Chapter 13 #2
The stupid thing, the thing I couldn't admit to anyone including myself, was that I wasn't angry.
I wanted to be angry. Angry was clean. Angry had structure and direction and a clearly identified target.
Angry would have been so much easier than what I actually felt, which was something closer to grief.
The specific grief of almost having something and then watching it be taken away, not by circumstance or fate or bad luck but by the person who was holding it, who looked at what they had and decided to set it down.
He'd chosen to walk away. That was the part I kept snagging on. Not that he was scared, not that his reasons made a certain kind of twisted sense, but that when the moment came, he'd chosen the fear over me.
My father had made choices too. Different choices, different stakes, but the architecture was the same: a person deciding that their own calculus mattered more than the person standing in front of them.
I rolled onto my back again. Stared at the ceiling again. The ceiling remained neutral.
Around one in the morning, I gave up on sleep and went to find something to eat.
The kitchen was dark, but light spilled from the living room, and when I turned the corner I found Will on the couch, laptop open on the coffee table, not typing.
Just sitting in the blue glow of a screen that had probably gone to sleep twenty minutes ago, staring at nothing.
He looked up. I looked at him. We were both wearing the particular expression of people who'd been caught not sleeping by someone they were pretending to be fine around.
"Couldn't sleep," I said, because it was obvious and therefore safe.
"Me either."
I went to the kitchen. Got a glass of water. Stood at the counter and drank it slowly, aware of him in the next room the way you're aware of weather. He didn't come into the kitchen. I didn't go into the living room. We maintained our zones like rival countries observing a ceasefire.
I put the glass in the sink and went back to bed and didn't sleep for another two hours.
The breakthrough, when it came, arrived wearing the costume of a normal workday.
Day four. I'd been digging through Meridian Tech's internal communications, the ones Bates had obtained through a warrant after our initial evidence gave him probable cause.
Metadata analysis. The tedious, granular work that most people found mind-numbing and I found almost meditative, the way some people found knitting or long-distance running.
My brain liked the repetition. Liked the way patterns emerged from noise if you sat with the noise long enough.
The pattern that emerged was this: certain emails from Reeves's personal server were being routed through an encryption protocol that didn't match the company's standard security. A private channel. Hidden in plain sight, the way the best hiding places always were.
"Will." His name still felt heavy in my mouth. Too many associations packed into one syllable. "You need to see this."
He came to my side of the table. Maintained his six inches of distance, which I was aware of the way I was aware of his soap and his breathing and the exact angle at which light hit his jawline, all of which was information I had not requested and could not return.
"The encryption timestamps," I said, pointing at the screen, grateful for the excuse to focus on something that wasn't him standing that close. "They correlate exactly with the shell company payments. He was using a separate channel to authorize the transfers."
"Can you tie the messages directly to his personal credentials?"
"Already did." I pulled up the next window.
My hands were steady, which I was proud of, because the rest of me was busy managing the dual awareness of a major evidentiary breakthrough and Will Steele's forearm, which was braced on the table next to my laptop and was, frankly, distracting in a way that forearms should not legally be allowed to be.
"His login token. His IP address. His personal encryption key.
This isn't Meridian. This is Reeves himself, personally authorizing payments to a trafficking operation. "
The quiet that followed should have tasted like victory. We'd been chasing this for weeks. The direct link. The thing that turned circumstantial into prosecutable.
"That's excellent work," Will said.
Excellent work. Like I'd turned in a strong quarterly report. Like we were colleagues who'd never shared oxygen in a dark hallway.
"I'll compile the file for Bates," I said, and turned back to my screen before he could see whatever my face was doing. "He should have it by tonight."
"Good."
I wanted to put my forehead through the laptop screen.
Instead, I worked. Channeled every ounce of frustration into meticulous documentation, because if I couldn't have a functional emotional interaction with the man sitting six feet away from me, I could at least build a federal case so airtight it would make prosecutors weep with joy.
I formatted. I cross-referenced. I wrote summary paragraphs with the controlled fury of someone defusing a bomb, which was essentially what I was doing, except the bomb was inside my chest and the wires were all the same colour.
By eleven o'clock, the file was nearly complete and my neck had developed a permanent grievance against my posture. I needed air. I needed to stand somewhere that didn't contain Will Steele and his monosyllables and his forearms.
"I'm going to get some air," I said. "The balcony. Five minutes."
"It's cold out there."
"I'm aware of how weather works, but thank you."
I didn't wait for a response. The small balcony off the living room was barely big enough for two people to stand, which was fine because I only needed room for one person and her rapidly deteriorating emotional state.
I wrapped my cardigan tighter and stared at a skyline I didn't recognize.
Virginia, Bates had said. Somewhere in Virginia.
It didn't matter. One anonymous view was the same as another when you were hiding.
The air was cold and sharp and it smelled like nothing, which was exactly what I wanted. Nothing. No soap. No coffee. No complicated man with complicated eyes and an allergy to emotional honesty.
The sliding door opened behind me.
"You've been out here for fifteen minutes," Will said. "Not five."
"Are you timing me now?" I didn't turn around. "That's a new one. Usually you just install apps."
The silence behind me was thick enough to touch. I regretted the words immediately and also didn't regret them at all, and those two things lived in my chest at the same time the way contradictions always did when it came to Will Steele.
"The file is ready to send," he said after a moment, his voice careful in the way it got when he was navigating something he didn't have a strategy for. "I wanted to let you know."
"Great. Send it."
More silence. I heard him step onto the balcony, felt the air shift as he moved closer.
Not close enough to touch. He'd calibrated the distance, the way he calibrated everything, and I was so tired of being calibrated at that something inside me snapped.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet click, like a latch releasing.
"Stop," I said.
"I haven't..."
"Stop managing the distance." I turned to face him.
He was backlit by the warm glow of the apartment, features half in shadow, and he looked tired in a way I recognized because I saw it in my own mirror every morning.
"Stop calculating how close you can stand without it meaning something.
Stop saying good like it's a full sentence.
Stop treating me like a colleague you've never met. "
He didn't respond right away. I watched his face for any clue into his thoughts, he was completely immersed in doubt and concern.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked, and his voice was rougher than his Professional Will voice, the edges showing through like bones through thin fabric.
"I want you to be honest. For five minutes.
Not strategic. Not careful. Just honest." I pulled my cardigan tighter, which was a defensive gesture and I knew it was a defensive gesture and I did it anyway.
"Because this..." I gestured at the space between us, at the apartment behind him, at the whole ridiculous charade of the past four days.
"This is killing me. And I think it's killing you too, but you'd rather die than admit it, and that's..." I lost the sentence.
Chased it. Couldn't find it. "I'm too tired for this, Will.
I'm too tired to keep pretending we're something we're not. "
"And what are we?"
"I don't know! That's the point." My voice climbed and I let it, because controlling it hadn't gotten me anywhere.
"I don't know what we are because you kissed me and then bricked yourself inside a wall and I've been standing outside it for four days trying to figure out if I should knock or just walk away, and I'm not.
.. I don't..." The words got tangled and I pressed my hands against my face and breathed once, hard, through my fingers.
"I'm not good at this. I've never been good at this.
I'm good at numbers. Numbers make sense.
People don't, and you especially don't."
The silence lasted long enough for me to become profoundly aware that I'd just unraveled in front of a man who handled emotion with the dexterity of someone wearing oven mitts.
When he spoke, his voice was lower. Closer to the ground. "I've been telling myself it was the right call. Walking away."
"And?"