CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Isla arrived at the hospital at nine the next morning, carrying two coffees from Superior Street and a nervousness she couldn't entirely account for. The third floor was quieter on Sundays. A nurse she didn't recognize waved her through.
Not leaning. Not propped. Standing under his own power in real clothes—jeans, another flannel shirt she recognized from the office, boots that Stacey must have brought.
His father's watch was on his wrist. He turned when the door opened, and the movement was careful—still guarding his ribs, still moving with the deliberate economy of a man whose body was keeping a ledger of every injury—but it was fluid in a way it hadn't been even three days ago.
He looked like James Sullivan standing in a hospital room rather than a patient who happened to resemble him.
"You're vertical," she said.
"Have been since seven." He almost smiled—the crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepening in a way that she'd missed more than she wanted to examine.
"Patel signed the discharge papers an hour ago.
Outpatient from here. Physical therapy three times a week, follow-ups with her office, the whole program.
" He paused. "She was very clear that I shouldn't be alone for the first week or so.
Something about monitoring for complications and not being an idiot. "
"She used those words?"
"She implied them with medical precision."
Isla set the coffees on the bedside table and dropped into the vinyl chair—her chair, the one she'd worn smooth over weeks of visits.
She handed him a coffee. He took it with both hands, the way he always did, and she watched his fingers wrap around the cup—large, calloused, the faded scar from the fishing accident catching the light—and felt something ease in her chest that had been tight for a very long time.
"So what's the plan?" she asked. "For recovery."
James drank his coffee and looked out the window—parking lot, rooftops, a narrow slice of Lake Superior visible between buildings like a secret the city was trying to keep.
"I called Stacey last night," he said. "She offered to let me stay at the house while I recover.
Emma's room has a pullout, and Stacey works from home most days, so she'd be around if anything—" He gestured vaguely at his torso, encompassing the cracked ribs and the bruising and the whole inventory of damage that Robert Brune had inflicted. "If anything went sideways."
It was a reasonable plan. Stacey was capable and nearby. Emma would be there on weekends. It made sense, the way James Sullivan's plans always made sense—steady, methodical, pragmatic.
Isla hated it.
The feeling surprised her with its clarity.
Not jealousy—not exactly. It was the recognition that the plan placed James in a house that was no longer his with a woman who cared about him but wasn't the person who'd sat in that vinyl chair every day for weeks, who'd held his hand while he was unconscious, who'd bought coffee she drank herself because the gesture mattered even when the recipient couldn't receive it.
"Come stay with me," she said.
James looked at her. The morning light through the hospital window caught his eyes—deep-set blue, crinkled at the corners, holding the expression of a man who'd heard something he hadn't expected and was turning it over with the careful attention he gave everything.
"My apartment," Isla continued, before the silence could solidify. "It's small, but the heating works now. The view of the lake is better than your parking lot." She was talking too fast. She slowed down. Met his eyes. "Patel said you shouldn't be alone. You shouldn't be. And I want you there."
The last four words landed with a weight that exceeded their size. She didn't retract them, didn't qualify them, because after three years of working beside this man and almost losing him, she was finished being careful about things that mattered.
James studied her face the way he studied evidence—thoroughly, missing nothing, reaching conclusions he didn't rush to share. Then he nodded, once, with the understated certainty of a man making a decision he'd already made before she'd asked.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Your couch is terrible, for the record. I've sat on it."
"You've sat on it once."
"Once was enough to form an opinion."
She laughed—short and surprised, the sound of a tension releasing in her chest. For a moment, the hospital room felt like a place where two people who'd spent three years circling each other had finally stopped.
It took all day.
Discharge paperwork consumed the morning. Isla drove him to her apartment in the early afternoon, taking the route along the lake because the view was better, and James watched Superior stretch out beside them under a sky that was trying to decide between gray and something lighter.
Her apartment was small, and seeing it through someone else's eyes made her notice things—the case files on the counter, the running shoes by the door. She cleared space while James lowered himself onto the couch and took in the view through her window.
"This is a good view," he said quietly.
"I know." She watched him watching the lake—James Sullivan on her couch, his boots by her door—and felt something settle in her chest that wasn't pain. It was the feeling of something fitting into a space that had been waiting for it.
They spent the afternoon in the quiet rhythms of two people who knew each other well enough that silence wasn't empty. She made dinner—pasta with whatever she had. They talked about small things. They didn't talk about Robert Brune. Tonight was not the time.
***
By evening they were both exhausted—James from the labor of leaving a hospital, Isla from a week of fatigue she'd finally, in the safety of her own apartment, allowed to catch her.
She sat beside him. The lake was dark beyond the window, the apartment warm—the heating working properly for once, the radiator ticking softly in the corner.
"James."
He turned to look at her, and in the lamplight his face held the expression she'd seen fragments of over three years—in the car during late-night stakeouts, in the office when he thought she wasn't looking, in the hospital room when he'd first opened his eyes and asked what happened with more than professional concern.
"You're family to me," she said. The words came out quiet and certain, without the rehearsal she usually demanded of herself before saying things that mattered.
"I need you to know that. After the past three years, the cases, the hospital—you are family.
I can't imagine my life without you in it, and I'm done pretending otherwise because we work together or because the timing is complicated or because—"
She stopped, because her voice was thinning at the edges in a way that threatened the composure she'd maintained through weeks of hospital visits and dock patrols and a knife fight in a stranger's hallway.
James was quiet. He looked at her with those deep-set blue eyes that saw everything and rushed nothing, and she watched him process what she'd said with the same careful, thorough attention he brought to evidence and crime scenes and the important things that deserved to be examined rather than reacted to.
Then he reached over and took her hand.
His grip was stronger than it had been in the hospital—not fully recovered, not the calloused strength she remembered from before, but warm and certain and deliberate.
He held her hand the way he did everything: steadily, without performance, with the quiet confidence of a man who had made a decision and intended to stand behind it.
"Is more than family an option?" he asked.
His voice was low, rough at the edges where the ventilator damage hadn't fully healed, but underneath the roughness was something that Isla recognized because she'd been carrying the same thing for longer than she wanted to admit.
"Because I fell in love with you a long time ago, Isla.
Somewhere between the first case and the hospital, though I couldn't tell you exactly when, it wasn't a moment, it was everything.
Every late night and every bad coffee and every time you walked into my hospital room holding yourself together with wire and stubbornness.
" He paused. His thumb moved across her knuckles.
"I should have said something sooner. I didn't because I was afraid of making it worse.
But I'm done waiting for the timing to be right, because it's never going to be right.
We chase killers for a living. There's always going to be something. "
Isla looked at their hands—his large and scarred, hers smaller and calloused in different ways, laced together in the lamplight.
She thought about Miami and Reggie and the way that relationship had fractured under the weight of the job.
She thought about Alicia Mendez and the guilt that had taught her to hold people at a distance that felt like safety and was actually just loneliness with better posture.
She thought about three years in Duluth, a city she'd treated as a punishment and had slowly, reluctantly, impossibly come to love—because of the lake, because of the work, because of the man sitting beside her with his heart offered in the same quiet, unshakable way he offered everything.
"Yes," she said.
He kissed her. Or she kissed him—it was impossible to say who moved first, because it happened the way their best work happened, in the synchronized instinct of two people who'd spent years learning each other's rhythms. His good hand came up to cradle her jaw, thumb against her cheekbone, and the kiss was gentle because it had to be—his ribs wouldn't allow anything else—but the gentleness was its own kind of intensity, the tenderness of a man saying with his body what he'd just said with his words.
When they pulled apart, his forehead rested against hers, and they stayed like that—breathing, close, the space between them finally closed.
"Your couch really is terrible," he murmured.
"Come to bed, then."
They moved carefully—James with the guarded movements his injuries demanded, Isla with a patience she'd discovered she possessed for the things that mattered most. The bed was small for two people, one of whom was six-foot-two with cracked ribs, but they made it work.
He lay on his back because his ribs required it.
She curled against his good side, her head on his shoulder, her hand on his chest where she could feel his heart beating.
His arm came around her with the comfortable weight of something that belonged there.
The lake was invisible in the dark beyond the window, but she could hear it—or imagined she could, the way you heard things you'd lived beside long enough that they became part of your own silence.
The apartment was warm. James's breathing deepened into the rhythm of a man whose body was healing even in sleep, and Isla listened to it—not the mechanical hiss of a ventilator but the unassisted, unhurried sound of the man she loved breathing beside her because he was alive and here and hers.
She closed her eyes. The anger that had lived behind her ribs for weeks—the low, constant burn that had driven her to the docks and through every sleepless night of her mandatory leave—was still there.
Robert Brune was still out there. The Lake Superior Killer was still writing his story in the margins of Duluth, and Isla would find him, because that was what she did and who she was and the work would not wait forever.
But tonight, the anger was quiet. Tonight, there was James's heartbeat under her palm and the warmth of another body in a bed that had only ever held one, and the particular, unfamiliar peace of a woman who had spent three years building walls and had finally let someone stand on her side of them.
She fell asleep. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, she slept without dreaming of the lake.