Chapter 20

Jake I didn't show her the message right away. I read it three times first, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less ugly if I stared long enough. They didn't. "Jake." Emma's hand was still against my chest. "Whatever it says, I need to see it." I turned the phone around. She read it once, twice, and I watched her decide not to fall apart, the same way I'd watched her decide that a dozen times since the night I found her on the sidewalk outside my shop. "Somebody knows," she said. "Not guessing. Knows." "Or wants us to think that." I texted Nash before I finished the thought—*trace the number, now*—and got Marisol Reyes, the attorney, on the phone before Emma had time to ask if I was overreacting. Marisol didn't do reassurance. She did facts, which I'd learned to be grateful for. "Nine A.M. is fast, but it's not unusual for an emergency petition," she said. "It means Whitfield thinks the claims deserve a quick look, not that he's decided anything. I need everything you have by six tonight—Emma's timeline, the clinic records, her pay stubs from the shop, anything documenting Derek's surveillance. If there's a message today, I want that too, and I want to know exactly who received it." "Front desk," I said. "No name on the sender." "Get the number to your investigator. Courts care about patterns of harassment, not just isolated events." Emma sat forward when Marisol said *timeline*, the same way she sat forward at anything that involved her actually doing something instead of being managed. "I'm writing it myself," she said. "Not you summarizing it for me. Mine, in my words." "That's better anyway," Marisol said. "Judges notice when the woman sounds like herself instead of like her lawyer wrote her diary." By the time we hung up, Emma already had a legal pad in her lap and was crossing out her second sentence. --- We worked at the kitchen table for two hours—her writing, me pulling employment records and printing photos Nash had flagged from the building's camera logs, careful never to touch her sentences once she'd put them down. When she caught me rereading one line twice, she snatched the pad back. "If it sounds weak, tell me it sounds weak," she said. "Don't just make the face." "It doesn't sound weak. It sounds like somebody trying not to sound angry, and you don't have to do that for this." She looked at the page a long moment, then crossed something out and let herself write it the way she actually felt it. Somewhere in the second hour, she noticed the ink on my forearm—the one she'd asked about before and I'd deflected. A single line of script, small enough most people missed it. *M.V.* "You've never told me who that is," she said. "No," I admitted. "I haven't." She waited instead of pushing, which was somehow worse, because it meant I had to decide on my own to say it. "Mara Vance," I said. "Before I met you. Before the shop, even—I was twenty-three, still figuring out what kind of president I wanted to be. She was smart, funny, tougher than anybody gave her credit for. I loved her." "What happened?" "She was with somebody. Not somebody in the life—a guy with a good job, good manners, the kind everybody thought was perfect for her. She never told me how bad it got. I saw bruises she explained away, saw her flinch at things that shouldn't have made anybody flinch, and I told myself I was reading it wrong because the alternative meant I had to do something about it." My jaw tightened around the next part, the part I'd never said out loud to anyone. "By the time I stopped pretending I didn't know, it was too late to get her out clean. I tried. I wasn't fast enough." "Jake." Her hand found mine on the table. "I'm sorry." "I've spent seven years telling myself I'll never miss it again. Every time I see somebody flinch, every time somebody explains away something that shouldn't need explaining, I go straight to worst case. That's not fair to you. You're not her." "I know I'm not her." "I need you to actually hear it, not just agree with it. You're not a chance to fix what I didn't fix then. If part of why I noticed you that first night was because I recognized the shape of something I'd missed before—I won't lie to you and say that's not true. But what I feel now isn't about Mara. It's about you. The way you write your own sentences instead of letting me write them. The way you circled back for Raven's schedule the same week you were running for your life. The way you called me out for making a face at your paragraph twenty minutes ago." Emma was quiet for a moment, studying me the way she did when she was deciding whether to trust a thing all the way down. "How do I know the difference," she said, "between you wanting me, and you needing to save somebody? Because from where I'm sitting, those might look identical." "They might," I said. "That's why I'm telling you, instead of hoping you never ask. You get to keep asking me that as many times as you need to. I'm not going to get tired of proving it." She reached over and touched the ink on my forearm, light, deliberate. "I don't need you to save me," she said. "I got myself out that door." "I know." "But I want you." She said it plainly, like she'd decided the fear of saying it out loud was smaller than the fear of not saying it at all. "Not because you rescued me. Not because of the baby, or the hearing tomorrow, or anything I owe you. Just because when I'm around you, some part of me that's been braced for ten years finally isn't bracing." "Comfort," I said, "or wanting, or both. Tell me which, so I know what you're asking for." "Both," she said. "Tonight, both." I kissed her slow, giving her every chance to change the shape of it, and she didn't. Her hands found the collar of my shirt, mine found her waist, careful the way they'd learned to be careful with her, and when she pressed closer I let her set the pace instead of chasing it. It went on longer than either of us probably meant it to, her breath uneven against my mouth, my hands staying exactly where she put them and nowhere she hadn't. When we finally broke apart, she stayed close, forehead against my jaw. "Stay tonight," she said. "Just stay." "I'm not going anywhere," I said, and meant it in every direction the sentence could be taken. We were still tangled together on the couch when Marisol called back, her voice sharper than it had been two hours earlier. "Derek's team filed a sealed exhibit twenty minutes ago," she said. "Judge hasn't unsealed it for us yet, but the clerk's office confirms it includes a medical document. I don't know what it is or how he got it, but somebody inside that clinic—or inside this courthouse—handed him something private." I looked at Emma, who'd gone very still beside me, one hand pressed flat against her stomach. "Find out who," I said, "before nine tomorrow."