Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Pain woke her.
Not the screaming, white-hot kind from the wall. This was duller, wider—a deep-tissue hum that had settled into every joint she owned while she slept and now announced itself as she surfaced.
Her wrist throbbed beneath something tight. Compression. Her knee was stiff and hot, locked at an angle she’d have to negotiate before it would bend. Her shoulders ached. Her hips ached. The muscles along her ribs felt like they’d been wrung out and hung up to dry.
She was in a bed she didn’t recognize.
A fragment surfaced. Isaac’s voice, low and close. His arms beneath her. Warmth: water, his chest against her back, the slow dissolution of pain into something she could survive.
That couldn’t be right. Isaac was in Austin. He couldn’t be here.
She opened her eyes.
But there he was sitting in a chair beside the bed. Close enough to touch. His shirt was wrinkled, his jaw dark with stubble, his eyes carrying the flat, spent look of a man who hadn’t closed them all night. A glass of water and a bottle of ibuprofen sat on the nightstand behind him.
He was watching her.
“Hey.” His voice was quiet. Measured.
“Hey.”
Her brain started buzzing. How had he found her? What had he seen? What had she said while she was in and out of consciousness?
He leaned forward. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a truck that backed up and hit me again.”
Not even so much as a hint of a smile. “Which joints are worst?”
“Wrist. Knee. Everything in between.”
He reached for the water and the ibuprofen.
She tried to sit up and her core seized, every abdominal muscle locking against the movement.
He was already there, one hand flat between her shoulder blades, easing her upright against the headboard.
The pillow shifted behind her and he fixed it without being asked.
She took the pills. Drank the water. Her throat was raw.
“There’s food,” he said. “I found some things in the kitchen. Nothing impressive, but there’s crackers and peanut butter.”
“Maybe in a minute.”
He nodded. Didn’t push.
She looked at the compression wrap on her wrist. Even layers, no gaps, the tension consistent from palm to forearm. He’d done that while she was unconscious. Wrapped her wrist and arranged her knee and covered her with blankets and sat in that chair and waited for her to wake up.
“I need the bathroom,” she said.
He stood immediately. She eased her legs off the bed and tried to put weight on the left one. The knee held—barely. A deep, grinding resistance, the kneecap tracking in its groove with the reluctance of something that remembered what had happened last time and didn’t trust the arrangement.
She could walk. It was ugly, but she could walk.
Isaac stayed beside her. Close enough that his arm brushed hers. He didn’t grab her, didn’t steer. Just matched her pace and stayed within reach. At the bathroom door, he stopped.
“I’ll be right here.”
She went in. Closed the door. Did what she needed to do slowly, carefully, each movement a conversation with joints that were cooperating under protest. When she came out, he was exactly where she’d left him, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
“Better?”
“Better.”
He walked her back to the bedroom. She lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, and the stiffness in her knee sent a bolt up her thigh that she absorbed without sound. He crouched in front of her and checked the compression wrap, his fingers gentle on the edges, testing the tension.
“Would another bath help? The warm water worked last night.”
She’d remembered it in pieces—the water, the heat, the slow release of her locked joints—but she’d filed it with the other fragments, half-convinced it was something her brain had assembled from need rather than memory.
But it was real. He’d put her in a bath. And she couldn’t have held herself upright, which meant—
He’d been in the water with her.
She could feel it now. The specific memory clicking into focus like a lens turning.
His chest behind her. His arm across her waist. The way she’d rested against him because there was nothing left in her body that could hold itself up.
She’d been undressed. She’d been unable to support her own weight.
And he’d climbed in behind her and held her there in the warm water until the pain released its grip.
“Fallon?”
She looked at him. He was still crouched in front of her, his hands on the compression wrap, waiting.
“The bath,” she said. “You were in the water with me.”
Something moved across his face. “You kept falling over. I couldn’t hold you up from outside the tub.”
She absorbed that. The intimacy of it. The vulnerability she hadn’t been conscious enough to guard against. He’d seen her at the absolute bottom. Not just hurt, but helpless. Unable to sit up in a bathtub without someone else’s body holding hers in place.
And then a second thing connected.
Cassandra told me what to do. He’d said that. Last night, or early this morning, somewhere in the blur. She’d half-heard it. His voice near her ear, low and steady: Cassandra told me what to do.
He’d talked to Cassandra.
If Isaac had talked to Cassandra, if she’d told him about the warm water and her hEDS, then the wall between Fallon’s two worlds had a door in it now.
And Isaac had walked through it.
She sat with that. The jolt of it reverberating through her chest in waves she couldn’t name.
Fear. Relief. A disorienting sense of exposure, as if someone had pulled back a curtain she’d spent years keeping closed.
Whatever she was feeling, she couldn’t sort it into anything as clean as a single emotion.
He was still here. He’d talked to the one person who knew everything, and he’d used that information to take care of her. He hadn’t run. Hadn’t recoiled. He’d held her in warm water and wrapped her wrist and sat in a chair all night.
“Food?” she said. “You mentioned peanut butter.”
He made her crackers with peanut butter. Brought them on a plate with more water. She ate slowly, her right hand useless, her left doing all the work. He sat on the edge of the bed beside her and waited until she’d finished before he spoke.
She set the plate on the nightstand. “How did you find me? How are you even in Chattanooga?”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I used what I had: the burner phone. I had my tech guy help me narrow the signal to Chattanooga through cellular triangulation.”
Of course. That was why Cass had wanted her to get rid of it. Because it was a liability. But Fallon hadn’t.
He paused. “From there, we researched people who could be your potential targets based on your previous marks. Wealthy, corrupt, the kind of people who’d earned what you do.”
She went still.
“The past five nights I’ve gone to every gala, every fundraiser, every black-tie anything that any of your potential targets might be at.
Bought tickets, talked my way in, stood in rooms full of people I didn’t care about and looked for you.
Sheer fucking luck I looked up and saw you on that building last night. ”
“You said something last night,” she said. “In the car. You said you know. About all of it.”
He straightened. Met her eyes.
“I know you’re not a pickpocket, Fallon.
I know you’re targeting corrupt people and taking them down.
The thefts, the public exposure, the financial records leaked to the press.
You’re dismantling them. Robin Hooding.” He said it plainly.
No judgment, no accusation. Just the shape of the truth, laid out between them.
“It’s a much bigger operation than anything I initially assumed. ”
She’d spent three years making sure no one ever said those words. Hearing them out loud, in someone else’s voice, sent two things through her at once. The cold spike of being known. And beneath it—quieter, harder to admit—the relief of not having to hide.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
The question was simple. The answer wasn’t.
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like I could just drop a confession into a phone call between flirting and goodnight. How do I even begin to explain something like this?”
“You could have tried.”
“And said what? Hey, Isaac, I’m not just lifting wallets, I’m running coordinated operations against wealthy criminals, stealing their assets, and orchestrating their public destruction?”
“You could’ve tried.”
“I didn’t know if you’d believe me. I didn’t know if you’d think I was delusional or dangerous or both.
” She pulled her good knee up against her chest. “And even if you did believe me, you work in security. Knowing what I do and not reporting it makes you complicit. I wasn’t going to put that on you. ”
“That was my choice to make.”
“No. What I carry is not the kind of thing you hand to someone else. It’s my cross. My mission. I chose it and I carry it because that’s the only way it works.”
He was quiet for a long time. She watched him sit with it. Not arguing. Not problem-solving. Just letting the reasons land.
“Tell me why,” he said. “There has to be a place where all this started. Somewhere that you first stepped onto this track.”
She looked at the far wall. A blank white rectangle in a rented room in a city that wasn’t hers.
“My father. Timothy Hemingway.”
The words came out smaller than she expected. She’d never said any of this out loud to anyone except Cassandra. The telling itself felt foreign in her mouth, like speaking a language she’d learned but never used.
“He was a good man. The best man I’ve ever known.
” She stopped. Started again. “We weren’t wealthy when I was growing up, but we were comfortable.
He worked hard. He loved my mother. Loved me.
He was the kind of father who showed up for everything.
Every school play, every soccer game, every Sunday morning making pancakes that were always a little burned on one side. ”
Isaac’s hand rested on the bed near hers.