Chapter 29 #2
Vince Kelly couldn't tell her anything more. That chapter was done. The rest of it she could do from anywhere. She was a lawyer with a laptop and a paper trail, and she knew how to find things. She didn't need to be in New York to do it. She didn't need to be anywhere near Archer Gray to do it.
She walked into the living room and froze.
Josh was coming across the room from the direction of the balcony doors. She registered it without fully processing it, the way the mind sometimes notices things before it understands what it's noticing.
"Josh." Her voice came out steady. Good. "How did you get in?"
He offered her a small, sad smile. "The door was open."
"The door was not open."
"It was," he said simply. "I knocked, and it swung in. You really should be more careful."
She looked at the door. It was closed now. She was certain she'd locked it behind her. She was almost certain.
She looked back at Josh.
He was dressed far more casually than normal. Dark jeans, a dark sweater, his hair neat and dry, and combed. He looked like he was on his way out to meet friends for the night. Like he'd been nowhere more strenuous than a taxi and the elevator.
But his sweater was wet.
Not damp, but solidly wet as if he’d been outside in the rain for quite a while. Even his jeans were wet. Why was his hair dry?
Contemplating how weird that was, she stood very still.
He hadn't come through the door. She'd locked that door. She knew she'd locked it because she'd stood here for a moment before she put the key in, steeling herself, and she had been deliberate about everything she did this morning. She had locked it.
Her mind moved slowly, reluctantly, the way it did when it was working toward something it didn't want to arrive at.
The balcony.
Twenty floors up.
The scuff marks on the railing that Josh had touched. That Josh had pressed both palms flat against, obliterating whatever had been left there. The evidence that Rush had needed and never gotten because Josh had destroyed it.
Josh, who knew parkour, a physical discipline for navigating obstacles.
Josh, whose ex-boyfriend Rafe from Brooklyn was also into parkour and all things outdoors.
The man whose photo had been on a restaurant wall in that neighborhood, smiling with a man Sam had described so casually, so normally, like it was nothing.
The back of her neck prickled.
She looked at Josh and thought about the night her apartment was destroyed.
The thumping in the walls while she sat in her secret room, barely breathing, texting Ryker with shaking hands.
Someone had come down from the roof. Rush had confirmed it.
Twenty floors. Someone who knew how to do it cleanly and quietly and who knew how to get into a building without being seen.
Someone who had visited this apartment. A man who knew the layout. He’d know about the balcony and the roof access, and the times Tatum was likely to be out. She thought about how Josh always seemed to know where she was.
His eyes traveled to the bags she still held, and his expression shifted into something curious and slightly too interested. "Going somewhere?"
She became aware, in a way she hadn't been thirty seconds ago, of how alone she was. She tried to keep her breathing even and keep her expression neutral.
There had been no one in the lobby or hallway when she arrived.
No one who knew she was here. Archer didn't know because she hadn't told him.
She had specifically, deliberately not told him, and now she was standing in her living room with two bags in her hands and Josh between her and the front door, his sweater damp and his hair dry and his expression perfectly pleasant in that way that had always made her skin crawl without her ever fully understanding why.
She understood now.
"I need more things at the Society," she heard herself say. Her voice was level. She was grateful for that because her mouth had gone dry. "I've decided to take the Anderson case. I'll be there for a while."
Something moved across his face. Something quick and satisfied and gone almost before she saw it. "Your mother will be so pleased."
"I'm sure she will," Tatum said. "I was just leaving."
"Of course." He came across the room, and before she could step back, he reached over and took one of the bags from her hand. When his fingers brushed hers, it took everything she had not to flinch. "Let me help you. I'm heading toward the office anyway."
She wanted to say no. She wanted to step back and put the width of the room between them and call Archer and tell him everything her mind was assembling right now in pieces that were clicking into place one by one with the horrible inevitability of something she should have seen much sooner.
But he had her bag. And he was between her and the door. And he was watching her with those soft brown eyes that had always looked so harmless, so pleasant, so entirely unthreatening.
She had been so stupid.
"Thank you," she said. The words came out normally. She didn't know how.
She held the door open, and he went through first. She followed, pulling it shut behind her. She checked the lock. Checked it again. Felt his gaze on the back of her neck while she did it.
In the elevator, she stood as far from him as the small space allowed and kept her eyes on the doors, her phone in her hand, and her thumb hovering over Archer's name, telling herself to wait. To think. To not do anything that would tell Josh what she knew before she was somewhere safe.
The doors opened.
They walked out into the lobby.
They walked out through the front doors into the rain.
And Tatum smiled at Josh and talked about the Anderson case and said something about the weather, and all the while her mind was screaming, rapid and continuous and entirely internal, the name she hadn't let herself think until right now.
It was Josh.
It had always been Josh.
And he was carrying her bag.