CHAPTER 19
Tessa
The article is finished. It’s been done for approximately fourteen hours and twenty minutes, and in that time I have refreshed my email forty-three times waiting for Simon to tell me it’s a go.
I’ve also reorganized Erik’s notebook entries into a third consecutive spreadsheet that Josie doesn’t need, eaten an entire sleeve of crackers standing over the kitchen island, and stared out the lobby windows at Occidental Square long enough that I’ve memorized the walking patterns of three different pigeons.
The pigeons, notably, can leave whenever they want.
I emailed the article to my editor at nine seventeen yesterday morning. Simon confirmed receipt at nine forty-two with a single line. Got it, will be in touch.
That’s editor-speak for Don’t call me, I’ll call you, and could mean anything from two days to a week depending on what else is burning on his desk.
Simultaneously, the legal team will review it and the fact-checkers will go through every claim.
There will be questions and clarifications and probably at least one conversation about liability that will make me want to put my head through a wall.
All of which is normal. All of which I understand intellectually. All of which requires me to sit here and wait, and I have never been good at waiting.
Cole left at seven this morning. Another client situation that Malik briefed the team on last night after dinner while I sat at the far end of the table pretending to read but actually listening to every word.
Something about a tech executive in Bellevue whose business partner had made some dangerous friends.
Cole and two other agents were out the door before the city was fully awake, moving with purpose and direction, while I stayed here and watched the pigeons.
Yeah… I’m a little more bitter today than I was yesterday, and twice as bitter as I was the day before that.
I push away from the lobby desk where I’ve been sitting for the better part of the morning and stand, rolling my shoulders. The restlessness has been building for six days now to an almost fevered crescendo.
I need air. I need movement. I need to go somewhere that isn’t this building because even the rooftop has been deemed too dangerous for me to go sit on—snipers and not worth the risk, blah blah.
I would kill to get outside, even for an hour, even for twenty minutes, just to remember what it feels like to choose a direction and walk in it.
Hell, I’d be good if they’d just open the lobby door and let me stick my nose outside to breathe in the city.
Footsteps on the reclaimed timber staircase have me turning to see Reid coming down from the second floor with an unhurried ease. He’s got a protein bar in one hand and his phone in the other. He’s in workout clothes, hair still damp from the gym, looking insufferably unburdened.
“Hi, Reid,” I say brightly, standing from my chair.
He looks up. The protein bar stops halfway to his mouth. “Hey, Tessa. What’s up?”
I cross the lobby toward him with what I hope is a casual and reasonable expression. “I need to get out of this building.”
He blinks. “Out.”
“Out,” I confirm. “Anywhere. I’m not picky. Ice cream. A walk around the block. I’ll even take a bikini wax at this point. There’s a place two streets over and I’ve been meaning to—”
The color drains from his face so completely and so rapidly that under other circumstances I might be concerned. “A what?”
“Bikini wax,” I repeat. “You drive, I go in, twenty minutes, we’re back before—”
“Nope.” He takes a full step backward, the protein bar now held in front of him like a shield. “Absolutely not. No. I don’t—that’s not—no.”
“Reid.”
“Tessa.” He recovers his composure and points the protein bar at me.
“I cannot take you outside this building. I’m sorry.
I genuinely am. But Cole would end me. Like, professionally end me and then probably also personally end me, and then Malik would end whatever was left.
” He shakes his head. “I like being alive. I’ve gotten kind of attached to it. ”
“It’s ice cream,” I say. “Or a bikini wax. Neither of those will get me killed.”
“Stepping outside that door is what gets you killed,” he says, not unkindly.
“Or gets me killed for letting you. Same outcome from where I’m standing.
” He takes another step toward the staircase, in full tactical retreat.
“I’m really sorry, Tessa. If it’s any consolation, when this is over, I will personally buy you the biggest ice cream in Seattle. ”
“That’s no consolation at all,” I grumble.
“Yeah,” he says sympathetically. “I figured.” And then he continues up the stairs, looking very proud to have successfully extracted himself from an uncomfortable situation.
I stand in the middle of the lobby and breathe through my nose.
Six days.
Six days in this building and I cannot get a single person to take me for ice cream.
“That bad?”
Anna is standing there with an expression on her face that tells me she heard the entire conversation.
She’s in jeans and a soft flannel shirt today, hair loose, looking like the most normal person in a forty-five-thousand-square-foot building that currently functions as my very comfortable, very secure, very inescapable prison.
“I just got turned down for a bikini wax,” I say.
Anna laughs, eyes twinkling. “So I heard. I think you emotionally scarred Reid.” She tosses her head toward the staircase. “Come have coffee, and you can vent to me.”
The community kitchen is quiet at this hour, the morning rush of agents cycling through already done.
It’s only the two of us at the long farmhouse table, mugs steaming between our hands, the windows at the far end showing a slice of Occidental Square where the pigeons are doing their thing and the trees are dancing in the breeze.
“Tell me,” Anna says simply.
So I do.
Not the case details—she knows those broadly—but the feeling of it.
The specific suffocation of being a person who is always on the go and is now confined.
The frustration of work that’s done but not done, of an article sitting on an editor’s desk while the world continues turning and the people who killed Erik Lanning continue doing whatever they do when they’re not sending men to breach journalists’ homes.
“When will the article get published?”
I lift a shoulder. “Depends how quickly legal gets through it.”
“And do you think it will get approval?”
“I hope so. I don’t have a witness, but I’ll have to wait and see.” I turn my mug slowly on the table. “And I can’t go to the police until after it publishes.”
Anna’s brow creases slightly. “Why not?”
“Because the minute law enforcement gets involved, the story becomes their story,” I say.
“They’ll classify evidence. They’ll seal records.
They’ll run the investigation on their timeline and their terms and my article becomes a footnote in a press release instead of making people understand what actually happened.
” I shake my head. “Erik didn’t give his life so his story could disappear into a federal filing cabinet. ”
Anna is quiet for a moment, turning her own mug. “So you wait.”
“So I wait,” I confirm glumly. “In here. While Cole goes to Bellevue and Reid can get ice cream whenever he wants and Josie runs three simultaneous investigations and everyone in this building has somewhere to be and do and I have—” I gesture vaguely at the table. “Coffee.”
“Coffee’s not nothing,” Anna says mildly.
I almost smile despite myself. “And it is with one of my new favorite people, so there’s that.”
She laughs and outside, a gust of wind moves through the square and more leaves spiral down from the nearest tree, signifying the passage of time.
“Can I ask you something?” Anna asks.
“Sure.”
“When the article publishes and the police get involved and RainVest implodes—” She pauses, choosing her words with care. “What happens to you and Cole?”
The question neither offends nor bothers me. Josie was nosy enough to ask as well, and the fact that I’m more than happy to delve into this tells me that these two women have become friends for life.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I wish I had a miraculous answer, but things are so crazy right now, it’s hard to make sense of right and wrong.”
“Do you want there to be a you and Cole?”
I look at my coffee. At my hands wrapped around the mug, the silver bracelet with its hidden tracker sitting at my wrist. “I never stopped,” I say quietly. “Loving him, that is. I just got very disciplined about not acting on it and put a lot of effort into trying to forget it.”
Anna nods like that’s exactly what she expected to hear. “And him?”
“He sets a mug out for me every morning before I’m awake,” I say.
“Just like he always did when we were together. He turns up the heat in the car before I say I’m cold.
He grabbed his keys the second I said I was going to Tacoma with or without him.
” I pause. “He’s terrified of losing me but at least for right now, he’s not asking me to be less. ”
“That’s different,” Anna says.
“That’s everything,” I correct quietly. “The question is… will he stay that way once this is all said and done, or will he revert to the man who doesn’t want to be with someone who has a dangerous job?”
She smiles at that—the smile of a woman who knows about loving a person in a dangerous world and building a life anyway. “Then maybe stop treating the end of this case like a finish line,” she says, “and treat it like a starting line.”
I look at her for a long moment. “I think that’s probably very good advice.”
I hold out my cup and she clinks hers against it. “Cheers.”
My phone buzzes on the table between us, the notification popping up at the top. An email. I almost dismiss it before I’m jolted by the familiarity of the sender.
Adrian Schwartz.
I stare at it for three full seconds before I’m able to process how extraordinary it is.
Adrian Shwartz, COO of RainVest, Erik Lanning’s boss.
“Excuse me a minute,” I say, picking up my phone to open the email. “I’ve got to handle this.”
“Sure,” she says, picking up our almost empty mugs and walking over to the coffee pot for a refill.
I pull up the email and read it.
Ms. Ward,
I believe we have mutual interests. I’ve been following recent events with considerable concern, and I have information that goes beyond anything currently in your possession.
I’m prepared to talk, but only directly and only soon.
I’ll want some type of immunity in exchange, which I’m sure you can help me get. I imagine you understand the urgency.
If you’re willing to meet, reply to this email and I’ll provide details.
— AS
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
Adrian Schwartz. COO of RainVest, the man who sat one office away from Gavin DelRey while this was all being orchestrated. The man whose name appears in the emails Erik provided, vague and careful but unmistakably complicit.
He wants to talk and he says he has more than I have. Could he be that last piece of evidence in the form of a live witness that I need?
Every instinct I’ve built over a decade of investigative journalism lights up at once. There’s that specific electric charge of a door opening at exactly the right moment, the thrill of a source materializing when you need one most.
And underneath it, quieter but present, what I’ve learned from my days inside this building, two men dead in my living room, and a whistleblower who trusted me and ended up under a vehicle in a parking garage… this could be a trap.
I should tell Cole. I know I should tell Cole.
I stare at the email and think about a story that is the most important piece I’ve ever written and a man who says he has information that goes beyond anything I currently have.
I should tell Cole, but I won’t. In a million years, he’d never allow me to meet up with this man. In fact, I’m sure he wouldn’t even want me to reply to him. If Schwartz is a potential witness, I know Cole will push me to turn all of this over to the feds right now.
“Um… I’ve got a few things I need to do,” I say to Anna, rising from the chair. “Catch you later?”
“You bet,” she says with a smile.