Page 69 of You, Only You

One syllable. That was all it would cost.

Except I knew what that syllable actually cost. I'd grown up in a house built on one-syllable lies. Small ones at first. No, I don't know where the money went. No, everything is fine. No, you don't need to worry. Each one weightless on its own. Together, heavy enough to crush a family.

I'd spent my whole adult life being the person who found the truth. Who followed the numbers. Who didn't flinch, didn't hedge, didn't choose the comfortable answer when the honest one was sitting right there, ugly and inconvenient and true.

Lying now, in a federal courtroom, under oath, to protect my own reputation? That was exactly what my father would have done. And I was a lot of things, but I was not, had never been, was never going to be him.

My eyes went to the gallery. Not on purpose. The same reflex Will had described, the hand reaching for the railing before you decide you're falling.

He was there.

Not in the front row. Not positioned like a strategist monitoring the operation. He was near the back, in a darksuit, and he was just sitting there. Not doing anything. Not controlling anything. Just present. Watching. The way you'd watch someone you loved walk into traffic, wanting to pull them back, choosing not to, trusting them to cross.

He'd come. After everything. After the distance and the silence and the message routed through Bates. He was sitting in that chair, and I understood, with the sudden clarity of a number clicking into place, what it had cost him. Will Steele, who controlled everything, who engineered every outcome, who couldn't watch me get a paper cut without building a security perimeter, was sitting in a gallery watching me walk into the hardest moment of my professional life and doing nothing but being there.

That was the bravest thing I'd ever seen him do.

I turned back to Webb. My heart was doing its thing, the fast, uneven drumming that I'd come to associate with moments I couldn't take back. But something had settled underneath it. A foundation. A floor where there'd been empty air.

"Yes," I said, and my voice was clear enough to reach every corner of the room. "I am romantically involved with William Steele."

The murmur that swept through the gallery was immediate and exactly as loud as I'd expected. I heard Chen exhale. Saw the defense attorneys exchange looks of poorly concealed delight. Felt the jury's attention harden.

Webb's smile widened. He looked like a man who'd just been handed a gift. "So you admit that your objectivity..."

"I'm not finished." Something in my tone made him pause. Maybe the same something that had made Will Steele pause in his office on the first day, when I'd pushed back about the Henderson file and he'd looked at me like I'd done something he hadn't planned for. "Yes, I'm involved with him. It happened during the course of this investigation, and I won't pretendotherwise. But my personal feelings don't change arithmetic, Mr. Webb."

I leaned forward slightly. Not for emphasis. Because I wanted him to hear this at close range.

"The wire transfers exist. The shell companies are documented. The correlation between payments and victim transportation is a matter of record, verified independently by the FBI's forensic accounting unit. You can question my judgment. You can question my objectivity. But you cannot question the numbers, because the numbers don't care who I have dinner with."

I turned and looked directly at Reeves. His smile was gone. In its place was something stripped and calculating, the face underneath the mask, and I thought: there you are.

"Victor Reeves used his company to fund a human trafficking operation. That isn't my bias talking. That's what two hundred and thirty-seven documents, fourteen bank records, and nine independent verification analyses show. And no amount of asking about my love life is going to change what those numbers say."

The silence that followed was absolute. Webb stood frozen for a beat, his script visibly derailed, and I watched him recalculate in real time. He was good. He'd recover. Men like him always recovered.

"Your Honor," he said, finding his footing, "the witness's admission of romantic involvement with a key figure in this investigation demonstrates clear bias..."

"The witness answered your question and provided context," the judge interrupted, her voice dry enough to start a fire. "If you have further questions about the evidence itself, proceed. Otherwise, move on."

Webb rallied. Of course he did. He spent the next twenty minutes picking at chain of custody, questioning verificationprotocols, probing for technical weaknesses in my analysis. I answered each question the way I answered every question about numbers: precisely, completely, and without apology. The numbers didn't need me to defend them. They just needed me to explain them. That was the difference between testimony and performance, and it was the difference Webb didn't seem to understand.

When he finally said, "No further questions," the exhaustion hit me like a wave. Physical, total, the kind that starts in your chest and fills everything. My legs were unreliable as I stepped down from the witness stand. The walk to the courtroom doors took approximately a hundred years, every eye tracking me, whispers building like weather.

I didn't look at Will as I passed. Not because I didn't want to. Because if I looked at him right now, the composed, professional, I-just-survived-that version of me would crumble, and I needed it to hold for approximately thirty more seconds.

I made it around a corner before the composure gave out. Not dramatically. I just stopped walking, leaned against the cold marble wall, and pressed my palms flat against the stone the way I always pressed them flat against surfaces when things got too big. Marble. Tabletops. Kitchen counters. As if finding something solid under my hands could make the rest of the world feel solid too.

I started laughing. Not the good kind. The kind that was one wrong breath away from crying, high and ragged, and I couldn't stop because the absurdity of what I'd just done was hitting me in waves. I had just told a federal courtroom that I was sleeping with the subject of my audit. On the record. Under oath. My professional reputation was currently trending toward "catastrophically compromised" and I was laughing about it in a hallway.

My father would be horrified. Or proud. Possibly both. Probably horrified.

"That's not the reaction I expected."

His voice. Coming from somewhere to my left. I opened my eyes and he was there, a few feet away, hands in his pockets, and the expression on his face was one I'd never seen before. Not the mask. Not the cracks. Something underneath all of it, raw and uncertain, like a man who'd rehearsed what he wanted to say and then forgotten all of it the moment she was actually standing in front of him.

"You came," I said. My voice was rough from testimony and laughter and the general state of being a person who had feelings.