Chapter Eleven
Rowan
I don't sleep well after the chili, which is its own kind of humiliating, lying awake replaying a conversation that didn't even end in a kiss and still managing to undo something I'd spent three weeks carefully rebuilding.
I keep circling the same handful of seconds, her hand close enough to mine to feel the warmth of it, the particular quality of his voice when he said he believed her, the whole tragedy of it, actually, I was standing next to something solid the entire time.
I've turned that sentence over so many times by three in the morning that it's started to lose its shape, words becoming just sounds, and somewhere in that exhausted, three a.m. loop I make the decision that feels, in the moment, like the only sane one left to me.
By morning I've decided, with the particular grim clarity of someone who slept four hours and used the rest of the night to think herself into a corner, that last night was a mistake I'm not going to repeat.
Not the honesty. The proximity. The unguarded hour at my own kitchen table, his hand close enough to mine that I could feel it without either of us moving.
That's not a version of caution I can afford right now, not with six days standing between me and whatever Dax Cole's planning, not with my whole life still hanging in a balance I don't fully control.
It's not that I regret what I said. Every word of it was true, and saying it out loud felt like setting something down I'd been carrying too long.
It's that truth and safety aren't always the same thing, and right now, with a man named Dax Cole counting down toward whatever he's planning, I can't afford to let my guard down in one direction without it bleeding into every other direction I need to stay sharp in.
So I go cold. Not cruel, just efficient, the particular efficient I perfected in the first month after the photo, all business, no lingering, and I watch it land on Wyatt when he shows up that evening, watch him absorb the shift without arguing, without asking what changed, just recalibrating to match whatever version of me is currently standing in front of him.
A woman comes in for a small memorial piece late morning, something simple, a robin for a mother she lost in the spring, and I find myself unable to focus the way I usually can, my hands doing the work while the rest of me keeps drifting back to a kitchen table and a conversation that shouldn't have mattered as much as it did.
I mess up a line, small, fixable, but it's the first mistake I've made on a client in over a year, and the woman doesn't notice, but I do, and it rattles me more than it should for something so minor.
"You okay, hon?" the woman asks, kind, oblivious to the reason for my distraction. "You seem a million miles away today."
"Just tired. Long week." I don't elaborate, and she doesn't press, and I finish the piece carefully, double-checking every line before I let her see it, grateful when she leaves satisfied and none the wiser about how close I came to letting my own tangled feelings bleed into her mother's memory.
I wrap her forearm in plastic and hand her the aftercare sheet, and she thanks me twice, unhurried, the way people do when a piece of their grief has just found somewhere permanent to live, and for a moment, watching her go, I remember exactly why I do this work in the first place, why it matters even on days when my own life feels like it's fraying at every seam.
"You okay?" he asks, once, careful.
"Fine. Long day." I don't elaborate, and he doesn't push, and something in his easy acceptance of the distance almost makes it worse, because some petty, exhausted part of me wanted him to push back a little, wanted proof that last night mattered enough to fight for instead of just quietly conceding.
He takes up his post across the street same as always, and I catch myself watching him through the window more than I mean to, cataloging the particular stillness in his shoulders that tells me he's noticed the change and decided, correctly, that pushing on it tonight would only make things worse.
I hate how well he's learned to read me these three weeks.
I hate more how much I've come to rely on him reading me right.
Deb clocks it within the hour, obviously, because Deb clocks everything.
"What happened," she says, not really a question, cornering me at the register while Wyatt's outside doing his usual rounds.
"Nothing happened."
"Ro."
"Nothing happened, and that's exactly the problem.
" I keep my eyes on the register, counting bills I've already counted twice.
"We had dinner. We talked. Nothing happened, and I still feel like the ground moved, and I don't have the bandwidth right now to figure out what that means with everything else going on. "
"So don't figure it out," Deb says, surprising me with the simplicity of it. "Not tonight. You don't owe yourself an answer on a deadline, Ro. Some things you just have to let sit until they're ready to tell you what they are."
"That's annoyingly reasonable of you."
"I contain multitudes, remember? I told you that weeks ago." She bumps my shoulder with hers, gentle, and for a second the tightness in my chest eases slightly, grateful for a friend who knows exactly how much space to give and when.
"You're better at this than you let on," I tell her. "The wisdom thing."
"Don't tell anyone. Ruins my whole brand." She winks, already moving back toward the register, and the ease of it, the sheer normalcy of a friend teasing her through something hard, does more to steady me than any amount of careful advice could have managed.
Deb doesn't push further, just squeezes my shoulder once and goes back to closing up, and I'm grateful, distantly, for a friend who knows when silence is the more useful gift.
I finish my own closing tasks on autopilot, mind still circling that kitchen table from the night before, and by the time I'm done I've almost convinced myself the cold shoulder is working.
The night goes quiet after that, quieter than usual, the particular loaded quiet of two people working hard not to look at each other too long.
I close up at nine, same as always, and I'm halfway up the stairs to the apartment when I hear it, a scrape of metal against metal from the alley side, wrong in a way my body recognizes half a second before my mind catches up.
I freeze on the stairs, one hand on the rail, straining to hear over my own pulse suddenly loud in my ears. There it is again, deliberate, careful, someone working at the alley door's lock with something more sophisticated than a screwdriver.
Every hair on my arms stands up at once, some old animal part of my brain flooding my system with adrenaline before my conscious mind has even finished processing what I'm hearing.
I think, absurdly, of Colton Reyes's easy smile, of the folded photocopy still sitting in a drawer downstairs, of every careful, deniable threat that's been circling this building for three weeks finally arriving at my actual door in the dark.
I don't think. I move, back down the stairs and to the front window, phone already in my hand, and I see Wyatt across the street go rigid on his bike, clearly having heard something too, already moving before I've even gotten my thumb to his contact.
"Stay inside," he says, when he answers, already running, I can hear it in his breathing. "Lock the front. I'm coming around the alley side."
I don't stay inside, not fully, some old stubborn instinct pulling me to the front door instead, watching through the glass, phone pressed to my ear with Deuce's number already dialing on my end because Wyatt can't be everywhere at once and I'm not about to sit passive while my own shop gets breached.
What happens next unfolds fast and messy, the way real danger always does, nothing like the careful, choreographed violence people imagine.
I hear Wyatt's shout from the alley, hear a scuffle, the specific ugly sound of a struggle between two men who both know exactly what they're doing, and I'm at the alley mouth myself inside of thirty seconds, ignoring every instinct telling me to stay back, because staying back has never once been who I am when something I've built is under attack.
Deuce's voice cuts through the dark somewhere behind me, already running, already shouting into his phone for backup, and for one disorienting second the whole alley seems to hold its breath, the scuffling sounds and Wyatt's low, furious voice and my own ragged breathing all suspended together in the dark before everything resolves at once into a scene I'll be replaying for weeks.
By the time I round the corner, Wyatt's got a man pinned against the brick, forearm hard across his throat, and even in the dark I can see it's not Colton Reyes, someone new, younger, scared now that he's caught, whatever confidence got him this far evaporating fast under Wyatt's controlled, furious grip.
A lockpick set lies scattered across the gravel where he must have dropped it in the struggle, small, professional-looking tools that tell their own story about how far Dax Cole's willing to go and how much planning went into tonight, no smash-and-grab amateur but somebody who at least thought he knew what he was doing.
"Who sent you," Wyatt says, low, dangerous in a register I've genuinely never heard from him before, not once in nine years.
The man doesn't answer, just gasps against the pressure on his throat, and for one terrifying second I watch Wyatt's control waver, watch something darker and more violent flicker behind his eyes, the particular rage of a man watching someone try to breach the one thing he's spent three weeks trying to protect.
"Wyatt." My voice comes out steadier than I feel, cutting through whatever's building in him. "Don't. Whatever this costs you, don't."