Chapter 15 #3
But I’ve spent too long learning that “family” is bigger than I was raised to believe.
It means a girl in a leather dress driving a knife into a conference table so nobody can vote on her sister.
It means a woman in a yellow dress laying out muffins on my desk because somebody mentioned I wasn’t eating.
A dear friend who saved my life and makes my vengeance her personal vendetta.
Somewhere in there I stopped requiring family to arrive in the shape I’d been promised.
“No,” I respond. “It doesn’t. But if you want to be with me, make your peace with cats. I’ve always planned on getting one.”
She turns in my arms, her long hair smacking me in the face. “A cat?”
“Yep.” I can feel the smirk coming and I let it. “A real prissy one. Like that fluffy thing on the Friskies cans.”
“You’re so confusing.” She looks up at me, genuinely baffled, which has become my favorite thing to do to her. “A Navy SEAL who watches Frozen in his free time and wants a fluffy cat. Can you even shoot a gun?”
“Squirt gun? Absolutely.” I wink at her. “And I would ruin you with a Nerf Blaster.”
Ding. My computer chimes.
I flinch. It’s small and it’s fast and I’d have sworn nobody alive could catch it.
But Sylvie catches it.
“What was that?” She’s watching my face now with an attention I don’t enjoy. “You’re on edge.”
“It’s just an email.” I release her and sit down, putting the monitor between us, and click nothing. “I’ve been waiting on a response from someone. It wouldn’t even come through here though. I’m just…don’t worry… It’s nothing.”
It could never come through here. It’s on the old laptop, sitting on my coffee table across town, with a manuscript inside a folder I haven’t opened because I don’t want to be reminded.
I don’t want to invite the ghosts to interrupt my peace.
I don’t want to hear anyone else’s interpretation of coward.
I tried to opened the file twice. Both times I got as far as the dedication, the small careful English, the letters of it swimming, and both times I shut the laptop like the lid was hot.
“What are you waiting on?”
“Nothing, per se.” I rub my eyes. “It’s just that I had a dear friend from the past send me something.
A book he’s writing. About a mission that went bad.
” My explanation comes through loose threads that I don’t intend to sew together.
“I need to read it. I want to. But even after all this time, with the FBI and PALADIN and all of it, it’s hard to go back to that chapter.
I really let my brothers down, and it’s just—”
“Tender?”
Her eyes have gone that color. Swamp green, clouded, the shade they turn when she’s stepped off her own path and doesn’t want me tracking where she went. I know precisely what it means. She’s hiding something.
But I have decided, over the past few weeks, that I would rather be happy than start an argument with her.
“Yeah,” I agree. “Tender.”
Sylvie sighs. She comes around the desk and crouches beside my chair and puts a hand flat against my cheek. She looks up at me with a softness I’ve never once seen her extend toward another living thing.
“If it’s hard, then don’t read it.” Her thumb moves along my cheekbone.
“Tell your friend you did and it’s spectacular.
Makes them feel good. You did your duty.
How about that? No need to hurt yourself to help a friend.
” She holds my eyes. “Don’t go back. Callen…
I… I’m not in the past. I’m in your future. ”
I nod slowly.
It might be the worst advice I have ever taken from anyone. It’s also the first time in ten years that a living soul has offered me permission to set the weight down, and I want it so badly my throat aches.
Bang! My door flies open, ripping the locked latch right off the door.
Admittedly, it was a flimsy bolt, anchored in dry-rotting trim, but also, Vesper might be two seconds away from turning green and busting through a wall.
Mouse putters by, the click click click of his paws are audible as he passes the door, but he doesn’t stop. He has no interest in saving me.
She’s standing in my doorway with a folder under her arm and her eyes going straight to the hand Sylvie still has against my face.
We come apart fast. Too fast. Guilty fast.
Vesper says nothing at first. Her gaze travels from me to Sylvie and back, unhurried, taking inventory, and I have the sensation of being weighed on a scale I can’t see.
“My fault. I’ll have Eden order a new lock.”
“No worries.” I clear my throat. “Hey, any word about that favor?” I ask just to change the subject from the obvious.
She glances at Sylvie. “Yes. You want me to tell you now?”
“Secrets are safe with Sylvie.”
Vesper’s eyes narrow to slits. For a moment I’m certain she’ll refuse outright, and I brace for it. Some part of me is already ashamed of what I just said and precisely why I said it.
She proceeds anyway.
“The pilot originally assigned to that mission was replaced the day before orders were executed.” She sets the folder on my desk and doesn’t open it.
“A last-minute swap. By my read, that’s a suicide mission.
Somebody switched out a man who would have asked questions.
I’m hunting down the original pilot to find out what he was told. ”
I nod. Everything in my chest has gone quiet and cold and very clear.
“Okay. Yes. That tracks. Definitely intentional.” I look at the folder. “Nothing in this world is a coincidence, Vesper.”
“Agreed.”
And there it is. Quick as a splinter going in.
Nothing in this world is a coincidence. A woman appears in a bar the same month my ex-wife dumps me again.
A woman with no past that can be checked, who turned up at my family’s wedding and magically finds her long-lost sister.
A woman who is standing beside my desk right now with her hands behind her back like she’s hiding something.
I take the thought and I put it in a drawer and I close the drawer.
It’s too new. Too fragile. I am happy for the first time in as long as I can remember. So, no, I will not dig at it. I have never in my life been so aware of choosing stupidity and so willing to choose it anyway.
“Callen,” Vesper says. “I’m glad you’re back to your old self.”
“Well. Thank you.” My voice comes out nearly normal, but mostly forced. “Did you need anything else?”
She looks at Sylvie.
“Actually, yes. I was hoping to have a word with Sylvie.” She pauses, a small beat. “Privately, I mean.”
Sylvie’s eyes cut to mine, and for one unguarded second there’s something in them I’ve never seen on her. Not fear. Sylvie doesn’t do fear. Something younger and more breakable than that. Pleading.
I nod her along. “Boss spoke.”
“Are you my boss now?” Sylvie asks Vesper.
“We’ll see,” she clips back. “Come on.”
They go. Two sets of footsteps recede down the corridor, one brisk, one reluctant, and I sit in the wreckage of my paperwork with my heart still going fast. As soon as I can take a deep breath and relax, Vesper’s head reappears around the doorframe.
“It smells like sex in here, Callen.”
She shuts the door.
I sit a long while, in a room with no windows, thirty feet under the ground, alone with the knowledge that I’ve been caught.
I smile.
Because I don’t care about it even slightly as much as I should.