Page 72 of You Can Run

She wanted to stay in it. She wanted to pull the sheet up and stay in the warm borrowed quiet of the room and not let the day start yet. She knew better than to think she could, but she wanted it anyway. Some version of ordinary that she'd been constructing in the back of her mind for years without letting herself call it what it was.

She got up. Found her t-shirt on the floor and pulled it on. Then she moved down the hallway, one hand trailing the wall, and stepped into the living room.

Dante was standing at the glass wall, facing out. His back was to her. He was dressed—jeans, his jacket, boots. Fully dressed, she noticed. Not the clothes of a man who'd been up for ten minutes getting coffee.

She followed his eyeline through the glass.

The deck ran the full width of the house, and beyond it the beach, and the Gulf burning in the early light. A woman was coming up the deck stairs from the sand. She moved without hurry, one hand light on the railing, her dark hair pulled back into a tight braid, her face turned slightly away.

Jessica didn't recognize her, but in that moment, she knew exactly who she was. It was the woman who had been hunting them. It had to be. Her mouth went dry.

“Dante.” His name came out of her barely above a whisper.

He turned. His face did something she didn't have a word for. It wasn't guilt, not quite, but something in the neighborhood of it.

“It’s okay,” he said.

He said it gently. That was the thing she would keep coming back to, later, when she had the distance to examine it: the gentleness of it, the way it sounded like something he'd been preparing.

He turned back to the glass.

The woman had reached the top of the deck stairs. She was smaller than Jessica expected. She stopped there, one hand still on the rail, and looked through the glass at both of them. Her expression was neutral in the way of a woman who had decided, some time ago, to keep her face as a private thing. Her eyes moved to Jessica briefly, then back to Dante.

Dante walked to the door.

Jessica watched him cross the room. Watched his hand find the handle. Watched him open it—not cautiously, not with his body angled for cover. He opened it the way you open a door for someone you're expecting.

The woman stepped inside.

Then the three of them stood in the living room and the morning light fell across all of them equally and nobody said anything for a moment.

The woman looked at Dante, and something passed between them.

Jessica felt the floor tilt.

She looked at Dante. He was already looking at her, and his face had the expression she didn't have a word for, andshe understood suddenly that whatever was happening had not started this morning.

Dante looked at her steadily. Beside him, the woman stood at the edge of the room and said nothing, which somehow made her more present rather than less.

“You reached out to her,” Jessica said. “You contacted her.”

The woman spoke first. “No. It was me who contacted him. Made him an offer he…” she drew out the word, “couldn’t refuse. His life for yours.”

Jessica ignored her. Her focus was laser-sharp on Dante and Dante alone. “When?”

“At the warehouse,” Dante said.

Jessica heard the words but had to spend a moment assembling them into a shape she could understand. Since the warehouse. While she'd been lying on the canvas sails listening to Trent on the floor below. While she'd asked him about Borya and felt his arm tighten around her. While she'd been choosing to trust him and walking into the dunes at his side.

The Gulf light was very bright. She was aware of herself standing in the middle of the room in just a shirt, her hair loose, no shoes, and she felt the specific vulnerability of that—how unprepared she was for this exact moment, in every possible sense.

“I don’t understand.”

When he spoke, his voice was soft. “I've been running the options. There's no version of this where we both walk away from it. Borya doesn't stop, you know that. You've known it longer than I have. If he wants me, he can have me. As long as he leaves you out of it. For good this time.”

“No,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. “No. We’ll find another way. There's another way out of this, Dante, there's always –”

“There isn't.”