris doesn’t argue.
“Why couldn’t she just tell us when she found out?” I say it before I can stop it—the question that’s been gnawing at me since she stood in the garden barely holding together. “We wouldn’t have judged her. She has to know that.”
Callie’s expression shifts, her patience running thin.
“She wasn’t afraid you’d judge her. She was afraid you’d be sad. That you’d mourn a future she never wanted, and she’d have to carry the weight of your grief on top of her own shame.” Callie holds my gaze. “In her head, she took something from you. Even though it was never yours to have.”
Chris’s throat works. “She’d be wrong.”
“Maybe, but she couldn’t hear whatever you’d say back.
Because the shame isn’t about your opinion—it’s about something she’s been carrying since she was a kid.
The fear that she’s broken because she doesn’t want what women are supposed to want.
And then she had to make a choice that confirmed every fear she’s ever had about herself, and tell two men she believed might have wanted what she chose to end. ”
Silence. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of Marcella’s voice in the backyard singing softly to her granddaughter in French.
Mason, who’s been leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, speaks for the first time since the initial standoff. “She needs tonight.”
But Chris is already standing. He picks his keys up from the counter without a word.
“Chris.” Callie sharpens. “Did you hear what I just said? You show up at her door looking like that—”
“I heard you.” He’s not arguing. He’s just done listening. He heads for the door.
Callie looks at Mason. Mason looks at me. Nobody stops him.
He’s already through the door, closing it behind him.
“He’s going to make it worse,” Callie says.
But I’m already on my feet. Because Chris is wrong about a lot of things tonight, but he’s not wrong about this—Nina is alone, and she shouldn’t be. And if he’s going, so am I.
“Wyatt—”
“He was right. She needs us,” I say. I grab my jacket and follow Chris into the night.