CHAPTER FOUR #2
"Her name's Vanessa Cole," Mia said, quiet, watching her own hand where it rested flat on the table.
A pause, brief but unmistakable, on the other end of the line. "You already know that."
"I heard the name a few days ago. Did some digging of my own — nothing that would compromise anything, I promise you that, I was careful." She swallowed. "I found an old photograph too. Nash never told me who she was. I don't think he had the chance to, before he left."
Webb was quiet a moment, and when he spoke again, something in his voice had shifted, gentler now, a man clearly choosing his next words with real care.
"I can't discuss the specifics of Agent Cole's role beyond confirming what I've already told you.
What I can tell you, because I think you need to hear it and because it happens to be true, is that this operation runs much better with two experienced agents in the field instead of one, and that the task force's decision to pair them had everything to do with operational necessity and nothing to do with anything else you might be imagining. "
"I'm trying not to imagine anything," Mia said. "I'm trying very hard."
"I know you are. For what it's worth, in every conversation I've had with him, your name is the only one that comes up when he's not required to be talking shop.
That's not something I'm supposed to tell you, technically.
I'm telling you anyway, because I think you've earned better than technically correct today. "
Something in Mia's throat went tight, gratitude and fear tangled together too closely to fully separate. "Thank you, Agent Webb."
"Marcus is fine," he said. "And Mia — for whatever it's worth from someone who does this job for a living and has seen it go every possible way it can go — the ones who make it through the hardest assignments are almost always the ones who had somebody steady waiting for them on the other side.
You're doing that job better than you probably know. "
She thanked him again, hung up, and sat a long time at the kitchen table afterward, turning her mother's words and Webb's words over together until they settled into something that felt, for the first time in days, almost like solid ground.
Trust the man. Not the situation. Hold onto that, even on the nights the not-knowing got loud.
She intended to.
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She kept her word to herself for exactly two more days before the resolve cracked, curiosity and fear conspiring against the discipline she'd promised her mother and Webb both.
It happened on a Thursday evening, Mia curled on the couch with a criminal procedure textbook she wasn't actually reading, her mind circling back, again and again, to the photograph in the closet.
She told herself she was simply organizing — the closet had needed attention for weeks, boxes stacked haphazardly since Nash's departure — but she understood, climbing the step stool with a deliberateness that gave away the truth of the errand, that organizing had nothing to do with why she was really up here.
The photograph looked the same as it had the first time she'd found it — Nash younger, unguarded, laughing beside a woman whose name she now had, whose face she'd since confirmed through a handful of careful, boundary-respecting searches.
Mia sat on the closet floor with it held between two fingers, studying the distinctive quality of Nash's smile in a way she hadn't let herself fully examine the first time.
He looked happy. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy, in a way that struck her, looking at it now with noticeably more context than she'd had weeks earlier, as something she rarely got to see from him even in their best moments together — not because he wasn't happy with her, she made herself remember, but because the man in this photograph had been younger, less weathered by nine additional years of a job that had taken things from him one careful piece at a time.
She turned the photograph over again, the same blank cardstock greeting her, no name, no date, nothing beyond the two smiling faces that had first sent her spiraling weeks ago.
She found herself, studying it now, feeling something closer to curiosity than jealousy — a want to understand the shape of whatever history existed between them, rather than simply fear of what that history might mean for her own place in Nash's life.
I'll ask him, she thought, tucking the photograph carefully back into its folder. When he's home. When there's room for the whole story instead of just the fragments I've had to assemble on my own.
She closed the box, set it back on the shelf, and climbed down from the step stool with a lightness she hadn't expected — not resolution exactly, but the beginning of something steadier than the anxious spiraling that had governed her relationship with that photograph since the week she'd first found it.
She made herself tea afterward, standing at the kitchen counter while the kettle worked, and found her thoughts drifting, unbidden, toward the version of Nash in that photograph — younger, unguarded, laughing at something outside the frame.
She wondered, turning her mug slowly on the counter, what that particular afternoon had actually looked like, whose voice had made him laugh that hard, what ordinary Tuesday had produced a moment worth capturing on film.
Small, harmless curiosities, she realized, rather than the anxious spiral they might have been even a week earlier — the specific relief of a fear finally loosening its grip enough to become simple wondering instead.
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