Chapter Five #2
"I don't know what it's about yet. That's the honest answer.
" Cole turned in the chair, faced her fully for the first time since he'd sat down, and she let him, because there was something in his voice that wasn't technical anymore, something closer to the register he used to talk to her in before any of this.
"But I know I'm not going to let it stay a mystery longer than it has to.
Whatever she's doing, whoever she's doing it with, this ends with your accounts locked down tight enough that it never happens again.
That's the only part of this I actually get to control, so that's the part I'm going to control completely. "
"That's not your business to control, Cole. It's mine."
"I know." He said it without defensiveness, a simple correction accepted, no argument trailing behind it the way there would have been once, back when he'd needed to be right about most things more than he'd needed to be careful with her.
"I meant I'm going to do the work as thoroughly and as carefully as it needs doing, on your terms, until you tell me it's done. That's what I meant."
She let the correction stand between them, unremarked on, and turned back to the screen, because it was easier to look at rows of IP addresses than at a man who kept, infuriatingly, saying exactly the right thing at exactly the moment she'd braced for him to say the wrong one.
They worked another hour, tracing what they could, flagging what they couldn't yet explain, and Jonas came by twice with nothing more urgent than a question about a delivery schedule, glancing between them both times with the careful neutrality of a kid who understood he was standing in the middle of something he had no interest in being asked about directly.
The second time, he lingered a beat longer than the question required, eyes flicking to the careful foot of space between their two chairs, the tidy, deliberate distance of it, and something in his expression suggested he'd clocked exactly what it meant even if he was smart enough not to say so out loud.
By five, Cole had a list of next steps, written out plainly for her, not summarized, not simplified, every item explained in enough detail that she could have picked the work back up herself if she'd wanted to.
"I'll be back Monday, same time, if that still works," he said, packing up the laptop, careful and unhurried, the same deliberate distance in every movement.
"Unless you want someone else finishing this out.
I meant what I said in the message. I'm not going to make this harder than it has to be for you. "
"Monday works." She stood too, arms crossed, putting the desk between them without quite meaning to. "You did good work today, Cole. I want that said plainly, because I don't want you walking out of here thinking I don't notice competence when I see it."
Something moved across his face, brief and unguarded, gone before she could fully read it. "Thank you for saying so."
"Don't make it more than it is."
"I won't," he said, and meant it, or seemed to, and left the way he'd come, through the loading dock door, across the gravel lot, back toward the garage without looking back, and Rowan stood alone in her office with a list of next steps in Cole's careful handwriting and the particular unsettled feeling of a woman who'd spent an entire afternoon waiting for the old version of him to show up and had instead watched a stranger who happened to share his face do everything, every single thing, exactly right.
She sat back down at the desk after he'd gone, pulled the list toward her, and made herself read through it twice, business first, the way she always processed anything that threatened to become more complicated than business.
IP addresses. Payment cycles. A truck stop in Coleraine that might or might not connect a broke, angry ex-employee to an actual rival motorcycle club casing Ironvow's territory.
That was the part that should have kept her up tonight. That was the part that mattered.
Instead she found herself thinking about the careful foot of space he'd left between their two chairs, and the way he'd asked before pulling data instead of just pulling it, and the plain, unhurried way he'd said I know when she corrected him, no argument in it, no wounded pride, just a man accepting a boundary the second it was set instead of testing to see how far he could lean against it.
She hated that she'd noticed. She hated it precisely, specifically, in the way she hated very few things, because noticing meant some part of her, some old, stubborn, traitor part she'd thought she'd starved out over the last seven months, was still keeping score in his favor, still building a case for him one small, restrained gesture at a time, whether she'd given it permission to or not.
She thought about the fan, too, the half-second he'd almost touched something that used to be theirs without thinking and then caught himself, pulled back like the old habit had burned him on contact.
That was the part that unsettled her more than any of the rest of it, more than the IP addresses or the truck stop in Coleraine or even the eight hundred dollars still sitting unresolved in her accounts.
It would have been easier, in a strange way, if he'd walked in today performing something, some visible, effortful version of a changed man designed to be witnessed and credited.
She knew how to be suspicious of performance.
She'd gotten good at it, out of necessity, in the months since.
What she didn't know how to be suspicious of, not yet, not fully, was a man whose restraint looked less like performance and more like something that had actually rewired itself somewhere underneath the surface, quiet enough that even he seemed startled by his own hands sometimes.
She didn't trust it. She told herself that firmly, sitting alone at the desk with his list of next steps in front of her, because not trusting it was the only safe position available to a woman who'd trusted completely once and watched that trust get used against her in her own building.
But not trusting something and not noticing it were two different disciplines, and she'd apparently only ever fully mastered one of them.
Rowan closed the laptop, turned off the office light, and went to check the CO2 lines herself before she locked up for the night, because physical work had always been the fastest way she knew to talk herself back down, and because there wasn't a single line item on tonight's inventory sheet that was going to ask anything complicated of her, and after an afternoon like this one, that felt like the only kind of mercy she had any right to expect.
She texted Deb on her way up to the apartment, three words, because some things were easier typed than said out loud even to the person who'd earned the right to hear them first.
He's different. Hate it.
Deb's reply came back before Rowan had even gotten her key in the door.
Different bad or different good?
Rowan stood on the landing above the storage building, keys in hand, the whole gravel lot quiet below her, the clubhouse dark across the way, and typed her answer honestly, because that at least she still owed herself.
Don't know yet. That's the problem.