13. Emma #2
“Will he become a witness like me?”
“Not like that,” Mel exhales. “My concern is that he keeps kicking at doors until one of them turns out to be a hornet’s nest. That is bad for him, bad for us, and bad for anyone still trying to keep this contained.
If I can give him enough information, maybe he'll stops digging long enough to let the Bureau handle the rest.”
I almost laugh.
Alex Hartley does not let anyone handle anything once he decides it belongs to him.
But I am not about to argue Mel out of something I desperately want, so I keep my mouth shut.
“He’s already connected because of Thomas’s murder and everything that followed,” she continues.
“Now his investigation may be crossing into current Accord activity. At this point, keeping him completely outside creates its own problems. I may be able to convince the people above me that his access, his resources, even the fact that he refuses to leave this alone, make him more useful informed than blind.”
“Useful how?”
“Let me worry about how I sell it. There are different ways to bring someone in without handing them the entire case. Witness, cooperating source, limited briefing. I need an argument that gets past the red tape.”
“You want to use him.”
The accusation comes out sharper than I intend.
“Emma.” Her voice softens. “I know what happened with you did not go the way any of us expected. I know you feel like we used you, and I carry my part in that every day. But you were in danger. You came to us, and we helped you the way we knew how.”
“And look where that got us.”
“I know.” There is no defensiveness in her answer.
“That is exactly why I am not trying to do the same thing to Alex. I do not want another person dragged deeper into this. I want permission to tell him enough that he stops tearing into things from the outside and stumbling toward people he does not even know are dangerous.”
I grip the phone tighter.
“What would that actually look like?”
“We’ll have a formal meeting. I’ll get clearance for whatever I’m allowed to show him and bring the documents with me.
Most of it will be redacted, but he’ll have enough to understand what happened, what we know now, and what he needs to stop digging into on his own.
” She pauses. “I would rather have him furious at us inside a briefing room than digging alone until he finds the wrong person first.”
My throat closes I force it to work anyway.
“When?”
“I need approval first.”
“How long, Mel?”
“I’m not giving you a deadline I can’t keep.”
“I need to tell him.”
“I know you do.”
“No, you don’t.” My voice cracks open again, and this time I let it. “I slept in his bed last night while he still believed I was responsible for killing his father. I let him say things to me he’d never say if he knew the truth. I let him look at me like that.”
Mel is silent.
“He made me apologize, Mel. For everything.”
“Did he hurt you?” Her tone is furious.
“No.” The answer comes fast enough to surprise even me. “Not like that. I wanted him. I chose it, every part of it.”
I swallow, and the next part comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“That almost makes it worse.”
“Why?”
“Because I still love him.” There it is, finally, the sentence I’ve been circling for weeks without letting myself land on it.
Not loved. Love. Present tense, and alive, and completely out of my control.
“I never stopped. I think I love him more now because I’ve seen what losing us did to him.
I’ve seen the man he built out of the wreckage, and I want him anyway.
I want the way he used to look at me back. ”
My palm presses over my eyes.
“That’s the part I can’t take. He used to look at me like I was the best thing that had ever happened to him, like there wasn’t a single question in the world I could get wrong.
Now I catch distrust behind his eyes before he manages to hide it, and I’d take the hatred over that if it meant he trusted me.
I can survive him being angry once he knows everything.
I don’t think I can keep surviving him believing I never loved him enough to come to him. ”
“Then give me a few days,” she says.
I laugh through the tears, and it hurts. “You always ask for a few more days.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been waiting ten years.”
“And I’m asking you to wait through a few more days, so we do this so he can’t dismiss it the moment fear and anger take over again.
If you tell him alone, what happens the first time he decides it’s another lie?
He can call you a liar to your face. He can’t argue his way around signed reports and federal records sitting on a table in front of him. Paper wins the arguments people lose.”
I can already see it. A government building with bad coffee and fluorescent lighting.
A table between us. Alex across from me while Mel slides ten years of my life toward him in a folder, his hands moving over the pages, the scar through his eyebrow pulling tight the moment he reaches Thomas’s name.
And then his eyes lifting to mine, and I have no idea what I’d find there.
I don’t let myself imagine forgiveness. It feels greedy even as a fantasy.
“I don’t need him to forgive me,” I say.
“What do you need?”
My hand closes around the locket. “I need him to know I didn’t leave because I stopped loving him. I need him to know that before anything else.”
Mel exhales long and slow.
“I’ll make it happen.”
I go still. “What?”
“I’ll get the approval. I’ll bring Alex in myself and lay out everything with the file open in front of him.”
My fingers loosen around the pendant.
“I promise,” she says.
That word stops the room cold. Mel doesn’t promise. Mel gives probabilities, contingencies, and instructions.
“Say that again.”
“I promise.”
I close my eyes and let my shoulders drop for the first time in days.
“A few more days,” she says. “Give me time to spin this properly. His father’s death makes him a wildcard, and his resources make him a liability if we handle him wrong. I need the Bureau to see that bringing him inside is safer than leaving him outside chasing down every lead he finds on his own.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes.”
For the first time in what feels like weeks, I breathe all the way down to the bottom of my lungs.
“Until then, nothing changes,” Mel says, and there she is, exactly on schedule. “You keep the routine. You tell him nothing. You write notes like you did last time. You don’t improvise because you decide you’ve found the perfect emotional moment.”
I look down at Bee, who has climbed halfway into my lap and looks thoroughly unimpressed that my crying has interrupted her morning schedule.
“All right,” I say.
“Say it.”
“I won’t tell him.”
“And if you think you’re about to?”
“I'll call you first.”
“Good.”
“Mel?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t use the word promise unless you can actually keep it.”
“I can keep it.”
The line goes dead without a goodbye, which is exactly as much sentiment as I’ve ever gotten out of Mel Torres.
I stay on the floor a while longer. Bee climbs the rest of the way into my lap and headbutts my hand until I start stroking her out of pure reflex.
“You have a terrible bedside manner,” I tell her.
She purrs like it’s a compliment.
I lift the cardamom jar and shake it. Three grains rattle around the bottom, and for reasons that have nothing to do with baking, that is what finally breaks me open enough to cry for real.
Alex comes home earlier than I expect him.
I’m at the counter kneading dough because emotional collapse triggers the same part of my brain that panics before the holidays.
Flour dusts my forearms, and one streak of it has found its way into my hair.
Bee sits on the island in a spot she’s absolutely forbidden from occupying, watching me work with the detached interest of a supervisor who has never once helped with the labor.
“You’re going to get me fired,” I tell her.
She yawns without opening her eyes.
The elevator chimes. My hands go still in the dough before I’ve consciously decided to stop.
Alex walks in with his tie loosened and his jacket hooked over one hand, the exhaustion on him settling behind his eyes.
He sees me, and he drops the jacket over the back of a chair without looking at where it lands.
He doesn’t say hello. Doesn’t ask what I’m making.
Doesn’t give either one of us enough time to remember all the reasons this is a terrible idea.
He crosses the kitchen in four strides.
My flour-covered hands barely clear the bowl before his palms find my face and his mouth finds mine, and the kiss steals whatever air I had left in my lungs.
I make a sound against him I don’t recognize as my own.
He lifts me onto the counter like I weigh nothing, and I wrap my arms around his neck without meaning to, flour smearing across the back of his shirt as he steps between my knees and kisses me like he spent the entire day furious at himself for wanting to.
Maybe he did.
His mouth is rough, almost desperate, one hand sliding into my hair while the other flattens against my spine, holding me against him like he needs proof I’m actually here and not something he invented on the drive home.
I kiss him back just as hard, because Mel said days.
Because the truth is coming whether either of us is ready for it, and because I am weak enough to take whatever part of Alex Hartley, he’s willing to hand me before it does.
His mouth drags along my jaw, down to the place beneath my ear where my pulse is already pounding loud enough that he has to feel it against his lips.
“Fuck,” he says, breathing the word into my skin as if it costs him something to admit.
I clutch the back of his shirt, fistfuls of expensive cotton bunching in my hands. “What?”