Page 151 of Never Alone
She set the water down. She kept her hands on the counter, palms flat, the way she had kept them folded in her lap on the drive back from Savannah.
"Tell me."
I told her.
I told her all of it. The audit. The flipped attackers. The warrant. The wire.
She listened the way she listened to hard things. Fully. With her hands folded in front of her on the counter and her eyes on mine. I had watched her do it in Miranda's office the first week. I had watched her do it the night the envelope came. It was the way she made the world go small enough to handle one piece at a time.
When I was done, she was quiet for a moment too long.
I watched her process the four things. I watched her go through them one at a time and put each one down in its place. The fourth was the only one she could not nod at as I named it.
Then she said: "Okay."
The word came out even. The kind of even that took work.
"Tessa."
She knew what I was doing with her name. She didn't let me do it.
"Okay. I'll do it."
"You don't have to decide tonight."
"I know I don't." She looked at me. Her eyes were steady. They had been steady for the whole listen, and they were steady now. "I'm deciding tonight."
"Tessa—"
"Cole." She said my name the way Quinn had said it on the porch. The way you say a name when the name is the whole sentence. "I have spent eight months running from a man because the law would not stop him. The law is offering to stop him. I have to take that."
"Okay."
"I'd rather sit across a table from him with a wire on than spend another year of my life waiting for the next thing he does."
"Okay."
She held still for a beat. I watched her gather herself for the next part. It was the small set she did before she said something that cost—the breath held a fraction long, the chin going down half an inch, then up.
"Will you be there?"
"Yes."
I had not waited. There was no version of this where I was not there.
She closed her eyes. Just for a second. When she opened them, she had something else ready.
"Close?"
She asked it the way a child asks a question about the dark.
"As close as they'll let me."
She let out a breath. It came out longer than she had probably meant it to. Her shoulders dropped half an inch and stayed there.
"Okay."
She picked up the water, drank half of it in one long pull, and set the glass back down with a careful little clink, like she didn't trust her hand all the way.
