14. Chapter 14
Beckett
Iam standing in my Brooklyn loft in the middle of a nor'easter that has shut down three bridges, Elias is asleep in his room, and Isla Wrenwood is on my couch because she cannot get back to Manhattan and I told her to come here before the storm hit.
She arrived three hours before the bridges closed with a tote bag and her laptop and no complaint about the relocation, which tells me she is more rattled than she is showing.
The Frey email thread is on her laptop. Frey photographed her leaving the estate this morning.
The cell tower nearest her building is out and her apartment has a compromised sightline and is accessible to a man who was placed in the Wrenwood household rather than hired.
I wasn't leaving her in Manhattan tonight.
She didn't argue, which also tells me something.
I make her tea without asking what she wants — English breakfast, not herbal, because I have been paying attention — and I set it on the coffee table.
She wraps both hands around it and drinks it without comment, and that small transaction, the tea already made and the right kind, sits between us for a moment before we both go back to what we were doing.
She notices. She doesn't say anything about it. Neither do I.
The storm hits properly at nine. The loft windows take it — the building is solid, good bones, the kind of construction that does not apologize for weather — but the sound of it is considerable, the nor'easter doing what nor'easters do, which is make the city feel small and the indoors feel earned.
Isla has her laptop open at the coffee table.
She's working through the Frey communication thread with the methodical attention she brings to everything, and I'm at my drafting table running the timeline for the third time.
The loft is quiet in the way it gets when two people are working in the same space and have stopped announcing themselves to each other.
I find this comfortable in a way I haven't found most things comfortable in seven years. I let it sit for a moment, then set it aside and keep working.
Elias appears at eleven in the evening in his pajamas. His socks are too big — they always are, because he refuses to wear the right size and I have stopped fighting it. He takes in the storm, the hour, and Isla on the couch, and he is undeterred by all three.
"I heard voices," he says, with the dignity of someone who has prepared this explanation in advance.
"You heard one voice," Isla says, from the couch. "I was on the phone."
"I heard your voice specifically," he says. "Did you bring Thai food?"
"I did not. I brought myself and a laptop."
He considers this. "We have bread."
"I've noticed."
He looks at me. I look at him. We have had this exchange, or a version of it, many times, and it ends the same way, which is with me stepping back from whatever I was doing and Elias getting a grilled cheese at an unreasonable hour.
"Do you want a grilled cheese?" Isla says.
Elias looks at her with the expression of a seven-year-old who has correctly identified a tactical advantage. "Yes please."
I move toward the kitchen. She's already there.
She finds the bread without being told where it is, which means she has been paying more attention to this loft than she has let on, and she finds the cheese, and she makes the grilled cheese with exactly the right spirit — unhurried, not announcing competence, just doing it — while Elias climbs onto his stool at the counter and tells her about Marco's iguana at length.
I stand in the doorway and watch them.
She asks the right questions. Not the exaggerated engagement adults sometimes offer children — actual questions that land.
"What does he eat?" she asks.
"Leafy greens mostly. And some fruit. Marco's mom makes him a little salad."
"A salad." She glances at me. "More discipline than most adults I know."
Elias follows her glance. "Dad doesn't eat on a schedule."
"I eat on a schedule," I say.
"You eat when you remember," he says, with the confidence of someone who has been taking notes.
Isla looks like she is working very hard not to smile. I do not react.
"What's his name?" she asks.
Elias sighs. "Gerald."
"Gerald," she repeats.
"I know. But it's Marco's iguana so I can't rename him."
"You have to respect the naming rights," she says.
"That's what I said." He takes a large bite of his grilled cheese. "He knocked over the shampoo once. In Marco's bathtub. Marco's mom was very upset."
"Gerald doesn't strike me as a very serious iguana."
"He's really not," Elias agrees.
As I listen, something loosens in my chest that I've been keeping wound for seven years, and I stand in the doorway and let it loosen, and I do not try to name what it is.
I get Elias settled at eleven-forty — back to bed, no protest, which means he was genuinely tired and the grilled cheese was the thing standing between him and sleep — and when I come back to the living room Isla has rearranged the coffee table materials into a working layout of the Frey communication thread.
She has laid it out the way I lay out a threat board: timeline along the top, relationships below it, the deleted thread in the center with its metadata printed and annotated in her handwriting.
I stand at the edge of the living room and look at it.
"It helps to have it physical," she says, without looking up. "I can't stop working when I'm anxious. If I stop I start thinking about other things."
I come and sit across from her. "What other things?"
She looks at the layout for a moment. "My mother," she says.
"She's been at a place in Scottsdale for three months.
Dad calls it a wellness retreat. Cole and I have another name for it.
" She pauses. "She's been somewhere like it four times in the last six years.
Different places, same outcome. She checks in, she does the first two weeks, and then she starts deciding the program isn't right for her, that she needs a different approach, that this facility isn't a good fit.
" Isla picks up a printed page and sets it back down.
"Pills, then a spa, then another spa. She has every resource available to her and she's never once used them to actually get better.
And I know addiction isn't a choice, I know that, but the refusal to fight it — that part I haven't figured out how to forgive. "
She is not looking at me. She's looking at the thread layout.
"It's the first time you've mentioned her without a joke attached," I say.
She looks up. "I know." A pause. "It's late. I guess I'm tired."
"I know," I say.
She holds my gaze for a moment, and then she looks back at the layout, and we get back to work.
We work side by side until two in the morning with the nor'easter still running its course outside and the loft going quiet around us, and then we are not working.
She is close enough that I can smell her perfume — something warm, something I have been noticing for weeks in rooms where I was supposed to be thinking about other things. The laptop is open between us but neither of us is looking at it.
"The car," I say.
She looks at me.
"It wasn't adrenaline," I say. "I'm not able to discount it as that."
"I know," she says. "I wasn't trying to."
She reaches over and closes the laptop lid with one finger. I take her face in both hands.
Her breath catches. My thumbs trace the line of her jaw, feeling the delicate architecture of bone beneath olive skin. She's looking up at me with an expression I can't name — something stripped and unguarded that makes my chest tighten.
I kiss her.
Not gentle. Not careful. My mouth finds hers with a hunger I've been chaining for weeks, and she meets it instantly.
Her lips part. Her tongue slides against mine, hot and slick and tasting faintly of the wine we finished an hour ago.
A sound escapes her throat — half gasp, half moan — and it detonates something in my ribcage.
My hands slide from her face into her hair, those loose chestnut waves spilling over my fingers.
She grabs the front of my shirt and pulls me closer, her nails biting through the fabric.
The kiss deepens, turns frantic. Teeth and tongues and ragged breathing.
I've been running on discipline for so long I'd forgotten what it feels like to lose control.
To want something so badly the wanting becomes its own kind of violence.
She shifts, climbing into my lap, her knees bracketing my hips.
Those heels she refuses to abandon dig into the couch cushions on either side of me.
Her skirt rides up her thighs, exposing olive skin that my palms find instinctively — warm, smooth, the muscles beneath taut as she presses herself against me.
"Matt —" His name breaks in her mouth.
I pull back just enough to look at her. Her lips are swollen. Her pupils are blown wide, the green almost swallowed by black. Her chest rises and falls rapidly, the fabric of her blouse straining.
"Bedroom," I say. "Now."
She doesn't argue. Doesn't hesitate. Just climbs off my lap and reaches for my hand, pulling me up from the couch.
I follow her through the dark loft, past the kitchen island, toward the hallway where Elias' room sits with its door firmly closed.
We move quietly — instinct carved from years of tactical movement — but there's nothing measured about the way she pushes me through my bedroom door and kicks it shut behind us.
The room is dark except for ambient city light bleeding through the blinds. I don't reach for the lamp. I reach for her.
My hands find the hem of her blouse and pull it over her head in one motion.
She's wearing a bra the color of midnight — some expensive confection of lace that makes my mouth go dry.
I unclasp it with fingers that aren't quite steady, and it falls away, revealing the full curve of her breasts, nipples already tight in the cool air.
"Fuck," I breathe.