Chapter Seven
EMMA
I woke up to an empty bed and the sound of the front door closing.
The clock read six forty. My ribs registered as a dull stiffness when I rolled onto my side, nothing worse. I got up without bracing for the first time since the crash, and that small victory made me stand straighter on the way to the bathroom.
When I came out, Kodiak was in the kitchen, with wet hair and a sheen of sweat on his arms. He’d been running.
“Morning,” he said.
“You’ve been up for a while.”
“Perimeter, then the trail.” He opened the fridge and grabbed bacon and a container of blueberries. “How are you feeling?”
“Better. A lot better.”
He laid bacon in a cast-iron skillet, and I leaned against the counter to watch him.
He cooked like he did everything else—no wasted motion, no hesitation, like scrambled eggs were a task with a correct sequence and he’d memorized it years ago.
His forearms flexed when he worked the spatula, and I let myself stare because he wasn’t looking at me and because I’d earned it after the week I’d had.
“You’re watching me,” he said over his shoulder.
“I’m supervising.”
“The hot sauce goes in at the end. I know what I’m doing.”
“You forgot the hot sauce last time.”
“I forgot nothing. I made a strategic decision to add it at the table.”
“You forgot.”
He pointed the spatula at me. “Slander.”
I grinned and stole a piece of avocado off the cutting board. He let me, which meant he’d cut extra on purpose.
We ate at the table, with his knee against mine. I didn’t pretend it was accidental anymore, and neither did he.
After breakfast, I tried to work, but couldn’t focus. The forensic accounting I needed to do required systems I didn’t have access to from here, and refreshing the same files wasn’t getting me anywhere. I closed the laptop.
“I need to get to my office.”
“Not yet.”
“Coleman—”
“Give Alice time to run what you sent her. A couple more days.”
I didn’t argue. Not because he was right, but because fighting over it would cost me a morning I wasn’t ready to give up.
We ended up on the porch. The temperature was cold, and the water was gray and flat.
I sat on the top step, with my knees drawn up, and he leaned on the railing across from me.
Neither of us had anywhere to be, and for the first time since the bomb, that didn’t make me anxious.
It made me tired in ways I hadn’t let myself feel.
He was quiet. Not the guarded version from the first night or the clipped operative tone from the helicopter.
He was present, unhurried, content to let the silence be what it was.
I’d spent the two weeks in California wishing for this version of him, and here he was, drinking water on a porch in the Chesapeake while gulls screamed at each other over the tree line.
“Can I tell you something?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“My father was a Marine.”
He didn’t react. He waited.
“Martin Sinclair. Two tours in Afghanistan. He was a different person when he returned.” I picked at a splinter on the step.
“Not all at once. It was slow. He’d forget things, then he’d lose his temper over nothing, then he stopped sleeping.
By the time my mother figured out how bad it was, the VA had him on a six-month waitlist for a counselor. ”
“How old were you?”
“Eight. Nine. Old enough to know something was off and too young to understand what. My mother found a counselor on her own. A woman named Ruth at the VA, who’d had a cancellation.
Mom drove him to that appointment and each one after it for eight months.
Twice a week, an hour each way. She almost left him twice during that stretch.
She told me that when I was older. She said the hardest part wasn’t the appointments or the driving.
It was sitting in the parking lot, not knowing if the man who walked out would be the one she married or the one who’d come home from Kandahar. ”
I didn’t look at Kodiak while I said this. I couldn’t. If I saw pity, I’d stop talking, and if I saw nothing, I’d do the same, so I kept my eyes on the water.
“Ruth didn’t quit on him. My mother didn’t quit on him. Between the two of them, they held him together until he could hold himself.” My throat was tight, but my voice held. “He lived. He came home. He raised me. He was the one who taught me to read a balance sheet before I could drive.”
“When did he die?”
“Three years ago. Heart attack. He was sixty-one.” I picked the splinter free and flicked it off the step.
“The system almost killed him twenty years before that. One counselor and one stubborn woman are the reason I’m here.
That’s why this case matters to me. It’s not the money.
It’s the families those fake nonprofits were supposed to help and didn’t. ”
I’d never told anyone the full version. Brenna knew some of it. Luke understood my father had served. Nobody had heard about the parking lot or the eight months of twice-a-week drives or how close my mother came to walking away.
He had all of it now. The title, the investigation, the woman he’d pretended to be married to—none of that was me. This was. My father broke, and the people who loved him stayed, and that was the single most important fact of my life.
I waited for him to respond.
He was still for a long time. Not the comfortable version from earlier. This was locked down, controlled, the kind that takes effort.
“I had a brother,” he said.
Past tense. I didn’t move.
“He was a Marine.” That was all. His tone was flat, and the door was closed.
I waited for the rest. His name, what happened, anything that would tell me he trusted me the way I’d trusted him.
He picked up his water bottle, took a drink, and set it down. “We should look at what Alice sent overnight. I think she flagged an anomaly in the second LLC filing.”
The temperature dropped ten degrees, and the sun hadn’t moved.
I stayed where I was and tried to be grateful. Two sentences. More than I’d gotten before. More than he’d offered anyone, probably. I told myself that was enough.
It wasn’t. I’d laid out my father’s breakdown and my mother sitting in a parking lot twice a week for eight months, and he’d handed me eight words and a pivot to Alice’s files.
I followed him inside because I didn’t know what else to do.
He had the laptop open when I came in. Whatever Alice had sent, he was already deep in it.
I poured a glass of water and stood at the counter. He didn’t look up. I drank it and poured another, and he was still buried in whatever Alice had sent.
I sat across from him and slid my own laptop closer.
For an hour, we worked in a silence that wasn’t comfortable anymore.
He’d ask me a question about a transaction date, and I’d answer.
I’d point out a discrepancy in a filing, and he’d nod.
We were two professionals at a kitchen table, and the man who’d had his mouth on me twelve hours ago was nowhere in the room.
At some point, his hand landed on my knee under the table. I moved my leg.
An hour later, he closed his laptop and said he needed to do a perimeter check. He was gone before I could respond.
I washed my glass and wiped down the counter. My hands clenched on the edge of the sink, and I tried to talk myself out of the anger that was building in my chest.
He’d lost a brother. He was a Marine, and he was dead, and Kodiak couldn’t say his name. That was real grief, and I had no right to be mad about how he carried it.
Except it wasn’t his grief that had me gripping the sink. It was because he’d taken what I offered and given me the bare minimum in return, and then sat across from me like the conversation hadn’t happened.
Forty minutes later, he came in and kicked his boots off by the door. He opened the fridge, then closed it empty-handed.
“Everything clear?” I asked.
“All good.” He leaned on the counter. “You hungry? I can fix you a plate.”
I shook my head.
“You’ve been quiet,” he said.
I almost laughed.
“Did I do something?”
“I don’t know, Coleman. Did you?”
He set his water down. “If this is about the perimeter check—”
“It’s not.”
“Then, what?”
I gripped the edge of the counter behind me. “I told you my father’s story today. About his service and what happened when he came home and what my mother went through to keep him alive. I told you things I’ve never said out loud to anyone.”
“I know.”
“You gave me ‘I had a brother’ and changed the subject to Alice’s files.”
“Emma—”
“You did this at two in the morning on our first night here. I told you there wasn’t anyone else, and you said something smug and shut down. That’s a pattern, Coleman.”
He pushed off the counter. “It’s not that simple.”
“Then, make it simple. Tell me about him. What was his name?”
“You don’t want to do this right now.”
“Wrong. I very much want to do this right now. You’re the one who doesn’t.”
His expression hardened. “I told you more today…”
“You told me two sentences.”
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“None of this is fair. I’ve given you everything. My father’s story, my body, my trust. You’ve given me your hands and your mouth, and not a single honest sentence that tells me who you are.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then, tell me his name.”
He didn’t answer.
“Tell me what happened to him.”
He didn’t answer.
“Tell me one fucking thing about your life that isn’t classified or deflected or swallowed before you say it.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said.
“I know exactly what I’m asking. I’m asking you to do what I did. I’m asking you to trust me.”
“I do trust you,” he said.
“No, you don’t. Not with a goddamn thing that matters.”
He flinched, and it was real. It should have stopped me.
“You asked why I’m quiet? Because I’m trying to figure out how to be in the same room with a man who will go down on me but won’t finish a sentence.
Who will hold me all night and then sit across the table in the morning like it didn’t happen.
Who told me he counted each day that we didn’t kiss and can’t tell me his brother’s name. ”
The volume of my voice kept increasing, but I couldn’t stop. If I did, we’d never get anywhere, and I’d have to walk away unsure if I’d given up too soon.
“I can’t keep handing you pieces of myself and getting nothing in return. So, either tell me what the hell you’re so afraid of or stop touching me. Because I can’t do both anymore.”
The kitchen was too small. I could feel him breathing from six feet away. He didn’t speak. He gripped his neck with one hand and fisted the other.
“Say something!” I shouted.
“I don’t know how!”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know.”
“Coleman—”
“His name was Jake.” His hand dropped from his neck.
“Jake,” I repeated.
“My brother. Jake.” He was looking at the floor. “I can’t talk about him. Not because I don’t trust you. Because each time I try, I’m back in a place where I couldn’t do a fucking thing to help him, and I can’t—I can’t be in that place and be what you need at the same time.”
I was shaking. My fists ached, and all the fury I’d built up over two hours was dissolving into grief. He’d given me a name. He’d given me the reason he couldn’t tell me more. It wasn’t what I needed, but it was everything he had.
“You don’t get to decide what I need,” I said, my voice raw. “I need you to stop running. That’s it. That’s all I’ve ever needed from you.”
He crossed the kitchen in two steps. His palms hit the counter on either side of me, and his mouth was on mine before I finished the breath I’d been holding.
It was nothing like any other kiss. It was hard and deep and anger-driven. I fisted both hands in his shirt and pulled him into me. He pressed against me, and I bit his lower lip hard enough that he groaned.
“I’m still angry at you,” I said against his mouth.
“I know.”
“This doesn’t fix it.”
“I know that too.”
I yanked his shirt over his head, and he let me. His chest was bare and warm, and I pressed my lips to his collarbone.
He lifted me onto the counter and stepped between my thighs. When he pulled my shirt off, the cool air hit my skin, and I shuddered.
“Tell me to stop,” he said.
“No.”
He unhooked my bra with one hand, and his mouth dropped to my breast. I arched into him and gripped the back of his neck. The granite was cold against my bare skin, and he was hot, and I was furious and desperate, and if he pulled away from me one more time, I was going to lose my mind.
He didn’t. He lifted me off the counter, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. My spine hit the wall, and he pinned me there with his hips.
“I’ve wanted to fuck you since California.” His voice was nothing like the measured tone he used for everything else. “I’ve thought about it every night on this island. What you’d sound like. What you’d feel like. Whether you’d say my name the way you do when you’re mad at me.”
I couldn’t think about anything other than now I wished he’d stop talking.
“Then, do something about it,” I said.
He carried me down the hall with my legs locked around him. When he set me on the bed, he stood over me and unbuckled his belt. I reached for the button on my jeans, and he caught my wrist.
“Let me,” he said. He stripped my jeans and underwear off in one motion.
I lay bare on the bed, with him standing over me.
“You’re beautiful,” he said as he rolled a condom on. “You’re even more beautiful when you’re furious, but I’m going to make you come so hard you forget why you were yelling at me.”
“I won’t forget.”
“Good.” He lowered himself over me and kissed me deep and slow while his hand slid between my thighs. “I don’t want you to.”
When he pushed inside me, I stopped breathing. He was big, and the stretch made my back arch off the mattress. He held still and pressed his forehead to mine.
“Look at me, Emma.”
I did. His eyes were dark and close, and he wasn’t hiding a goddamn thing.
“Say my name.”
When I did, he started to move.