CHAPTER TWELVE
By the fourth day, Nash understood what Dr. Alvarez had meant about the guilt doing more damage than the substance itself, because the guilt had arrived first and hit harder than the physical pull currently building beneath his skin — a low, insistent hum that hadn't faded the way he'd hoped it might, hadn't stayed contained to that single terrible night the way some small stubborn part of him had prayed it would.
They'd moved back into the city two days after the safehouse, Fuentes deciding the operation couldn't afford a longer absence without risking Voss's suspicion, and Nash had spent every hour since fighting a private battle he had no framework for fighting, no experience to draw on beyond what he'd watched, distantly, secondhand, in his own father years ago — a battle he'd promised himself, as a fourteen-year-old boy learning to drive stick in an empty lot behind a feed store, he would never actually have to fight himself.
He'd tried, that first morning back, to fold himself back into Trent Marsh's easy competence, showing up for a scheduled check-in call with a contact from the freight company as though nothing had changed, and found the performance far harder to sustain than it had been even a week earlier — his hands shaking faintly on the phone, his voice carrying a flatness he had to consciously work to soften into Trent's usual warmth.
He'd hung up afterward and sat a long moment in the apartment's small kitchen, staring at nothing, understanding with a fresh, cold clarity exactly how much the marina had taken from him beyond the physical craving itself — some baseline steadiness he'd always been able to count on, gone now, replaced by an effort that cost him much more than it used to.
"You're not eating," Vanessa said, watching him push food around a plate neither of them had much interest in, the apartment's small kitchen table between them heavy with a silence that had become their new normal these last few days.
"Neither are you."
"I asked first."
Nash set his fork down, some of the careful composure he'd been maintaining since the safehouse finally cracking under the weight of four days without real sleep.
"I keep thinking about calling Fuentes. Telling her I can't do this anymore, that whatever the operation needs from us isn't worth what it's already cost, what it's clearly going to keep costing the longer this runs. "
"And I keep thinking the exact same thing, about six times a day, and then I think about the kids in that first briefing, and I talk myself back into another day.
" Vanessa's own composure looked thin, stretched, dark circles under her eyes that hadn't been there a week ago.
"I don't know if that makes us brave or just stubborn past the point of good sense. "
"Maybe both."
"Maybe both," she agreed, something almost like a real laugh escaping her, tired and worn but genuine.
They sat with the silence a while longer, and Nash found himself, not for the first time these last few days, grateful in a way he hadn't expected to be for her presence — not romantic, nothing close to it, but the distinctive solidarity of two people fighting the same private war and refusing, day after day, to let the other fight it entirely alone.
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The craving hit hardest that night, somewhere around two in the morning, a physical wrongness so acute it pulled him fully out of a thin, restless sleep and left him sitting upright on the edge of the bed, hands shaking, every nerve in his body screaming for something he knew, with a clarity that terrified him, he could not let himself have.
He found Vanessa awake in the living room when he stumbled out there, unable to stay alone with the wanting a moment longer, and recognized immediately, from the distinctive white-knuckled stillness of her posture on the couch, that she was fighting the exact same battle in the exact same hour.
"I called Dr. Alvarez," she said, not looking up, phone still gripped tight in one hand.
"She's talking me through it. Breathing exercises.
Grounding techniques. It's not — it doesn't make it stop, exactly.
It gives you something to do with your hands and your attention besides just drowning in it. "
"Does it help?"
"A little. Enough, maybe, some nights." She looked up at him then, something raw and unguarded in her face that he suspected she wouldn't have let him see in daylight. "Sit with me? I don't think either of us should be doing this alone tonight."
He sat. They breathed through it together, following Dr. Alvarez's instructions relayed secondhand through Vanessa's careful repetition — four counts in, hold, six counts out, again, again, the physical wanting gradually loosening its grip by degrees rather than all at once, the way Dr. Alvarez had warned them it would.
"Tell me something true," Vanessa said, somewhere in the middle of it, echoing the request he'd made of her weeks ago on that dark highway drive. "Anything. I need my brain doing something besides fighting this."
Nash thought a moment, breathing through another slow count, searching for something true enough to hold both their attention through the worst of the wanting.
"I used to think love meant never scaring the people who loved you.
Never being the reason somebody else lay awake at night wondering if you were coming home.
" He kept his eyes on the middle distance, the confession coming easier in the dark, easier without her full attention fixed directly on him.
"I think I understand now that's not actually possible, not in the life I chose.
All I can control is what I do with the fear once it's already there — hers, mine, everyone's.
Whether I let it make me smaller, or whether I use it as a reason to fight harder for my way back to her. "
"That's a good thing to hold onto," Vanessa said quietly. "I might borrow it, if you don't mind. He deserves the same fight from me, whatever this ends up costing either of us before it's done."
They sat together the rest of the night, trading small true things back and forth in the dark, the wanting gradually loosening enough by dawn that both of them, exhausted and hollowed out but still upright, still present, still fighting, understood they'd survived one more night that had really threatened, for a while there, not to be survivable at all.
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Fuentes called at nine that morning with news that landed, after the night they'd just had, like something almost too good to trust.
"The hearing moved up," she said, without preamble.
"Judge granted an expedited timeline given the scope of what we're alleging.
Seven days now, not eleven. If the records come through the way we expect them to, we could have enough to move on the network's upper tier noticeably sooner than any of us planned for. "
"Seven days," Nash repeated, something in his chest loosening slightly for the first time in nearly a week.
"Seven days, assuming nothing else shifts between now and then.
I need you both to hold the cover a little longer, stay sharp, stay careful — but I wanted you to have the timeline as soon as I had it, given everything else currently sitting on both your shoulders.
" A pause, something almost gentle creeping into Fuentes's usually clipped delivery.
"How are you both holding up? Genuinely asking, not just for the file. "
Nash looked over at Vanessa, both of them hollow-eyed and exhausted from a night neither of them would have survived quite so intact alone, and found, despite everything, something steady enough in himself to answer honestly.
"We're holding," he said. "Barely, some hours. But we're holding."
"Seven more days," Fuentes said. "Then we reassess everything, whatever the hearing gives us. I promise you both that much."
Nash hung up and sat a long moment with the number, turning it over the way he'd turned over every other number these last weeks — days since he'd left Port Callahan, days since the marina, days now standing between this exhausted morning and whatever came after seven more days of holding a cover that was costing both of them significantly more than either had knew, going in, it might.
Seven days. He could survive seven days.
He had to believe that, this morning, because the alternative — not believing it, not finding some way to hold onto it — wasn't a door he could afford to open, not now, not with Vanessa watching him from across the kitchen with the same fragile, stubborn hope in her own exhausted eyes.
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They spent that day trying to rest, an effort that mostly failed, both of them too wired from the previous night's craving and the morning's news to settle into anything resembling normal sleep.
Nash found himself, sometime in the early afternoon, standing at the apartment's small window watching the street below, and turned when Vanessa joined him, both of them quiet for a while, watching an ordinary Port Callahan afternoon continue its business entirely indifferent to the seven-day countdown now governing both their lives.
"I keep thinking about what happens after," Vanessa said eventually. "If we make it seven days. If the hearing goes the way Fuentes is hoping. What does after even look like, for either of us?"
"I don't know," Nash admitted. "I haven't let myself think much past the next contact window, most days. Thinking further than that feels like tempting something I'd rather not tempt."
"I think about Daniel. What it looks like, coming home to him after this — whether he even wants that version of me, once I have to explain what these weeks actually cost." She wrapped her arms around herself, a small defensive gesture he'd started to recognize as her version of bracing for a blow that hadn't landed yet.
"I think about whether I even know how to be that version of myself again.
Ordinary. Not managing a cover, not counting days, not fighting something invisible under my own skin every single hour. "
"I think you find your way back to it," Nash said, though he heard the uncertainty in his own voice even as he offered the reassurance.
"Slower than either of us wants, probably.
But I think the ordinary version of us is still in there, underneath everything the last weeks have piled on top of it.
I have to believe that, some days, or I don't think I could keep doing this. "
"That's fair." Vanessa was quiet a moment, something working itself out behind her eyes. "I think I believe it too, most hours. It's just harder to hold onto than I expected, this deep into it."
They stood together at the window a while longer, two people counting down toward a deadline neither of them fully trusted yet, both of them holding onto the fragile, stubborn hope that seven days might actually be enough to see them through to whatever ordinary version of themselves still waited on the other side of this assignment.
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