Chapter 17 #2
"We don't. Not for certain." Erin met her eyes and in that meeting was something Alexandra hadn't expected: honesty without armour.
Erin wasn't performing confidence. She wasn't promising an outcome.
She was standing in front of her wife and telling the truth.
"The ANPR trail is solid. The van went to Ashworth's estate.
The connection to Arthur is established.
But we didn't have visual confirmation at Latimer's either, and she wasn't there.
I won't promise you something I can't deliver. "
The words hurt. But they also healed something, a tiny fracture in the distance between them, because honesty was what Erin gave when she was letting you back in. Erin lied by omission and silence. She told the truth when she was done hiding.
"But you're going," Alexandra said.
"I'm going. A new tactical team, Garrett and Osei are back, and Mills has added four officers from the London unit.
We move at twenty-three hundred, late enough that the household should be asleep, early enough that we have hours of darkness for the approach.
Mills is coordinating from here." Erin paused.
Her jaw worked. The muscle there tightened and released in the way it always did when she was working toward something difficult.
"I want to do this differently. I want you at the safe house again. Closer this time. Mills has identified a property four miles from the estate. Julia will be with you. But not the children. Not this time. They need their sleep.”
"No. Not the children."
Frank and Matilda were asleep upstairs, their small bodies warm under their duvets, their faces soft with the oblivion of childhood sleep.
She would not wake them. She would not drag them through another night of waiting and hoping and having that hope destroyed.
If this went wrong, if this was another empty house, she would carry that alone.
"Vic will stay with them," Julia said from the doorway. "And Hyzenthlay."
Alexandra nodded. The practicalities were settling around her like scaffolding, structure to hold her up while the fear tried to pull her down. She turned back to Erin.
"Come back to me. Whatever happens tonight, whether Florence is there or not, come back to me. Don't disappear again."
Erin's face changed. The professional composure cracked and beneath it was the woman Alexandra had married: fierce, frightened, furious with herself for the distance she'd created.
She crossed the space between them in two steps and took Alexandra's face in her hands, both hands, the bandaged one and the whole one, and pressed her forehead against Alexandra's and held her there.
"I'm sorry," Erin whispered. "For today. For the phone call. For all of it. I couldn't — I didn't know how to—"
"I know."
"I love you. I love you and I was so angry that I forgot to say it, and that is unforgivable."
"It's not unforgivable. It's human. And I love you too. Now go find our daughter."
Erin kissed her. Not the quick, hard kiss from last night.
A slow kiss, deliberate, pressed into her mouth like a seal on a letter, carrying everything that the last twenty-four hours had prevented her from saying.
Alexandra's hands found Erin's waist and held on and the control room and the analysts and Deputy Director Mills and Julia all ceased to exist for the five seconds that the kiss lasted.
Five seconds of warmth and connection and the fierce, fragile hope that this time would be different.
Erin pulled back. Her green eyes were bright. "I'll call the moment I know anything. Whatever the outcome. I promise."
"Go."
Erin went. The control room door closed behind her and the room felt smaller and emptier and the satellite image of the Duke of Ashworth's estate glowed on the main screen, and Alexandra stared at it and silently begged the universe to put her daughter behind one of those thirty walls.
Before they left, Alexandra went upstairs one more time.
After she changed her clothes, she opened the door to the children's room and stood in the threshold and listened to them breathe.
Frank was sprawled diagonally across his bed with one arm hanging over the edge.
Matilda was curled on her side, her hair spread across the pillow, the duvet pulled to her chin.
Florence's bed was empty. The rabbit watched from the pillow with its button eyes.
"I'll bring her home," Alexandra whispered to the empty bed. It sounded like Erin. It sounded like a promise she wasn't sure she could keep. She closed the door and went downstairs.
The car ride to the safe house was quieter than last time.
No card games. No children. Just Alexandra in the back seat and Julia beside her, and the dark Surrey countryside passing outside the windows, and the headlights cutting through a night that felt thick and heavy and full of possibility.
The driver was silent. The security car following them was a dark shape in the rear-view mirror.
Rain had started: a fine drizzle that blurred the headlights and dotted the windscreen and made the road shine like dark glass.
Julia was on her phone, coordinating quietly with Mills.
Alexandra didn't listen. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window the way she had last time, and she watched the darkness stream past, and she thought about Erin's kiss and Erin's promise and the satellite image of an estate where her daughter might or might not be sleeping.
The fear was different tonight. Last night's fear had been bright and sharp and laced with the manic energy of hope.
Tonight's fear was slower, deeper, the fear of a woman who had been disappointed once and was preparing to be disappointed again.
She couldn't stop it. She couldn't make herself believe the way she'd believed last night, because belief was a muscle that had been torn and the scar tissue hadn't healed yet.
But Erin had kissed her. Erin had said I love you and I'm sorry and had held her face in both hands and had looked at her with eyes that were open and undefended.
After hours of silence and distance and the terrible blankness of a woman who had shut herself behind the wall of operational focus, Erin had come back.
Not all the way, not yet, but she'd cracked the door open and let the light in, and Alexandra would hold onto that crack the way she'd been holding onto everything else this week: with both hands and no intention of letting go.
That mattered. Whatever happened at the Duke of Ashworth's estate, that mattered.
Julia set her phone down. The glow from the screen lit her face for a moment before it went dark. "Mills has the tactical team en route. Erin's convoy left the castle twenty minutes ago. They should be at the staging point within the hour."
"Twenty minutes ago." Erin had been driving through the dark for twenty minutes and Alexandra hadn't known.
Twenty minutes of motorway and country lanes and hedgerows sliding past in the headlights while Erin moved toward whatever was waiting at the Duke of Ashworth's estate.
She imagined Erin in the lead car, the same armoured Range Rover, the same tactical team around her, the same bandaged hand and fierce green eyes and the absolute refusal to stop that had defined her since the morning Florence was taken. "She'll call when they arrive?"
"She'll call," Julia said. Her voice carried the steady certainty of a woman who had known Erin Kennedy for a long time and understood that when Erin made a promise, it was not a courtesy. It was a contract.
The safe house appeared in the headlights: another anonymous cottage on another anonymous lane, its windows dark, its garden ordinary.
They pulled in. The gravel crunched beneath the tyres.
The security car stopped behind them and two officers took up positions at the front and back of the property with the practised efficiency of people who had done this before.
Julia squeezed her hand once, firm and warm, and they got out and went inside, and Alexandra sat on another beige sofa in another sterile room and waited, again, in the dark, while the woman she loved drove toward a house that might hold everything or nothing.