CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sunday mornings had become the hardest stretch of Mia's week, a particular quality of quiet settling over the apartment that weekdays, filled with Sandra's office and evening classes, mostly managed to keep at bay.
She'd woken early, unable to sleep past seven despite having nowhere she needed to be, and found herself moving through the apartment with a restless, unfocused energy that eventually landed her in front of the laundry she'd been avoiding for the better part of a week.
She sorted whites from darks with more attention than the task actually required, folding each item with a careful precision that had nothing to do with tidiness and everything to do with needing her hands occupied while her mind, given nothing else to focus on, kept circling back toward the same unanswerable questions.
Where was he right now. Was he safe right now, this exact minute, or was safe only ever a retrospective claim, true until suddenly it wasn't. She caught herself refolding the same towel three times, some part of her aware of the repetition and unable to stop it regardless.
She'd tried, these last weeks, to build a version of Sunday that didn't feel quite this hollow — a standing brunch with Daniel some weeks, a call to her mother most others, the discipline Dr. Patterson would eventually help her name more clearly once therapy began.
But this Sunday had arrived without any of those anchors scheduled, just Mia and the laundry and the quiet ache of an apartment built for two people currently housing only one.
Her phone rang mid-morning, while she was still elbow-deep in the laundry basket, and she reached for it before the first ring had fully finished, the reflex three weeks deep now and showing no signs of fading.
"He's keeping his promise," Webb said, and something in his voice — careful, deliberate, a man choosing to relay exactly the words he'd been given and nothing more — told her this had come through some unofficial channel rather than the standard update.
"That's the message, word for word. I don't have context for it beyond that. I'm guessing you do."
Mia sat down on the edge of the couch, laundry basket forgotten, something warm and aching moving through her chest all at once.
She knew exactly which promise. The fire escape, her hand in his, don't disappear into it, find your way back to the man standing in this kitchen — a promise she'd extracted from him with something close to desperation, that final night, needing some concrete thing to hold onto through however many months of silence waited on the other side of his leaving.
"Thank you," she said, voice unsteady in a way she didn't bother hiding from Webb anymore, not after weeks of these calls, not after everything he'd already seen her carry. "Is he — how does he sound? However you're getting this, however it's being relayed."
A pause, longer than she was used to from him. "I only have the words themselves, Mia. Not a tone I could describe to you, not a context beyond what he asked to have passed along. I wish I had more to give you than that."
She let the pause sit a moment, some old instinct from months of skip traces and background checks flagging the hesitation before Webb had finished responding, the exact careful quality of a man choosing his next words with more deliberation than the situation, on its face, seemed to require.
"You're being careful with me," she said. "More careful than usual."
"I'm always careful with you."
"This is different. I can hear it." She stood, restless suddenly, pacing toward the kitchen window with the phone pressed to her ear.
"Marcus. If something's wrong, I need you to tell me.
I've spent five weeks proving to you I can handle the truth better than the not-knowing. Please don't start protecting me now."
Another pause, and when Webb spoke again, his voice had lost some of its practiced neutrality, replaced by something that sounded, for the first time since she'd known him, truly uncertain of how much he was allowed to say.
"The operation's entered a phase with elevated risk.
That's the honest version I can give you without violating protocols I don't have the authority to violate.
He's alive. He's safe as of this message.
I want you to hold onto both of those facts, because they're true, and because I know exactly how much weight a phrase like 'elevated risk' is about to carry for you regardless of anything else I say around it. "
Mia gripped the edge of the counter, breathing through the distinctive vertigo of receiving reassurance and warning in the same breath, unable to fully separate which one to trust more. "Elevated how."
"I can't say more than I already have. I'm sorry.
I know that's not the answer you need right now, and I know it doesn't make the waiting any easier.
" Something in his voice gentled, the careful warmth she'd come to rely on these last weeks.
"What I can tell you — and I want you to actually hear this, not just let it pass by while you're spiraling toward every worst-case scenario your mind's about to build — is that he asked specifically for that message to reach you.
In the middle of whatever elevated risk currently surrounds him, the thing he made time to do was make sure you knew he was keeping a promise he made you on a fire escape.
That tells you something real about where his head is, even now. "
She held onto that, the way she'd learned to hold onto small solid things these last several weeks — her mother's advice, Webb's honesty, the distinctive steadiness Sandra had taught her to bring even to the parts of a case that scared her.
He asked for that message to reach me. In the middle of whatever this is, he thought of me first.
"Thank you," she said again, quieter now. "For telling me as much as you can, even when it's not everything."
"Always," Webb said, and the word landed strange in her chest, an echo of a promise she and Nash had made each other on a different night entirely, before all of this, before contact windows and elevated risk and a shoebox photograph that still sat unresolved on a closet shelf.
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She sat with the phrase "elevated risk" for a long time after the call ended, turning it over the way she'd learned to turn over any piece of incomplete information, some restless instinct refusing to let it simply sit as unexamined fear.
If Webb couldn't tell her more, she reasoned, some part of her already reaching for her laptop before she'd fully decided to act on the impulse, that didn't mean there was nothing more available to find — not about Nash specifically, not anything that would compromise the operation, but about the general shape of what "elevated risk" might mean for an operation like this one.
She spent an hour that evening reading everything publicly available about undercover operations targeting trafficking networks — court records from similar cases, news coverage of task force operations in other cities, the general contours of how these investigations typically escalated once a cover began attracting real suspicion.
None of it told her anything specific about Nash's situation.
All of it told her, with a clarity that settled cold and heavy in her chest, exactly how dangerous "elevated risk" could actually mean in operations structured like this one — coercion tactics, forced compliance tests, the exact vulnerability of an operative whose cover required proximity to violence they had no way of fully controlling.
She closed the laptop before she'd read further, some self-protective instinct finally overriding the compulsive need to understand, and sat a long moment in the quiet apartment, breathing through a fear that had sharpened, now, into something a good deal more specific than the vague dread she'd been carrying for weeks.
He's alive. He's safe as of this message. She held onto Webb's words like a lifeline, understanding, with a clarity that ached, that "as of this message" carried an unspoken addendum neither of them had said aloud — as of this message, and I cannot promise you anything beyond it.
She thought about calling her mother again, decided against it, not wanting to hand this specific, sharpened fear to someone three hundred miles away who could do nothing but worry alongside her.
She thought about calling Ruiz, decided against that too, some instinct telling her he was likely carrying his own version of tonight's fear and didn't need hers added to it.
In the end, she simply sat with it alone for a while, letting herself feel the full weight of it without trying to manage it into something smaller or more bearable than it actually was — a discipline she was still learning, these last weeks, the specific difference between avoiding a fear and actually sitting with it long enough to survive it intact.
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She called Daniel that afternoon, the impulse arriving before she'd fully decided to act on it, some instinct telling her that whatever she was currently carrying would sit easier shared with someone who recognized the particular shape of it without needing the details explained first.
"Bad day?" he asked, picking up on the second ring, something in his voice suggesting he'd been having one of his own.
"Strange day. Got a message today — good news, I think, except it came wrapped in enough careful hedging that I can't tell anymore whether I'm supposed to feel relieved or terrified.
" She sank down onto the couch, laundry still forgotten in its basket across the room.
"You ever get days like that? Where the reassurance and the warning arrive so close together you can't actually tell which one's supposed to be doing the heavier lifting? "
"More of those than I'd like, lately." Daniel's voice carried a weariness she recognized immediately, the exact exhaustion of someone who'd spent the day fighting his own version of the same uncertainty.
"Actually — funny you'd call today. I got something similar.
A message, passed along secondhand, careful in exactly the way you're describing.
I've been sitting with it for a few hours now trying to decide if I'm supposed to feel better or worse. "
Something in Mia went very still, the same puzzle-piece feeling from weeks ago returning, sharper now, harder to dismiss as simple coincidence. "What'd the message say? If you don't mind me asking."
"That she's thinking of me. That whatever's happening on her end, I'm not far from her mind, even now.
" He laughed, short and humorless. "Which should be comforting, and mostly is, except it's exactly vague enough that my brain's spent the whole afternoon filling in worse and worse blanks around it. "
"I know that feeling," Mia said, quiet, something in her chest tightening around a suspicion she still wasn't ready to say out loud, not yet, not until she had something more solid than a shared Thursday afternoon and two messages that arrived, coincidentally, on the exact same day.
"For what it's worth — whatever she's dealing with, the fact that she made time to send you something, even something small and hedged, tells you she's holding onto you through it. That much I do believe."
"I hope you're right." A pause, something warmer creeping back into his voice. "Same time Thursday? I could use the version of today where somebody actually understands what I'm talking about without me having to explain the whole shape of it first."
"Thursday," Mia agreed, and hung up a few minutes later, sitting alone in her quiet apartment with two messages sitting side by side in her mind — hers, and Daniel's, arrived on the same day, carrying the same particular careful weight — and a certainty building steadily beneath her ribs that she was no longer entirely sure how much longer she could keep pretending not to see.
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