CHAPTER FOUR
Mia waited two days before she let herself do anything with the name.
She told herself it was patience. Mostly it was fear — the distinctive kind that came from understanding that some questions, once asked out loud, couldn't be unasked, and that she had exactly one photograph and one overheard name and absolutely no proof that either of them meant what the tightness in her chest kept insisting they meant.
Sandra had taught her that much, these last months.
Don't build a case on a feeling. Build it on what you can actually verify, and only then decide what the feeling was trying to tell you.
So on Thursday, between a morning class on evidence procedure and an afternoon shift at the office, she did the only thing that felt like actual verification instead of just anxious spinning: she ran the name.
It wasn't hard. Sandra's firm had database access most private citizens didn't, and Mia had learned, over months of skip traces and background checks, exactly how to search a name carefully enough to find what was public without crossing into anything that would raise flags on a federal agent's file — because that was the other thing she recognized clearly now, sitting at her desk with the search bar blinking back at her.
If this Vanessa Cole really was federal, digging too deep into her professional life wasn't just invasive.
It was the kind of mistake that could compromise an active operation, which meant, whatever else this was, it could not become about Mia satisfying her own jealousy at the expense of Nash's safety.
She kept the search narrow. Public records only.
A LinkedIn profile, old and sparsely updated, listing a vague "federal law enforcement" employer and a graduation year from a criminal justice program at a university two states over.
A handful of old photographs from what looked like a college reunion four or five years back — group shots, nothing that told her much of anything, except that in one of them, tucked at the edge of a larger group, was unmistakably the same woman from the photograph in her closet.
Dark hair. That same easy laugh. Older now than in Nash's photo, the years visible in small ways — a slightly sharper jaw, an ease in her posture that read like someone far more confident than the young woman laughing at Nash in a backyard years ago.
Mia sat with the photo open on her screen for a long time, feeling something in her chest settle into a shape she didn't especially like — not jealousy exactly, or not only that.
Something closer to grief for a version of the last three weeks she'd been telling herself she was handling fine, and clearly hadn't been, not entirely, if a single confirmed photograph could undo that much careful composure in under a minute.
She closed the laptop before Sandra came back from her lunch meeting, before anyone could see her face and ask the question she wasn't ready to answer out loud yet.
? ? ?
She stepped out onto the office's small back stoop on her lunch break, phone in hand, and called Ruiz before she'd fully decided to, some instinct telling her she needed a second, steadier perspective before the fear could fully take root.
"I found her," she said, without preamble, once he'd picked up. "Vanessa Cole. There's a photograph, confirmed now, not just a name in an old shoebox anymore."
"Okay," Ruiz said carefully, and Mia could hear him shifting into the exact measured tone he used when he sensed she was standing on the edge of something. "How are you doing with that?"
"I don't know yet. I keep waiting to feel something simple — angry, or jealous, or relieved, something I could actually name — and instead it's just this tangle I can't sort out.
" She leaned against the brick wall, the autumn air cool against her face.
"She's pretty, Ruiz. Confident, from what I can see in the photo.
The kind of woman who probably doesn't second-guess herself the way I still catch myself doing sometimes. "
"You're allowed to feel whatever you're feeling.
I'm not going to tell you the fear's unreasonable, because I don't actually know that it is.
" Ruiz's honesty landed easier than false comfort would have, the specific gift of a friend who'd never once managed her feelings for her.
"What I will tell you is that Nash chose you.
Chooses you, present tense, every single day he's out there fighting to come home.
Whatever this Vanessa Cole looks like in an old photograph doesn't change the plain fact of that. "
"I know that. Rationally, I know that completely." Mia exhaled, something loosening slightly in her chest. "It's just harder to feel it some days than others, especially days like today."
"That's allowed too." A pause, and when Ruiz continued, his voice had gentled further. "You want me to come by after work? I could bring food, sit with you a while. Sometimes the tangle's easier to sort out with somebody else in the room."
"I'd like that," Mia admitted. "Thank you, Ruiz. For always somehow knowing exactly when I need this."
"That's what I'm here for," he said, and hung up a moment later, leaving Mia standing on the back stoop with something steadier settling into her chest than she'd carried out here twenty minutes earlier — not resolution, not yet, but the exact comfort of not having to carry the tangle entirely alone.
She called her mother that evening, an impulse she didn't fully examine until she was already three minutes into the conversation, the phone warm against her ear while she stood at the kitchen counter not eating the dinner she'd made and then lost all interest in.
"You sound tired, baby," her mother said, the familiar opening that used to mean careful distance and now, these last several months, usually meant something closer to actual concern.
"It's been a strange week."
"Strange how?"
Mia hesitated, turning the wine glass she wasn't drinking from in a slow circle on the counter. A year ago she would have deflected, the old reflex too deeply worn to fight. Tonight, for reasons she didn't entirely understand, she found herself wanting to try the harder thing instead.
"Nash is away for work. Has been for a few weeks now. It's — it's the kind of assignment where I don't get to talk to him, mostly. Just updates from someone else, every so often, telling me he's alive."
Her mother was quiet a moment, and Mia braced herself for the old careful non-question, the kind that used to define most of their conversations. It didn't come.
"That sounds unbearably hard," her mother said instead. "I'm sorry, baby. Is there anything I can do?"
"I don't think so. I think I just needed to say it out loud to somebody who isn't already carrying their own version of the same worry.
" Mia pressed her palm flat against the counter, grounding herself in the solid coolness of it.
"There's something else too. I found out — I think I found out — there's a woman working with him.
On the assignment. Somebody from before me. "
"Do you trust him?"
The question landed simpler than Mia expected, cutting cleanly through everything she'd been circling for two days without quite naming. "Completely," she said, and found, saying it out loud, that she meant it entirely.
"Then trust him," her mother said. "Not the situation — situations don't deserve your trust, and this one sounds like it doesn't even deserve your understanding, not fully, not from the outside.
But the man. If you trust him, let that be the thing you hold onto, even on the nights the not-knowing gets loud. "
Mia closed her eyes, something in her chest loosening slightly for the first time in two days. "When did you get so wise about this kind of thing?"
"I've had a great deal of practice lately," her mother said, something rueful and warm in her voice at once, "learning how to trust people I love through the parts of their lives I can't fully see into.
Turns out it's a skill, same as any other.
You just have to keep choosing it, over and over, until it starts to feel less like a leap and more like a habit. "
They talked a while longer, easier now, the conversation drifting toward ordinary things — Mia's classes, her mother's garden, a cousin's wedding neither of them had firm plans for yet — and when Mia finally hung up, the kitchen felt marginally less heavy than it had an hour before, though the weight hadn't disappeared so much as become something she felt slightly more equipped to carry.
? ? ?
Webb's next update came two days later, a phone call instead of the usual brief text, which told her something before he said a single word.
"He's fine," Webb said immediately, hearing, she guessed, the particular stillness that must have carried in her voice the moment she picked up.
"I want to lead with that, because I know exactly what a call instead of a text does to a person's stomach in the first three seconds.
He's fine. The assignment's proceeding. I just have slightly more to tell you than usual today, and some of it felt like it deserved a voice instead of a screen. "
"Okay." She sat down at the kitchen table, bracing without entirely meaning to.
"The operation's entered a phase where his cover requires a partner presence at certain meetings going forward.
It's a common tactic in networks like this one — they want to see the people an operative has something to lose over, as a kind of built-in leverage.
" Webb's voice stayed level, careful, the same trained neutrality she'd come to recognize from their very first conversation.
"That partner role is being filled by another agent on the task force.
Someone experienced, someone Nash actually already knew slightly before this assignment began, which the task force felt was an asset rather than a liability, given how much harder it is to build a convincing cover from nothing. "