Page 110 of Crosscurrent

"Diane’ll know something's wrong." Cara turned her phone over in her hands. "She always knows. And Piper." She stopped, lower lip trembling. “We can’t just––“

"We need to wait until we can tell them something concrete."

There was no flight and no road that put either of them in this room before the night was decided one way or the other, and all a call now would do was hand two people he loved a terror they could do nothing with. "The second we know, we call. Not before."

Cara looked at him a moment, then nodded, and set the phone face-down on her knee, where she could feel it.

They didn't have to wait long.

The doors swung open. A surgeon in tired scrubs came out asking for the family of Thomas, and stopped, recalculating visibly, at how many people stood up at once.

"He's going to make it." She lifted a hand against the noise before it could start. "He lost a great deal of blood, and he is not going to enjoy the next few weeks. But he's stubborn, and he's stable. He’s going to make it."

Reagan didn't make a sound. She just crumpled, all at once, the way a held breath finally lets go, and put her face in her hands. Cara wrapped an arm around her, and for a little while the toughest woman Gabe knew let herself not be.

Cara picked up her phone, catching his eye as she swept out into the corridor. “I got this.”

Reagan was past words and somebody had to be the steady voice on the far end of the line.

Gabe watched her from the doorway. Watched her say Diane's name. Watched whatever Diane said back land soft on her face, and watched her give her friend, and Tom’s daughter, the one sentence that mattered, he's going to make it, and then stand a while just listening, nodding, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. He could fill in the other side without hearing a word of it. Diane steady as a banked fire even now, telling Cara to bring the whole bruised lot of them home, saying she'd have the lights on. And she’d take care of Piper until they arrived.

At some point Cara said, "Hang on. She's right here," and carried the phone back inside to Skye.

Skye took it like it might go off.

Gabe watched the most self-contained person he had ever known stand in a hospital corridor and let a teenager three thousand miles away love her out loud, not deflecting it, not running from the room, just shutting her eyes and taking it, because she had very nearly not lived to. When she handed the phone back, her eyes were wet. She didn't bother to hide it, which was its own kind of first.

Later, after the surgeon, after the room had loosened, after Skye had installed herself in a chair by the recovery-ward door to stand a watch nobody had assigned her, Gabe found Cara at the windows at the end of the hall, looking out at a parking lot going gold in the waning light.

He'd been needing to say this since this whole mission got crazy. Maybe since Norway. He was done carrying it.

He straightened behind her, ready for whatever response he got. "I'm not going to do the thing I always do.”

She didn't turn. "Which thing?"

"The one where you say you can’t promise tomorrow, and I let that be." He inched closer, until he could feel her body heat fill the inches between them. "I've been letting this slide. Letting us slide. Well. It's over. The thing we kept saying we'd wait for came, and we nearly didn't walk back out of it. I'm done waiting for a safer time to want what I want."

Now she looked at him.

He swallowed hard, forcing himself to continue. Whatever her answer, things between them would change now. He needed to take this chance.

He stared into her dark eyes. "I want the after. Now. Not someday. I want the bakery and the cat and the whole ordinary impossible thing. I want to marry you, Cara. I'm not asking you tonight. You've had enough people pointing things at you for one night. I'm telling you. Just so it's said. So it's in the room."

Cara was quiet a long moment. He'd half braced for the deflection, the joke that put three careful feet between them. It didn't come.

"You don’t know the details, but you know what I am," she said at last. "I run. It's the one thing I've ever been good at. I've spent my whole life making sure there was nothing in any room I couldn't walk straight out of." Her voice wasn't level. "And tonight I walked into a cabin full of guns because the people I couldn't leave were inside it." She stopped, and started again, smaller, truer. "I think you've gone and broken the only skill I had."

"Is that a yes?"

"It's not a no." She turned back to the glass, but she took his hand, and held it, and didn't let go. "It's an ask-me-again-when-I-can-think-straight. It's an I-want-it-too, and that scares me worse than Cartwright did." A breath. "It's the most honest thing I have tonight. Take it."

He took it. From her, he understood, it was the whole world.

50

Suzette Bennion wouldn't get on the plane.

Cara found her at the edge of the airfield, her go bag, watching Nomad walk his slow circle around his plane. In the flat morning light she looked smaller than she had in the swamp, and older, but free in a way that hadn't yet decided what to do with itself.