CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fuentes called it a supervised contact, which was, Mia would think later, one of the more clinical phrases she'd ever heard applied to the single most terrifying twenty minutes of her entire life.
"Twenty minutes," Fuentes had said on the phone, two days earlier, her voice carrying the particular careful neutrality Mia had come to recognize from every conversation that mattered more than the person delivering it wanted to let on.
"A secure location, task force personnel present the entire time, no physical evidence either of you can carry out that would compromise operational security if you're searched afterward.
I want to be honest with you about the constraints before you agree to this, because I think you deserve better than walking in with expectations this format can't meet. "
"I don't care about the constraints," Mia had said, already crying a little and not remotely embarrassed about it. "I just want to see him."
"Then I'll see you Thursday."
She hadn't slept properly in the two days since, hadn't been able to focus on anything longer than a few minutes at a time — not her coursework, not Sandra's latest case, not even the shell-company map that had occupied her so completely the week before.
Every part of her had narrowed down to a single countdown, ticking toward Thursday afternoon with an intensity that felt, some hours, like it might actually consume her from the inside out.
The building Fuentes directed her to was unmarked, tucked into an industrial stretch of the city Mia had never had reason to visit before, a windowless conference room on the second floor furnished with nothing more than a table, four chairs, and a federal agent stationed quietly by the door who introduced himself only as part of the security detail and said nothing else for the entire twenty minutes that followed.
She heard Nash before she saw him — footsteps in the hallway, a voice she recognized instantly even muffled through a closed door, some low exchange with another agent she couldn't make out the words of — and felt her whole body go taut with an anticipation so acute it bordered on physical pain.
Then the door opened, and Nash walked in, and Mia knew, in the single unguarded second before either of them said a word, exactly what Ruiz had meant weeks ago in that parking garage, warning her about a version of this reunion neither of them had fully prepared for.
He looked thinner. Not dramatically — nothing that would have alarmed a stranger passing him on the street — but enough that she, who'd spent a year memorizing every inch of him, registered it immediately, the specific hollowing beneath his cheekbones, the distinctive tightness around his eyes that hadn't been there the morning he'd left.
He was pale in a way the Nash she knew never was, even in the dead of winter, and there was something in the way he held himself — careful, contained, a stillness that read less like calm and more like effort — that made her chest ache before he'd even crossed the room to reach her.
"Hi," he said, and his voice cracked slightly on the single syllable, some of the careful containment slipping for just a moment before he caught it again.
"Hi," she managed back, and then he was across the room and she was in his arms and every careful thing either of them might have planned to say dissolved into the simple, overwhelming fact of being able to touch him again after seven weeks of nothing but secondhand messages and a silence that had, some nights, felt like it might honestly never end.
He held her hard enough that it should have hurt, and didn't, his face buried in her hair, his whole body trembling slightly in a way she felt rather than saw, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all, just breathed each other in, two people relearning, in real time, the exact solidness of a person they'd spent seven weeks holding only in memory.
"You're shaking," she whispered eventually, pulling back just far enough to study his face, cataloguing every small change with the same careful attention she'd once reserved for a stranger's tells across a club floor — the thinness, the pallor, something new and unsettled behind his eyes that hadn't been there before.
"I'm fine."
"Nash."
"I'm fine, Mia." Something flickered across his face, quick and gone, and she recognized it, with a cold drop in her stomach, as the exact same careful deflection she'd used on her own mother a hundred Friday phone calls, a lifetime ago, before any of this.
"I've missed you. That's all this is. Seven weeks of missing you finally catching up to my nervous system all at once. "
She wanted, badly, to believe him. Some part of her, exhausted and starved for exactly this reunion, was ready to accept whatever version of the truth let her keep holding him a little longer without the fear intruding.
But the part of her that had spent months learning to read financial records for the story underneath the surface numbers, the part that Sandra had spent months training into something sharper and more reliable than instinct alone, wasn't willing to let it go quite that easily.
"Something's different," she said quietly, keeping her voice low enough that the agent by the door wouldn't have reason to intervene.
"I don't know what, and I understand you probably can't tell me, given everything Webb's already explained about what you're allowed to share.
But I need you to know that I see it. Whatever it is.
I'm not going to pretend I don't, even if pretending would make this twenty minutes easier for both of us. "
Nash was quiet a long moment, his hands still resting at her waist, his eyes searching her face with an intensity that felt, to Mia, like a man trying to memorize something he was afraid he might not get to see again for a long while.
"The assignment's harder than I expected it to be," he said finally, choosing each word with visible care.
"That's the truth I can give you, within what I'm allowed.
Harder in ways I didn't have a framework for before this started.
I'm handling it. I need you to trust that much, even without the specifics. "
"I do trust you." She reached up, brushing her thumb along the new hollow of his cheekbone, an old tender gesture that felt, in this sterile borrowed room, almost unbearably intimate. "I just wish trusting you didn't have to mean watching you disappear into something I can't help you carry."
"You are helping me carry it." His voice cracked again, rawer this time, and he pulled her back against his chest like he couldn't bear the distance of even a few inches a moment longer.
"Every single day, Mia. I think about you constantly — not as some abstract idea of home I'm working toward, but you, specifically, the actual weight of you in my arms, the sound of your voice, the exact way you say my name when you're annoyed with me versus when you're not.
That's what's getting me through the hardest hours.
I need you to know that, whatever else this twenty minutes doesn't give either of us time to say. "
She held onto him, breathing in the unfamiliar detergent scent of whatever laundry service the safehouse apartment must have used, searching underneath it for the version of him she knew and finding it, faintly, still there — his heartbeat steady under her ear, the particular warmth of his hands at her back, the man underneath whatever the assignment had started asking him to become.
"Kiss me," she said, pulling back just enough to look up at him. "We have — what, twelve minutes left? I don't want to spend them talking around the edges of everything neither of us can say directly."
He kissed her like a drowning man finding air, slow at first and then hardly slow at all, one hand coming up to cradle her jaw with a tenderness that made her chest ache all over again, and Mia let herself sink into it fully, memorizing the exact taste and shape of him the way she'd once memorized every detail of a room she needed to survive — not performing anything, not managing anything, just present, entirely, in the single unguarded fact of being held by the man she loved after seven weeks of nothing but silence and secondhand reassurance.
They broke apart breathless, foreheads resting together, and Nash's hands moved to frame her face, his eyes searching hers with an urgency that made her chest tighten before he'd even said anything.
"I need you to promise me something," he said, voice low, careful.
"Whatever happens the rest of this assignment — whatever version of me eventually comes home to you, however long it takes, however different that version looks from the man who left seven weeks ago — I need you to promise you'll fight for him.
Even on the days it's hard. Even if it takes longer than either of us is hoping for right now. "
Something cold moved through Mia's chest at the distinctive weight of that request, the distinctive shape of a man preparing her, without being able to say for what exactly, for something significantly harder than she'd let herself imagine standing in this room twenty minutes ago.
"I already promised you that," she said, voice unsteady now, matching the fear she could see plainly in his eyes despite everything he was clearly trying to keep contained.
"On the fire escape. That's not a promise I'm capable of taking back, Nash, whatever this assignment ends up costing either of us before it's over. "
"I know." He pressed his lips to her forehead, lingering there, breathing her in one more time like he was trying to store enough of her to last however many more weeks stood between this room and whatever came next.
"I just needed to hear you say it again.
Needed something solid to carry back with me, past whatever's waiting on the other side of that door. "
The agent by the door cleared his throat, gently, the exact signal of a man whose job required interrupting a moment he had no interest in interrupting, and Mia felt the twenty minutes collapse toward its end with a suddenness that stole the breath from her lungs.
"I have to go," Nash said, something breaking audibly in his voice now, the careful containment from earlier entirely abandoned. "I don't — Mia, I don't know when I'll see you again. Could be days. Could be markedly longer, depending on how the next stretch of this goes."
"Then I'll be here," she said, fierce, holding his face in both her hands the way her mother had held hers at graduation, months from now, in a future neither of them could see yet from this small windowless room. "However long it takes. I'm not going anywhere, and neither is this."
He kissed her one last time, hard and brief and aching, and then Fuentes's agent was gently indicating the door, and Nash was walking backward away from her, his eyes never leaving her face until the door closed fully between them and Mia was left alone in a borrowed conference room with her hands pressed flat against her own chest, trying to hold onto the physical fact of him a moment longer before the ordinary world outside reclaimed her.
? ? ?
She cried the entire drive home, not the careful, contained crying she'd trained herself into over these last seven weeks, but something rawer and more total, pulled over twice on the shoulder of the highway because her hands were shaking too hard to trust the wheel.
Whatever version of me eventually comes home to you. The phrase sat lodged in her chest like something sharp, turning over and over, refusing to fully resolve into anything she could name clearly enough to be less afraid of.
She thought about calling Ruiz. Thought about calling her mother, or Daniel, or anyone who might help her carry the particular weight of what she'd just seen and couldn't yet fully articulate even to herself.
In the end she drove home in silence instead, some instinct telling her this specific fear needed to sit with her alone for a while before she was ready to hand any part of it to somebody else.
She let herself into the apartment, dropped her keys on the counter with hands that still hadn't fully steadied, and stood a long moment in the kitchen doorway, looking at the space that had once held both of them and now, more than ever, felt like it was only holding the ghost of who they'd been before any of this started.
Fight for him, he'd said. Whatever version of me eventually comes home to you.
She intended to. She just hadn't recognized, walking into that borrowed conference room twenty minutes ago full of hope and seven weeks of accumulated longing, exactly how much that promise might eventually ask of her before this was over.
She made herself eat something that evening, more out of discipline than appetite, and fell asleep earlier than usual, exhausted in a way that went substantially deeper than the physical.
Her last clear thought before sleep finally took her was of his hands — steady, despite everything, holding her face like something precious — and she carried that image with her into a rest that came, for the first time in days, without the anxious circling of a mind too tired to keep fighting its own fear any longer.
? ? ?