Page 28 of You, Only You

I thought about my father. Not the headlines version. Not the twelve million dollars and the forty-three families. The real version. The one who'd started with one bad decision and told himself it was temporary, reversible, not that serious. The one who'd looked at the line in the sand and taken one step over it, then another, then another, until he was so far past it he couldn't see it anymore.

I thought about what made a line a line. Whether it was the act itself or the reason behind it. Whether my father's crime was worse because it was selfish, or whether the selfishness was just the detail that made it easier to condemn. If he'd stolen the same money and given it to charity, would I feel differently? Should I?

The answer came slowly, not as a revelation but as a settling. Like sediment finding the bottom.

Yes. The reason mattered. Not because it made the act legal, but because it determined what kind of person you becameon the other side of it. My father had crossed the line and become smaller. Greedier. More willing to lie. The crossing had corrupted him, inch by inch, because the thing he was crossing for was himself.

Will crossed lines too. But every time he did, he was reaching toward somebody else. Toward victims who had no one. Toward a system that couldn't fix itself.

That wasn't the same thing. It wasn't clean. It wasn't comfortable. But it wasn't the same thing.

An hour passed. Maybe two.

Then I got up, walked back out to the living room, and found Will standing at the window, staring out at the city. He turned when he heard me approach, and I saw the question in his eyes,have you decided?but he didn't ask it.

I crossed to the kitchen island, opened my laptop, and pulled up the files on Eric Mendez.

"His biggest debt is to a bookie named Sal Terranova," I said, scrolling through the data. "Forty-three thousand. Independent operation, no ties to Reeves."

Will moved to stand beside me. Not behind me, not looming. Beside. Equal.

"That's our leverage," he said quietly.

"We offer to make it go away if he cooperates. Clean slate. And we make it very clear that if he doesn't cooperate, Sal will learn exactly how much Eric's been skimming from Reeves's petty cash to cover his losses."

"That's... creative."

"That's forensic accounting." I finally looked at him. "I'm not doing this because I think it's right. I'm doing it because those photographs won't stop showing up when I close my eyes, and I can't live with that and do nothing. There's a difference between that and thinking it's right."

He studied me for a moment. Something in his expression shifted, but he didn't name it, and I was grateful for that, because I didn't want this moment to be more than what it was: a decision, made with open eyes, by someone who was choosing to act.

"And if you start losing sleep over it? Over whether this is the same slope your father was on?"

"Then I'll tell you. And you'll tell me the truth, even if it's not what I want to hear."

"I can do that."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

It wasn't enough. Promises were just words, and my father had been very good at words. But it was a start. And Will was looking at me with an expression that was the opposite of glib, the opposite of casual. He looked like a man who understood exactly what I was asking and exactly what it would cost him to follow through.

We stood there, side by side at the kitchen island, the city glittering beyond the windows. I'd crossed a line. There was no going back now, only forward, into whatever came next.

But standing beside Will in the kitchen that smelled like coffee and omelets and the ordinary domesticity of a morning that had no business being ordinary, I realized the line hadn't felt like a cliff. It had felt like a door. The same one I'd been thinking about since the drive home from the storage unit.

I still couldn't see what was on the other side. But I'd stepped through it. And Will was standing there too, which meant whatever was coming, I wouldn't be figuring it out alone.

"Lindsey," Will said, and the way he said my name had changed somewhere in the past week. It used to sound like a chess move. Now it sounded like something else. Something Iwasn't going to think about right now because I had a gambling addict to profile.

"Yeah?"

"Eric Mendez has a routine. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he works late at Reeves's private residence. The security system goes into maintenance mode between 10 and 10:15 PM for scheduled updates."

My pulse picked up. Not fear. Not exactly. "That's our window."

"That's our window." He met my eyes, and there was something fierce in his gaze. "We have ten days to prepare. And once we start, there's no stopping. Reeves will know we're not backing down."