Chapter 26 Asher #2
“The equipment should have been pulled,” I said. “The timeline was aggressive. I knew it was aggressive when I approved it, because the funding window was closing and the pilot program needed results to justify the next phase, and I told myself the margins were acceptable.”
My voice sounded strange to me. Flat. Not controlled—just scraped down to the studs.
“The subcontractor failed. Equipment that should have been replaced. Certification that had been bought. All of it traceable back to Richard, eventually, if you look hard enough.” A pause.
“I looked hard enough. After. Not before. Before, I knew his character and I trusted the system anyway because the mission mattered and the timeline couldn’t slip and it was easier not to ask the question.
” He looked at his hands. “Richard wasn’t wrong that I knew.
He was wrong about what I knew. I didn’t know Tommy would die.
I just knew Richard was the kind of man who cut corners, and I looked the other way, and someone else paid for it. ”
“You chose the version that let you keep moving,” she repeated. Not mocking. Tasting the words.
“And then I spent three years trying to make it right by controlling everything around the aftermath. SEAS. The contracts. The foundation. You.” I had to stop. Breathe. “You were never a project, Charlie. But I made you one. Because projects I can manage. People I—”
“Can’t.”
“Can’t.”
She reached across the counter. Her fingers closed over mine. The brace on her wrist was warm against my skin.
“Richard used Tommy’s death to try to break us,” she said. “But that’s not why I left. I left because you decided what I could handle. And I need you to stop doing that.”
“I know.”
“Not ‘I know’ like you’ve accepted a term sheet. ‘I know’ like you understand that the next time something is scary or ugly or complicated, your first call is to me. Not Jax. Not Shaw Security. Not your own head. Me.”
“That’s—” I started to say terrifying. Stopped. She already knew it was terrifying. That was the point. “Yeah. OK.”
“Eloquent.”
A sound came out of me that might have been a laugh. Rough and unpracticed, like a door opening for the first time in a long time. “I’m not going to be good at this.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to want to fix things. Solve things. Put myself between you and anything that looks like it might hurt.”
“I know that too.”
“And you’re going to—”
“Tell you to knock it off? Yes. Loudly and with great enthusiasm.”
I looked at her. Really looked. Not cataloging or assessing or running calculations about what she needed and how to provide it. Just looking at a woman who’d driven four hours to sit in my kitchen and tell me exactly who she was and what she required.
“I’m not moving back into the guest room,” she said.
“Good.”
“And I’m keeping operational control of SEAS. That wasn’t a gesture. That’s mine now.”
“It was always yours. I just had the paperwork.”
She picked up the compass. Turned it in her fingers.
The gold caught the light and threw tiny flares across the kitchen counter, and I watched them move and thought about Keiko Matsuda’s steady hands and the centuries-old idea that broken things could be more beautiful than whole ones, and I didn’t know if that was true about me yet. But it might be true about us.
“You sent this without a return address,” she said.
“You didn’t need a return address. You know where I am.”
She set the compass down. Stood up. Came around the island to where I was leaning against the counter.
She stopped about a foot away from me, close enough that I could smell Mia’s laundry detergent on the borrowed flannel and something under it that was just her—warm skin and the ghost of that shampoo I’d memorized weeks ago.
“I don’t need you to protect me,” she said. “I need you to stay.”
I pulled her in. Not carefully, not strategically—just pulled, my arms around her shoulders and her face against my neck and her hands fisting the back of my shirt.
She was shaking. Or I was. Probably both.
I pressed my mouth to her hair and breathed and didn’t say anything because for once in my life I didn’t need words to for me to be enough.
We stood like that for a long time. Long enough for the coffee to sit untouched.
Long enough for the light to shift from afternoon to that golden late-day thing that made the kitchen look like a painting.
Her breathing evened out against my collarbone.
My hands stopped shaking. The compass sat on the counter behind her, gold seams glinting, pointing nowhere in particular.
It didn’t need to point anywhere. We were already here.
“Asher?”
“Yeah.”
“Your eggs are terrible.”
I laughed. Real this time—startled and full, the kind that started somewhere in my stomach and didn’t ask permission.
She tipped her head back and grinned at me.
She was so close I could see the exact moment her eyes went soft, and I kissed her because I could, because she’d driven four hours and knocked on her own door and told me exactly what she needed, and the least I could do was listen.
The house wasn’t quiet anymore.
I didn’t want it to be.