Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
LAYLA
I’d been putting it off.
Every time I picked up the phone and found his name in my contacts, I put it back down and found something else that needed doing.
The records requests needed following up.
The files needed organizing. Koa needed a run.
The cottage needed cleaning. There was always something, and I was not a woman who hid from hard things, which meant I was aware enough of what I was doing to be annoyed at myself about it, and I kept doing it anyway.
The truth was, I wasn’t afraid of the conversation. I was afraid of disappointing him. Those were different things, and only one of them was worth being afraid of.
He’d been the one who’d shown up when nobody was supposed to show up, the FBI agent who’d taken one look at a sixteen-year-old girl in a hospital bed and decided she was going to be okay because he was going to make sure of it.
He’d adopted me legally before I turned seventeen, which nobody had asked him to do and which he’d done anyway, without ceremony, as if it were simply the obvious next thing.
He’d built a family around me. Taught me to fight.
Drove me to my first college visit and cried at my graduation without apologizing for it.
He was going to be worried. He was going to be so worried, and I hated doing that to him. But I was going to do it anyway because I couldn’t do this without him knowing. He deserved to hear it from me.
I sat on the sofa with my phone in my hand. Koa settled his head in my lap. One hand stroking through his fur, I made myself dial.
It rang twice.
“Hey, baby girl.” The warmth in his voice hit me somewhere in the sternum the way it always did, the warmth of a man who answered his phone for his daughter with his whole heart every single time. “How’s your case going? Ashley said it’s been keeping you busy.”
So Ashley had kept the secret. I made a mental note to do something nice for my sister. “It’s going. I’m close to some breakthroughs. I can feel it.”
“You keeping Koa close? And your knives?”
“Yeah.” I looked down at Koa’s face, eyes half-closed, radiating contentment. “Both. Always.”
“Good.” I could hear him settle into his chair, the familiar creak of the leather one in his home office. “You never know what’ll come out when you start rattling cages. These cold cases, someone went to trouble to keep them cold.”
I winced at the ceiling. He had no idea how right he was. “Yeah. Listen, Daddy.” I took a breath. “I’m not going to be home for Christmas this year.”
Silence.
“What?”
“I’m staying put for the case. It’s at a critical juncture, and I don’t want to risk being gone if the leads I’m following pan out.” I kept my voice steady, the way I’d learned over years of doing things that required steadiness. “I’m so sorry.”
“Well.” A pause while he recalibrated. “Maybe we can come to you. Where is this case?”
I closed my eyes briefly. “North Carolina.”
A longer beat before he asked, “Where in North Carolina?”
And there it was. Not dad voice anymore. The shift was subtle. He’d spent thirty years as an FBI agent before spending the last decade as a consultant, and when something tripped a wire, his voice changed in a way that was almost imperceptible unless you’d grown up listening for it.
“Layla.”
I said it fast, the way you pulled off a bandage. “Hatterwick Island.”
The silence that followed had a different quality than the first one.
Then he swore, low and creatively, which he almost never did. “What the hell are you thinking? Does Bruce know?”
“Yeah.” I pressed my free hand over my eyes. “He knows.”
“And he let you—” He stopped. The tone had shifted again, and I recognized that one too. The careful grip on his temper as he composed exactly how he was going to ream my handler out the moment this call was over. “He let you stay?”
“I left the program, Daddy.”
Another silence. Longer this time. I sat in it, and my heart did something uncomfortable in my chest. The fear I’d been carrying around for weeks rose up to make itself known.
He’d taken me in and given me a family and a name, and a life, and I’d just told him I’d walked away from the only protection that life had ever had.
I was terrified of what his face looked like right now, even though I couldn’t see it.
“I’m sorry.” I hated that I was saying it, but couldn’t stop.
“I’m sorry. I know this wasn’t what you wanted for me.
But I have to do this. You of all people—you know I need answers.
You know I’ve needed answers for fifteen years, and this is the closest anyone has ever gotten.
I couldn’t walk away from it. I tried. I genuinely tried. ”
He let me finish. He always let me finish. It was one of the things that made him who he was.
Then he sighed. A long, slow exhale that carried weight in it, the breath of a man setting something down that he’d been carrying in the hope he wouldn’t have to.
“I suspected you’d do this one day,” he said.
“I hoped you wouldn’t. But I know you, baby girl.
I’ve known you since you were sixteen years old, and I watched you decide that whatever had been done to you wasn’t going to define what you did next.
” A pause. “It’s part of why I pushed you so hard in your training.
So you’d be as prepared as I could make you for whatever you ended up doing. ”
Something in my chest unknotted. “You’re not mad?”
“I’m worried.” He said it plainly, without dressing it up.
“I’m going to be worried until you’re standing in my kitchen eating your mother’s food and I can see with my own eyes that you’re all right.
That’s just how it is.” Another pause. “But no. I’m not mad.
I understand what this means to you. You wouldn’t go into it lightly. ”
The relief that rushed through me was so huge it was almost physical. I hadn’t realized how much space the fear had been taking up until it wasn’t there anymore.
“Listen,” he said, and the FBI agent was back underneath the warmth now, not replacing it but present alongside it, the two things he’d always been simultaneously. “Do you have someone watching your back? You’re not doing this alone?”
I thought about Jace. About a man who made me coffee and tea and positioned himself between me and doors that opened too fast and sat on the steps with me listening to the murmur of the ocean and said I’m not going anywhere in a hundred different ways without ever saying it directly.
“I’m not doing this alone,” I said.
Part of me wanted to say more. Part of me wanted to say, there’s this man, and he’s kind of remarkable, and I think you’d like him, and I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m doing it anyway.
Part of me wanted that conversation, the one where I got to talk about someone the way Willa talked about Sawyer and Madden talked about Rios, with the warmth and excitement of a person who had found something real.
But that wasn’t what Jace and I were doing, and I didn’t live that kind of life, and this was not the moment to figure out whether any of that was changing.
“I mailed gifts to everyone,” I said instead. “You should get them in a day or two. There are some other things back at the house I’ll get to you when I make it back to Orcas, but I wanted you to have something to open on Christmas morning.”
“We’ll keep our eyes peeled.” A warmth in his voice, making room for me even in this. “What do you want me to tell your mother?”
I blew out a breath. “At the risk of putting the full burden on you—as little as possible? I don’t want to ruin her Christmas with worry. I’ll come clean after. Okay?”
“I can agree to that.” A pause. “I love you, Layla. You stay safe. You come home.”
“I will. Love you too, Daddy.”
I sat for a moment after I hung up, absorbing the call—what it had cost and what it had given back, Koa’s head still warm and heavy in my lap. The fear had taken up so much space for so long that its absence left a kind of quiet I needed a moment to adjust to.
He wasn’t mad. He was worried. He was always going to be worried. But he understood me well enough to understand why I’d done it, and he loved me well enough to say so, and that was everything.
A knock sounded at the door.
I opened it to find Willa, Gabi, and Madden standing on the front step with the collective energy of women who had decided something was happening.
“We heard you need a dress,” Willa said. “For a New Year’s Eve party.”
“This calls for a shopping trip,” Gabi announced.
Madden was tapping at her phone. “There’s a boutique in Manteo that’s supposed to be good. I already looked up the hours.”
I stood in the doorway and looked at these three women who had pulled me into their orbit without asking and kept me there. Something tightened in my throat that I wasn’t going to examine too closely right now.
When had I last had this? Not colleagues, not the careful professional friendships that came and went with cases, but actual women who showed up at my door because I needed a dress and they’d decided to make it an event.
“Let me get my purse.”