Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Jessica sat on the deck for a long time. The Gulf had gone from gold to white as the sun climbed.
She wasn't crying. What she felt instead was something worse: a blankness so total it scared her, as if the part of her that knew how to react to losing him had been cut out cleanly. What was left was just a woman sitting in a chair, breathing.
He'd walked away from her. He'd put himself between her and the thing that was coming, the way he'd been doing since the night she first met him. This time the thing that was coming had a price he could pay and she couldn't stop him from paying it.
She kept seeing his face in the last moment before he turned away. He'd looked at her like he was memorizing her. Like he already knew he wasn't coming back and needed one last version of her to carry with him into whatever came next.
Jessica looked down at her hands. The ring was still on her finger. She turned it once, feeling the smooth underside, and something moved in her chest. She pressed her palms flat against her thighs and breathed until it passed.
At some point she went inside and found the primary bedroom closet with a shelf of basics kept for guests, the kind of rental that thought of everything.
Black leggings, a denim jacket, a pair of boots half a size too big.
She dressed slowly, like someone performing a task that required concentration.
She left the Santiago’s old t-shirt folded on the bed.
She made coffee and stood at the glass wall and drank it and looked at the water and tried to think about Corpus Christi. Her duplex. The street outside. The Bare Minimum. Her old life, the one she could return to now, the one Dante had bought back for her with his own.
She got surprisingly far with it. That was the worst part.
She could see the key in her lock, the first morning back in her own kitchen.
She could see herself doing it for a week, a month, a year—filling the hours the way she always had, with routine and work and the slow, disciplined effort of not wanting anything too much.
The grief hit her then.
It came as a sound, a single, broken noise that left her mouth before she could stop it, something between a gasp and a sob. Her hand came up to her face, pressing hard against her mouth, as if she could push it back in.
She cried standing up, at the glass wall, with the coffee still in her other hand. She cried for the sound of his voice, and for the way his hands had trembled when he'd touched her, and for the fact that the strongest man she'd ever known had been shaking because of her.
She cried until the coffee went cold in her hand. Then she set the mug on the counter, wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and stood there for a moment, breathing, looking at the ring.
Then she went to find the phone.
The house had a guest tablet on the kitchen counter with a laminated card beside it listing the WiFi code and the property manager's number. At the bottom: For emergencies, a house phone is located in the utility drawer beneath the coffee station.
She found it—a cheap cordless handset, the kind that hadn't been fashionable since 2005. She stood at the counter and stared at it and realized she had no one to call.
Ryan's number was in the burner phone Dante had taken with him. Miller was compromised. Trent was dead. She had no addresses, no contacts, no lifeline that didn't pass through someone who'd already failed her or betrayed her.
She had Santiago.
She didn't have his number. But she had his name and she had Agua Dulce, and that was enough.
She pulled the tablet toward her, opened the browser, and searched Santiago Cruz Agua Dulce Texas.
Nothing useful popped up—no social media, and no public listings.
She tried the clinic. Agua Dulce medical clinic staff.
The third result was a community health center with a phone number and a short list of personnel.
His name wasn't on it, but Julian's was—Julian Cruz, RN—listed under the outreach program with a work number.
She dialed it. A receptionist answered, sounding bored. Jessica asked for Julian Cruz and was told he wasn't in today. She asked if there was another number where he could be reached and was told they couldn't give that out.
“Can you give him a message?” Jessica asked. “Can you tell him to call this number? It's a family emergency.”
She read the house phone number off the laminated card and hung up and waited.
Eleven minutes later, the phone rang.
“Who is this?” Julian's voice, careful and tight.
“Julian, it's Jessica. I need to speak to Santiago.”
A pause. She heard a muffled exchange, a door closing, and then Santiago was on the line.
“What happened.” He didn’t phrase it as a greeting or a question, just a flat statement.
“It's Jessica.”
“I know who it is. Where's my brother?”
She'd known the question was coming and she'd spent the last hour finding the words for it and none of them were right. She looked at the Gulf through the glass and said it the only way she could: plainly.
“He's gone, Santiago.”
A beat. “What do you mean, gone.”
“He made a deal. Last night, while I was sleeping, he reached out to the woman who's been hunting us. He arranged to hand himself over in exchange for me walking free.” She paused, her throat tightening. “He left this morning. He walked out the door and went with her and he didn't look back.”
The silence that followed was long enough that she checked the handset to make sure the call was still connected.
She heard Santiago exhale. It was a drawn-out sound, the breath of someone absorbing a blow they'd been half-expecting their whole life.
“He's been running for thirteen years,” Santiago said. “Thirteen years, and he finally gets somewhere that feels like a life and then you come back and he blows it all to hell.”
“I didn't know,” Jessica said. “I swear to you, I didn't know until this morning.”
“I know you didn't know.” He said it quickly, like he didn't want her to misunderstand.
“That's not—I'm not saying it's your fault.
I'm saying he's been doing this his entire life.
Deciding things alone. Carrying things alone.
Not telling the people who love him because he thinks that's the same as protecting them.” His voice cracked on the last word, but she heard it.
Jessica pressed her free hand flat against the counter. There was another silence. She could hear him breathing, could hear the effort it was costing him to stay together. She stood at the counter and waited and let him have what he needed.
When he spoke again, his voice was steadier, but only barely. “Where is she taking him?”
“I don't know yet.”
“You don't know.” A pause. “So what are you going to do?”
This was the moment. She felt it arrive—the fork in the road that had been waiting for her since she'd watched Dante walk down the path and disappear.
She could say the safe thing. She could tell Santiago she was going home, going back Corpus Christi, going back to the careful, small life that Dante had paid for with his own.
Santiago would accept that. He might even be relieved.
One less person to worry about, one less variable in a situation that had already cost him more than he should have had to give.
But the woman sitting at this counter was not the same woman who'd hidden in a crawl space three days ago.
“I'm going after him,” she said.
Santiago didn't respond immediately but she heard the silence shift.
“Jessica—”
“I'm going to find him, Santiago. I don't know how yet.
I don't have a phone, I don't have a car, I don't have a weapon.
I don't even know where she's taking him.” She heard her own voice, and it surprised her, how calm it was.
Like something that had been forged in the last seventy-two hours and was only now cooling into its final shape.
“But I'm not going home. I'm not going back to Corpus Christi to sit in my apartment and wait to find out whether he's alive or dead.”
The silence that followed was the longest yet.
“You'll get yourself killed,” Santiago said.
“Maybe.”
“You don't know these people. You don't know what they're capable of.”
“I shot one of them in my apartment,” she said. “I know exactly what they're capable of. And I know what I'm capable of. That's new information for all of us.”
“What do you need?” he asked. The question came out differently this time. Like finally he was engaging with her in a way he hadn’t in years.
“Money,” she said. “Enough to get started. I need to buy a weapon, and I need to be able to move without leaving a trail.”
“You know how to use a gun?”
“I learned.”
Another pause. Then: “There's a Western Union on Seawall Boulevard. I can wire you five hundred dollars. It'll take about an hour.”
“Thank you, Santiago.”
“Don't thank me.” His voice was quiet, but there was something in it that hadn't been there before, a grudging recognition, the first crack in thirteen years of resentment. “You bring him back, Jessica. You hear me? You bring my brother back.”
“I will.”
He hung up.
She stood with the dead handset in her hand and stared at the sea and felt the weight of what had just happened.
Santiago had spent over a decade blaming her for what Chicago had done to his family.
He'd looked at her on that porch in Agua Dulce like she was a wound that wouldn't close. And just now, on a phone call that had lasted less than five minutes, something had changed. It wasn’t forgiveness, that was too big a word for it.
But the beginning of something that might, eventually, look like it.
Because she wasn't running. For the first time ever, she was the one moving toward the danger instead of away from it, and Santiago had recognized that, because Santiago had spent his whole life watching Dante do exactly the same thing.
She set the phone down. She walked out of the house into the heat of the morning and started toward Seawall Boulevard.
She didn't have a plan. She had a direction, and soon she’d have five hundred dollars. Most of all though, she had the unshakable knowledge that the man she loved was somewhere out there and she was done being the person who got left behind.
At four in the afternoon, The Pelican Club was doing modest business—a handful of men at the bar, a couple of tourists groups who'd wandered in.
Jessica pushed through the door and stood for a moment while her eyes adjusted from the afternoon glare.
The gun was in the inside pocket of the denim jacket. A Ruger LCP, small enough to disappear in a palm, bought forty minutes ago at a pawn shop on 61st Street from a man who hadn't asked her anything except whether she wanted a box of ammunition with it. She'd said yes.
She approached the bar. The bartender was a heavyset woman in her fifties.
“I'm looking for Miller,” Jessica said.
The woman continued wiping the bar. “Don't know a Miller.”
“He uses this place as an office. Or he did, last week.” Jessica kept her voice even. “Fifties, heavy, grey hair. He sits in the back booth and he takes meetings.”
The woman looked at her for the first time. “You a cop?”
“No.”
“You look like you've had a bad few days.”
“I have.” Jessica held her gaze. “Where is he?”
Another pause. The bartender folded her cloth and set it on the counter.
“I don't know where he is today. But if someone were looking for him, they might try the marina off Pelican Island. He keeps a boat there. The Marguerite. Slip fourteen.” She picked up the cloth again. “I didn't tell you that.”
“Tell me what,” Jessica said.