Page 25 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Do you?” He crossed his arms. The gesture was so familiar it almost made me want to smile. I didn’t let myself because it would piss him off, and he was mad enough as it was.

“You could have found a reason to turn this case down. Devon would have sent someone else.”

“Devon sent me.”

“Devon sent you because you said yes. Don’t hide behind that.” He studied me with the exhaustion of a man who had known me since high school and had very few illusions left. “You have no business being anywhere near this island. Not with the people who are still out there.”

“I’m well aware of the risks.”

“Are you?” His voice didn’t rise. It never did, which was somehow worse. “Because you signed documentation, Layla. You agreed. And yet here you are, in the same county, working a case that is directly connected to the operation that—” He stopped himself. Took a breath. “I can smooth this over if you come back with me now. You’ve technically already broken the agreement by being here, but if you leave today, I can make the argument that you didn’t know what the case was going to involve until you arrived. It’s thin, but it’ll hold. Probably.”

I looked at him for a long moment. Koa had planted himself at my left side. He’d met Bruce McCormick before, but he watched the man with the calm, evaluative attention he gave to everyone until he decided they were safe.

“I can’t leave,” I said.

“Layla.”

“I thought just coming here would be enough. I thought I’d get off the ferry and walk around the village and feel whatever I needed to feel, and then I could go home and be done with it.” I kept my voice level. “That’s not what happened.”

“What happened is that you came back to a place where you are actively at risk and inserted yourself into an investigation that is directly connected to the people who⁠—”

“I know who they are.” At least insofar as the threat to me was concerned.

“Then you know what they’re capable of.”

“I know better than almost anyone what they’re capable of.” The words came out harder than I’d intended. I made myself soften them. “That’s exactly why I can’t leave. Something changed. There are new avenues that weren’t there before, new people looking with resources and connections I don’t have on my own. This is the closest anyone has gotten in years. I can’t walk away from that.”

He stared at me. For a long moment the only sound was the wind off the water hissing against the cottage windows and Koa’s steady breathing.

“If you stay,” he said finally, “you’re ending the agreement. The protection goes with it. No backup. No resources. No cavalry if it goes sideways.” He held my gaze steadily. “I need you to hear me when I say that. The moment you make this choice, I cannot help you. Not because I don’t want to. Because my hands will be tied.”

“I understand that.”

“Do you really?” Bruce looked at me the way he had when I was young and terrified and had no idea who I was going to be on the other side of all of it. “Because I’m asking you—I’m begging you—not to put me in that position. Not to put yourself in it.”

I thought about the posters in every window on Front Street. About Willa’s face when she talked about the boat, and Gabi’s knee bouncing, and Rios sitting in that room carrying the lingering scars of being the island’s convenient villain. About all of them still here, still looking, still refusing to let her become just a name in a cold case file.

And underneath all of it, the thing I never said out loud to anyone, the thing that had been sitting in my chest since I got off the ferry and walked onto the sand of this island and felt the quality of the air here that was like nowhere else in the world.

“I can’t leave,” I said again. “I knew that before I got on the ferry. I think I’ve known it for a long time.”

Bruce stared at me for a long, hard moment. His face shifted—not to defeat exactly, more the acceptance of someone who had run out of arguments they’d believed would work.

“I can’t throw you over my shoulder and drag you out of here,” he said. “Much as I’d like to right now.”

“I know.”

“If you’re really determined to continue on this path, then I need you to promise me something.” He uncrossed his arms. “You do not take unnecessary risks. You keep your head down and your training sharp. You use every bit of sense you have, which is considerable when you’re not being stubborn.”

“I’m always being stubborn.”

“I know that, too.” He looked at Koa. “And you keep that dog with you every minute.”

“That was never going to change.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he crossed the room and pulled me into a hug that was brief and fierce and said everything he hadn’t been able to say out loud in all these years as my handler, through all the check-ins and the moves and the new name and the careful construction of a life that was real even when it was built on a foundation of necessary fiction. I held on.

When he stepped back, his jaw was set, and his eyes were doing the thing they did when he was feeling something he didn’t intend to show.