CHAPTER SIX
Webb called it a support contact, which struck Mia as a clinical way to describe what he was actually offering — another person, apparently, navigating this exact same particular loneliness, someone who might understand the exact shape of loving somebody disappeared into an assignment neither of them could ask real questions about.
"I want to be careful how I say this," Webb told her, the Tuesday after their last call, his voice carrying the same measured neutrality it always did when he was picking his way around the edges of something he wasn't fully authorized to share.
"There's someone else connected to this operation, in a support capacity similar to yours, who's dealing with a version of the same uncertainty.
I can't tell you who, or how they're connected, beyond saying I think the two of you might do each other some good.
Entirely your choice whether you want the introduction. "
"Why now?"
"Because you asked me last week whether it gets easier, and I gave you an honest answer, and the honest answer is that it gets easier when you're not the only person you know who's carrying it.
" A pause, something almost apologetic in it.
"I probably shouldn't be doing this. I'm doing it anyway, because I think both of you could use it more than I need to worry about the technicality. "
She'd agreed, mostly out of the same restless curiosity that had driven her to run Vanessa Cole's name through the database two weeks earlier — not quite hope, not quite dread, something closer to the distinctive hunger for information that came from living too many weeks inside a silence nobody would fully explain to her.
She'd spent the two days before the meeting turning the decision over more than the simplicity of her initial agreement suggested, some part of her wary of the specific vulnerability of meeting a total stranger and handing them, essentially, the rawest parts of her current life.
She'd mentioned it to Sandra in passing, half hoping for permission to back out.
"Go," Sandra had said, not looking up from the file she was reviewing. "You've been carrying this alone for weeks, dressing it up as competent independence. There's a difference between independence and isolation, and you've been drifting toward the wrong one of those lately."
"What if it's awkward? Two strangers, forced together by a federal agent's guilty conscience, trying to have a meaningful conversation over coffee?"
"Then it's awkward, and you leave after twenty minutes, and you've lost nothing except twenty minutes and the price of a coffee.
" Sandra had finally looked up then, something gently insistent in her expression.
"Or it's not awkward, and you gain exactly the kind of support you've been white-knuckling your way through weeks without.
I know which outcome I'd bet on, knowing you. "
Mia had gone, in the end, precisely because Sandra's confidence had outweighed her own doubt, and found herself, walking into the coffee shop that Thursday afternoon, grateful — retroactively, and far — for having pushed past the hesitation.
Webb had set it up carefully, deliberately vague — a coffee shop near the hospital district, a Thursday afternoon, a description general enough that she'd nearly missed him entirely: a man in dark blue scrubs, sandy hair still damp from what she guessed was the tail end of a shift, sitting alone at a corner table with two coffees already ordered, the same small consideration Webb himself had shown her that very first week.
"Daniel," he said, standing as she approached, an easy, slightly tired smile that made him look younger than she suspected he actually was. "I'm guessing you're Mia."
"Guilty." She slid into the chair across from him, studying him with the particular assessing attention three years on a club floor and several months of PI work had trained into her — steady hands despite what she guessed had been a long shift, kind eyes with the exact exhaustion underneath them that came from caring about people professionally and personally at the same time.
"Webb wouldn't tell me much of anything. Said you'd understand why."
"He wouldn't tell me much either. Just that there was somebody else out there living inside the same particular flavor of not-knowing I've been living in for a few weeks now, and that meeting might help more than it hurt.
" Daniel wrapped both hands around his own coffee, and she noticed, the same instinctive cataloguing she'd applied to Kesler's photograph weeks earlier, that he wasn't wearing a ring either — a boyfriend, then, not a husband, someone new enough to this particular grief that he hadn't yet earned the standing that came with a title.
"How long's your person been gone?"
"About five weeks now. You?"
"Coming up on five as well." Mia wrapped her own hands around her cup, grateful, unexpectedly, for the simple physical warmth of it. "Does it get easier for you? Genuinely asking. Everybody keeps telling me it does and I haven't seen much evidence of it yet."
"No," Daniel said, with a directness that struck her as almost a relief after weeks of people softening the truth around her.
"It doesn't get easier. It gets more familiar, which isn't the same thing, though it can feel similar enough on the good days to fool you.
" He turned his cup a slow quarter-turn on the table, an unconscious gesture she recognized immediately, having watched Nash do something almost identical a hundred times.
"I keep thinking I've found the bottom of it, and then some ordinary Tuesday it surprises me all over again — I'll be running a call, doing my job fine, and something small will remind me she's not answering her phone, and it just knocks the wind out of me for a minute like it's the first week all over again. "
"She," Mia repeated, filing the pronoun away without meaning to, an old reflex from a hundred background checks that had taught her small details mattered more than people expected them to.
"Yeah. My girlfriend. Eight months now." Something crossed his face, brief and careful, the distinctive expression of a man deciding, in real time, how much of the truth he was allowed to hand over.
"I don't know much about what she actually does day to day — government work, is about the extent of what I've ever been told, and I've learned better than to push past that.
But she disappears for stretches, same as your person, no explanation available on the other end, and I spend those stretches doing exactly what you're apparently doing.
Waiting. Trying not to spiral. Failing at that more than I'd like to admit. "
Mia felt something settle into place at the edges of her attention, not quite a full picture yet, just the vague unsettled sense of two puzzle pieces sitting close enough together that a shape was starting to suggest itself without fully resolving.
She didn't push it. Some instinct — the same one that had kept her from confronting Nash about the photograph before he left — told her this wasn't the moment to force an answer she wasn't certain she actually wanted yet.
"What's she like?" she asked instead. "Your girlfriend."
Daniel's whole face changed at the question, something warm and unguarded moving through it that Mia recognized immediately, having seen the same particular softness cross Nash's features more times than she could count.
"Sharp. Funnier than she gives herself credit for — dry, sort of sideways humor that sneaks up on you.
Steadier than almost anyone I've ever met, which is strange to say about someone who does whatever it is she actually does for a living, given how much of it clearly isn't steady at all.
She's got this way of making a room feel less complicated just by walking into it.
" He laughed, a little self-conscious. "Sorry. You didn't ask for the whole speech."
"No, I like it." Mia found herself smiling, honestly, for the first time in what felt like days. "It's nice, actually. Hearing somebody else talk about their person like that. Makes the whole thing feel less like I'm the only one out here being ridiculous about it."
"You're not being ridiculous. For what it's worth, from a stranger who's known you all of fifteen minutes — I think the fact that it costs you this much says something good about what you've built with whoever you've built it with.
People who don't actually care don't spend their Thursdays meeting strangers just to feel a little less alone in the waiting. "
They talked another hour, easier as it went, trading small ordinary details the way new friends did — her classes, his job, a shared complaint about hospital coffee that somehow led to twenty minutes on the general inadequacy of most coffee shops within walking distance of downtown.
It was, Mia realized somewhere in the middle of it, the first entirely comfortable hour she'd spent with anyone since Nash left, the specific ease of talking to someone who knew the shape of her worry without needing it explained to him first.
"Can I ask you something," Mia said, as the conversation's easier rhythm settled into something more contemplative.
"How do you manage the fear at work? Running calls, dealing with real emergencies, while also carrying whatever you're carrying about her.
I keep wondering how anyone does both at once without one of them suffering. "
Daniel considered the question seriously, turning his cup slowly on the table.
"I compartmentalize while I'm actually on a call — have to, or I'd be no good to the patient in front of me.
But it costs something, doing that repeatedly.
I've started noticing I come home some nights and just sit in my car outside my apartment for twenty minutes before I can make myself go inside, not ready yet to let the compartment door open and feel all of it at once. "
"I do something similar, I think, though mine looks different.
I bury myself in Sandra's cases. Financial records, property searches — anything that needs my full attention, because the alternative is sitting with my own thoughts, and my own thoughts have gotten much less pleasant company since Nash left. "
"That sounds exhausting. Running from your own head that consistently."
"It is." Mia wrapped both hands around her cooling coffee, something loosening in her chest at the exact relief of naming it out loud to someone who wouldn't try to fix it, just understand it.
"I think that's actually why this—" she gestured between them, "—helps.
I don't have to run from it here. You already understand the shape of it, so I don't have to explain or defend it.
I can just be exhausted, out loud, and you get it. "
"I get it completely." Something warm moved across Daniel's face, the distinctive recognition of someone finding an unexpected ally in unfamiliar territory.
"I think I needed this as much as you clearly did.
Maybe more, if I'm honest. I don't have anyone else in my life who understands this particular flavor of waiting.
My friends mean well, but they don't have a framework for it. You actually do."
"Then I'm glad Webb decided to break protocol a little, setting this up.
" Mia found herself smiling, something genuine and unguarded that had been in shorter supply these last weeks than she'd fully realized until this exact moment.
"I think we're going to need each other, whatever the coming weeks or months ask of either of us. "
"I think you're right," Daniel agreed, and the easy warmth of the conversation carried them through another twenty minutes before either of them finally, reluctantly, admitted the afternoon had to end.
"Same time next week?" Daniel asked, as they gathered their things to go, his tone careful, giving her room to say no if she wanted it.
"I'd like that," Mia said, and meant it.
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She thought about the conversation the whole drive home, turning it over the way she turned over most things that didn't quite sit flat yet, some part of her already assembling details she hadn't consciously decided to collect.
A girlfriend. Government work. Disappears for stretches, no explanation.
Sharp, funny, steadier than anyone he'd ever met.
She thought about Vanessa Cole's LinkedIn photo, the easy confident posture in it, the exact kind of steadiness that read, even in a still image, as someone who'd need a person like Daniel — someone gentle, someone patient, someone who could hold a version of not-knowing that would break plenty of other people.
She didn't say anything to Daniel about it.
Not yet. Some careful instinct told her the timing mattered here too, the same way it had mattered with the photograph, that a suspicion voiced too early could do more damage than the not-knowing itself, especially to a friendship this new, this fragile, built on exactly the kind of trust that came from two strangers agreeing not to push each other past where either of them was ready to go.
But she filed it away, the same careful cataloguing instinct she'd built over months of skip traces and background checks, and found herself, driving home through Port Callahan's early evening traffic, unable to shake the growing certainty that the universe had just handed her, sideways and unasked-for, the exact mirror the last five weeks had apparently decided she needed.
She let herself into the apartment a while later, the evening settling into its familiar quiet, and found, brushing her teeth before bed, that some of the day's heaviness had truly lifted — not gone, not fully, but lighter than it had been that morning, carried now by someone who recognized the shape of it without needing the details explained twice.
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