CHAPTER ONE #2
Not Webb. Not Nash, obviously, though some small foolish part of her still checked every single time regardless.
She typed back a yes anyway, because Ruiz had made a quiet habit of these check-ins since the week Nash left, showing up with sandwiches or coffee or simply an hour of easy conversation about nothing important, and she'd come to understand it for what it actually was — not pity, exactly, but a man managing his own worry the only way he knew how, by making sure the people Nash loved weren't managing theirs entirely alone.
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Ruiz was already at the diner two blocks from Sandra's office when she got there, a booth by the window, two coffees already ordered, looking somehow both larger and more tired than she remembered him being a month ago.
"You look tired," she said, sliding into the booth across from him.
"Everybody keeps telling me that lately. I'm starting to take it personally." He pushed a coffee toward her, the same order she always got without needing to ask anymore. "How's the not-hearing-from-him going?"
"About like you'd think." She wrapped both hands around the mug, more for something to do with them than because she was actually cold. "Webb says the assignment's proceeding on schedule, whatever that means when nobody will tell me what the schedule actually is."
"That's about all he tells me too, for what it's worth.
I'm not exactly inside the loop on this one.
" Something moved across Ruiz's face, quick and hard to read, gone before she could ask about it.
"It's different, not having eyes on him.
Even during Deveaux, even when things were bad, I at least knew where he was standing most days.
This is —" He shook his head, not finishing the sentence, and she didn't push.
Some things, she'd learned this past year, needed room to stay unfinished for a while before a person could put words to them.
They ate mostly in comfortable silence after that, the kind that had built up naturally over a year of shared history neither of them needed to narrate out loud anymore.
It was somewhere between the sandwich and the coffee going lukewarm that Ruiz set his fork down and looked at her with an expression she recognized — the one that meant he'd been deciding whether to say something for a while now.
"There's a name that came up when I was talking to Webb last week," he said carefully.
"Wasn't supposed to, honestly — slipped out sideways in a conversation about something else entirely, and Webb caught himself and moved on fast enough that I almost missed it.
Figured you deserved to hear it from me instead of stumbling into it some other way. "
Something in Mia's chest went still and careful, the specific stillness of a body bracing before it fully recognized what it was bracing for. "What name."
"Vanessa Cole. Federal agent, apparently — working the case with Nash in some capacity.
" Ruiz watched her face while he said it, gauging something, and whatever he saw made his own expression soften into something closer to apology.
"I don't know anything past the name, Mia.
I want to be clear about that. Could be nothing.
Could be exactly the kind of nothing that ends up mattering a great deal, knowing how these operations usually run.
I just didn't want you finding out some worse way, later, that I'd known and sat on it. "
Mia turned the coffee mug slowly between her hands, feeling something shift and resettle inside her chest, a puzzle piece sliding toward a shape she didn't yet have enough information to see clearly.
Vanessa. She didn't know the name. She was certain, running back through a year of Nash's stories, his old case files, the handful of times he'd mentioned people from before her, that she'd never heard it once.
But she thought, unbidden, of a shoebox on the top shelf of their closet.
A photograph of a woman she'd never met, laughing at something outside the frame, standing close enough to a noticeably younger Nash that the closeness itself had told its own quiet story even before Mia had let herself fully examine what that story might be.
She hadn't looked at that photograph again since the week she'd found it.
Hadn't asked Nash about it, in all the days between finding it and his leaving, some careful instinct telling her the timing was never quite right, that the conversation deserved more room than the crowded final weeks before deployment had left available for it.
She wondered, suddenly, with a clarity that felt almost like cold water, whether she'd simply run out of time to ask the question that mattered most.
"Mia." Ruiz's voice pulled her back, gentle, worried now in a way he was visibly trying to keep out of his tone and not quite managing. "You okay?"
"I don't know," she said honestly, because lying to Ruiz had never felt like an option worth pursuing, not after everything the two of them had survived together this past year. "I think I might know that name from somewhere I wasn't expecting to hear it again."
She didn't explain further, not yet, and Ruiz — steady, careful Ruiz, who'd learned over the last year exactly when to push and when to let a silence sit — didn't ask her to.
He simply reached across the table and squeezed her hand once, brief and solid, the particular kind of comfort that didn't pretend to fix anything and was somehow better for not trying to.
"Whatever it turns out to be," he said, "you're not carrying it alone. I hope you know that by now."
"I'm starting to," she said, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she mostly meant it.
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She went home that evening and, for the first time in three weeks, climbed the step stool in the closet and pulled the shoebox down from the top shelf.
The photograph was exactly where she'd left it, tucked into the same manila folder, the same easy unguarded smile on the same younger version of Nash's face.
She sat on the closet floor with it held carefully between two fingers, studying the woman in it the way she'd studied her the first time — dark hair, an easy laugh, nothing in the photograph itself offering up a name or a date or any concrete reason for the distinctive unease that had taken root in Mia's chest at the diner that afternoon.
Vanessa Cole. She said the name out loud, once, quietly, to the empty apartment, testing the shape of it against the woman in the photograph, unable to know for certain if they were the same person and somehow already certain, in the exact way a body sometimes understood things before the mind caught up, that they were.
She didn't cry. She'd promised herself, the morning Nash left, that she wasn't going to spend this assignment falling apart over things she had no ability to control, and she intended to keep that promise even now, sitting on a closet floor with a stranger's photograph in her hands and a fear she couldn't yet fully name settling into her chest like weather.
She thought instead about what Nash had told her, the night he'd first driven out to her duplex with a case file under his arm — that loving someone who ran toward danger instead of away from it meant learning to trust the running, even when you couldn't see where it led.
She thought about Reggie's ring, warm on her finger even now, a promise made by a man who'd never once given her a reason not to trust him completely.
She put the photograph back, closed the folder, and set the shoebox back on its shelf.
Whatever this turned out to be — whoever this woman was, wherever she stood beside Nash right now, in whatever room Mia couldn't see into and had no way of reaching — Mia intended to be exactly the woman she'd promised him she'd be while he was gone.
Steady. Waiting. Trusting the running, even now, even with a name in her chest she hadn't asked for and couldn't yet make sense of.
She just hoped, turning off the closet light and heading back toward a kitchen table where dinner for one waited, that trust would turn out to be enough.
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