Chapter 11 #3
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“You think I hear one sad story and forget there’s a killer on the loose?”
“I think you hear pain clearly enough that sometimes you want to answer it before you question it.”
“That sounds like a nice way of calling me gullible.”
“It’s not.” His voice roughened. “Holly, your compassion is not the problem. It’s one of the things that makes you who you are. I’m trying to keep someone from using it against you.”
She wanted to throw the phone. Instead, she set it carefully on the counter because too many things in her life already felt one touch away from shattering.
“Allen helped me when I was building this place and running into issues. He believed in me. He was here for me.” She paused to let that sink in. “He didn’t make me feel stupid or dramatic. He made me feel like the system could still work if someone showed me how to use it.”
“I’m not taking that from you.”
“It feels like you are. Allen cares about people. Just because he’s defending Hopper Shaw doesn’t make him a bad guy.”
Reid dragged one hand over the back of his neck, and she saw fatigue catch up with him in the movement.
He’d slept poorly. He’d kissed her, been pulled back into the case, protected her, protected Linc, and was now standing in her apartment trying to convince her that a man she trusted might be defending a killer.
“I’m not accusing Allen of anything,” he said. “I’d be happy to be wrong about him, but I can’t ignore what’s in front of me because he believes he has a good reason for everything he does in the name of justice.”
“You see suspects where I see wounded people.”
“Someone is killing wounded people, Holly. Someone may also be hiding among them.”
The truth of that stole some of her anger and left her with something more fragile. Her carefully built life had not only cracked. It had become evidence. “You make it sound like caring about people is dangerous,” she said.
“It can be.”
“Right. You taught me that lesson eight years ago.”
Reid’s eyes held hers, steady and tired and too full of all the things neither of them had room to handle.
“I wish I could take it back. I wish there were words I could say to fix it. All I can do is stand here and protect you. I’m sorry, Holly.
I’m sorry for what I did to you then, and I’m sorry I have to be the bad guy now.
But if I don’t play devil’s advocate right now, you could get hurt.
You can hate me for it, but I’m not letting anything happen to you. ”
She looked away because the rawness in that was too intimate. Reid wasn’t arguing like a man who needed to win. He was arguing like a man who had already imagined losing her, and that made her heart hurt in places she’d spent years refusing to name.
“I don’t trust blindly,” she said, though the words didn’t have as much force as she wanted.
He came one step closer. “But Allen knows where to touch the bruise. Hopper. Emma’s anniversary. The system failing people. Not abandoning someone who needs help. He called you because he knew those things would matter to you.”
“They do matter.”
“I’m not asking you to stop caring. I’m asking you to let me stand between your caring and anyone who might use it.”
She raised her hands in the air. “What would he be using it for? I leaned on him once. Now, he’s leaning on me. That’s what friends do.”
Reid stood close enough that she could see the faint shadow under his eyes and the tension in his jaw, close enough that the kiss from the night before returned with maddening clarity.
She wanted to be angry at him without wanting to step closer. She wanted to defend Allen without hearing every point Reid had made. She wanted her instincts back, clean and trustworthy, but the case had reached into every safe place she had and turned all of them complicated.
Her phone buzzed on the counter. They both looked at it. She picked it up and read a text from Allen.
I’m sorry I called. I shouldn’t have put this on you. Please don’t worry about me. I’ll manage.
The words should’ve reassured her. They did the opposite.
Was that the point?
She handed the phone to Reid because she wasn’t hiding anything, not anymore.
Reid read it, then gave the phone back. His mouth tightened, but he didn’t say anything.
“What?” she asked.
“That message is designed to make you worry more.”
Holly closed her fingers around the phone and looked toward the door.
Her shop was empty below them, locked and dark, but it no longer felt separate from the apartment, Linc’s kitchen, Hopper’s house, or Allen’s wounded voice on the phone.
Her safe place had become a jumbled mess like the community board in the shop, and everyone she cared about was pinned to it.
“I’m worried,” she said.
Reid’s voice gentled. “I am too.”
The admission didn’t sound like a warning or a strategy. It sounded like the truth underneath both. Holly hated how much she needed that truth.
She hated even more that when Reid reached for her hand, slowly enough that she could refuse, she let him take it.