CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nash rode back to the apartment in the task force's unmarked sedan, staring out the window at Port Callahan's skyline receding behind them, the taste of Mia still on his mouth and a hollowness opening up in his chest that had nothing to do with the craving currently humming beneath his skin and everything to do with the specific ache of watching her face crumple as the door closed between them.
He hadn't told her everything. Couldn't have, not in twenty minutes, not with an agent stationed by the door and operational security constraints neither of them could ignore — but more than that, some part of him hadn't wanted to.
Hadn't wanted to watch the distinctive horror move across her face that he knew would come the moment she understood exactly what "harder than expected" actually meant, the exact shape of the marina office, Voss's voice, the needle, Vanessa's hand gripping his hard enough to bruise.
Some things, he'd decided somewhere in the last two days, deserved to be told in person, fully, when he finally had the words and the safety to tell them right — not rationed out in fragments across a table with a federal agent watching the clock.
He found Vanessa waiting when he got back to the apartment, curled into the corner of the couch in the same posture she'd taken up most evenings since the marina, phone in her lap, a expression on her face that told him, before she said a word, that her own contact hadn't gone the way she'd hoped it would.
"How was she?" Vanessa asked.
"Scared. Trying not to show it, mostly failing.
" Nash sat heavily on the couch beside her, the craving building steadily now that the adrenaline of the reunion had worn off, leaving behind only the familiar hollow wanting he'd been fighting for nearly two weeks.
"She knows something's different. I didn't tell her what.
Couldn't, really, not in the time we had, not with someone standing at the door the whole conversation. "
"Daniel doesn't know anything's different," Vanessa said quietly, not quite looking at him.
"I didn't get a contact window like you did.
Just a call, five minutes, monitored the same as always.
I told him I loved him and that I missed him and I hung up before he could ask any of the questions I could see him wanting to ask underneath everything else he actually said. "
"You'll get your window eventually."
"Maybe." She pulled her knees up to her chest, an old defensive posture he'd started to recognize over these last weeks as her version of the same hollowing he was fighting himself.
"I keep thinking about what happens when I finally do get one, though.
Whether I tell him the truth, or whether I keep doing exactly what I did tonight — managing his fear instead of actually sharing mine, because sharing mine feels like it might break something between us that I'm not sure could survive the honest version of what's happening to me right now. "
Nash was quiet a moment, turning that over alongside his own version of the same fear.
"I think," he said slowly, "that the not-telling costs more, eventually, than the telling does.
I think I learned that the hard way, with Mia, before all of this — used to believe protecting her meant keeping the worst parts of the job separate from what we had together.
Turns out that just built a wall neither of us could see clearly enough to actually tear down when it mattered. "
"When did you learn different?"
"The night Reggie died." Something tightened in Nash's chest at the memory, old grief resurfacing alongside the newer wound currently occupying most of his attention.
"I tried to keep her out of it, out of all of it, right up until the moment doing that nearly got both of us killed instead.
She taught me, after that, that shutting someone out of your fear doesn't actually protect them.
It just makes sure they're unprepared for whatever eventually comes anyway. "
Vanessa considered that a long moment, something working itself out behind her eyes. "I think I'm more scared of him seeing me different than I am of the withdrawal itself, if I'm being honest. Which probably says something uncomfortable about where my priorities have ended up."
"It says you're human," Nash said. "And that loving somebody who wasn't built for this particular kind of fear is its own specific hard, the same as loving somebody who was."
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The craving hit hardest around midnight, worse than it had in days, a physical wrongness so acute Nash found himself pacing the length of the small apartment, hands shaking, every nerve screaming for relief he knew, with a clarity that terrified him fresh each time, he could not let himself have.
Vanessa found him in the kitchen sometime after one, gripping the edge of the counter hard enough that his knuckles had gone white, breathing through counts that weren't holding the way they usually did.
"Talk to me," she said, taking up a position beside him without touching him, some instinct telling her, correctly, that contact might not help in this particular moment. "What's it feel like right now. Specifically."
"Like every cell in my body is convinced there's exactly one thing that would fix this, and every part of my brain that's still functioning knows that's a lie, and the gap between those two truths is currently trying to tear me apart from the inside."
"That's a good description. I might steal it, next time Dr. Alvarez asks me the same question.
" Vanessa's voice stayed steady, grounding, the exact calm of someone who'd learned, these last weeks, exactly how to be present for this without either panicking herself or minimizing what he was going through.
"You're not going to give in. I've watched you fight this every single night for almost two weeks now, and you haven't yet, not once, even on the nights it looked a good deal closer than tonight does. "
"How do you know tonight's not the night that changes."
"Because I know you." Something fierce entered her voice, gone quiet immediately after, like she'd surprised herself with the intensity of it.
"Because I've watched you talk about Mia every single day since this assignment started, watched you turn her name into something like an anchor when everything else in this apartment feels unmoored.
A man who's about to give in doesn't spend his worst hours talking about the woman he's fighting to get back to.
He talks about the wanting instead, lets it fill up all the available space.
You keep making room for her instead. That's not nothing, Nash. That's the whole fight, most nights."
He let that settle, breathing through another count, the craving beginning, slowly, to loosen its grip the way it eventually always did — not gone, never fully gone these days, but survivable, barely, one more time.
"Seven days," he said finally, once his hands had steadied enough to trust them again. "Fuentes's hearing. Seven more days and we find out whether any of this actually mattered."
"Seven days," Vanessa agreed, and reached over, finally, to squeeze his hand, the same plain, real comfort she'd offered him in the safehouse weeks ago. "We've survived worse odds than that already. I think we can survive one more week."
They sat together in the kitchen a while longer, both of them quietly counting down toward a deadline that felt, in the distinctive exhausted clarity of one in the morning, like the only solid thing either of them currently had left to hold onto.
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Nash called Dr. Alvarez himself the next morning, a call he'd been putting off for days, some old stubbornness telling him he ought to be able to manage the worst of the craving without leaning on her directly, before last night had finally worn that stubbornness down to nothing.
"I should have called you sooner," he admitted, once she'd picked up, her voice carrying the same unhurried patience she brought to every conversation, professional and warm in a combination he'd come to rely on more than he usually let himself acknowledge.
"Vanessa's been the one managing most of the worst nights.
I think I convinced myself that meant I didn't need to be checking in with you directly. "
"That's a common pattern," Dr. Alvarez said.
"Leaning entirely on one support person, especially one who understands the specifics as intimately as Agent Cole does.
It's not wrong to lean on her. It becomes a problem if it's the only support either of you is drawing on, because eventually you're both running on the same limited well, and neither of you has enough left over to refill the other's. "
"What do you recommend?"
"Talk to me directly, at minimum twice a week, even on the nights that feel manageable.
Especially on those nights, honestly — the manageable stretches are often when people stop checking in, and then the hard nights arrive without any recent practice at reaching out first." Her voice gentled slightly.
"How are you doing today, specifically? Not the summary. The actual texture of it."
Nash considered the question, drawing on the same honesty he'd been practicing with Vanessa these last weeks. "Tired. Scared some days that this doesn't actually end, that I'm just going to be managing this hum underneath everything for the rest of my life, in some form or another."
"That fear's common too, and I want to address it directly rather than just reassuring you past it.
The hum, as you're describing it, does typically fade with time and continued sobriety — far more than most people going through early recovery believe possible, while they're still deep inside the hardest stretch of it.
But I won't promise you it disappears entirely, because for some people, some vigilance stays, in a manageable, background form, indefinitely.
The goal isn't the absence of any trace of this ever again.
The goal is building a life resilient enough to hold whatever trace remains without it controlling you. "
"That's not the answer I was hoping for."
"I know. It's the honest one, though, and I think you've earned honest over comfortable, given everything you're already carrying.
" Something warmer entered her voice. "You're doing better than you're giving yourself credit for, Nash.
Seven days from a hearing that could change the whole shape of this operation, still fighting every single night instead of giving in — that's not nothing.
That's much more than nothing, actually. "
He thanked her, hung up, and sat a long moment with the conversation, understanding, with a clarity that settled slowly into something like acceptance, that the fight ahead of him wasn't going to have the clean ending he kept hoping for, but might, eventually, become something he could carry without it costing him everything else he was trying to build.
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