Page 69 of Dozer

I take the phone out of her hands before she can talk herself into staring at that message any longer than necessary.

We know what you sent. And where.

Seven words. Seven words that shouldn't exist.

"We need to call your contact," I say. "Now. Before we do anything else."

She nods, hands not quite steady, and gives me the number instead of dialing it herself, which tells me more about how rattled she actually is than anything she's said out loud. I use the burner Hunter's people issued at the new location, dial, and get a voicemail box with no name attached.

"No answer."

"Try again in ten minutes. He doesn't always pick up fast. He runs a legitimate mail forwarding business. He's not exactly used to being anyone's emergency contact for classified evidence."

I file that detail away. A legitimate business. Not a Spartan Elite asset. Someone entirely outside the operational chain, someone Kenzi trusted on her own judgment alone. That matters almost as much as the fact that somebody has just told her they know exactly what she sent and where.

I look at her across the little kitchen table. She's trying to hide the shake in her hands by organizing things that don't need organizing, lining up evidence bags that are already perfectly straight, because apparently even panic has to meet her standards. I know that trick. I've used it myself.

I try the number again eight minutes later. Still nothing. We sit with the uncertainty longer than either of us wants to, the seven words on that screen sitting between us like something that hasn't finished happening yet.

"I need to understand something," I say eventually.

"Ask."

"Why didn't you tell me? Not the whole speech again. Just was it me, specifically, or was it everyone?"

She's quiet for a moment, weighing the question. "It was everyone, at first," she says. "Then it became something more specific to you, and I think that's actually the harder truth to say out loud."

"Say it anyway."

She looks down at her hands. "The longer this job went on, the more I realized I didn't just trust you with my life. I trusted you with things I don't usually let anyone hold. And some part of me got scared of that, because the people I've let hold important pieces of me before, haven't always handled them carefully." She takes a breath. "So I kept one thing back. Not because I doubted you specifically. Because I've spent years building a version of myself that doesn't fully depend on anyone else, and I wasn't ready to let that version go completely, even for you."

I understand that better than I plan to let on. I've built the same architecture myself, just out of different materials.

"Yeah," I say. “I get it.”

Her eyes lift to mine. "Do you?"

I turn the burner phone over once in my hand, an old habit, something to do while I say something I hadn't planned on. "I had someone I loved once, before Spartan Elite. Somebody I let hold things I didn't let anyone else hold." I use her words.

She goes still, giving me the same patient quiet I've given her every time she's said more than she meant to. "What happened?" she asks. I don’t feel pressured to answer the question, I see it for what it is, just an open door if I want to step through.

"She didn't die; it's not that kind of story." I turn the phone over again. "She left. Not because of anything dramatic like cheating. But, because loving someone who disappears for months at a time, who can't tell you where he's going or when he's coming back or whether this deployment is the one that he won’t come back from is a specific kind of hard not everyone can carry. She was honest enough to admit she couldn't at least, but it still hurt. I loved her a lot."

Kenzi's expression changes, just slightly. "That's not a small thing to share with me."

"No. It's not." I look at her, this woman who handed me a phone and a laptop before I'd even asked, who apologized for not fully trusting me while explaining exactly why the caution made sense, who has spent the last week proving, over and over again, that she can be terrified and still keep moving. "I stopped letting people close after that. Told myself it was smarter. Fewer things to lose. Fewer people waiting on a call that might not come. Fewer people to notify if I lost a battle and never made it home." I pause. "It worked, mostly. Because I didn't let it not work."

Her mouth curves faintly. "Until?"

"Until you climbed into a truck talking about your cat and made it a lot harder to keep believing that it was actually a life instead of just a very efficient way of avoiding having one."

That gets her. A small, tired laugh slips out, and something in my chest loosens with it. I don't smile often. I want to now.

She doesn't say anything for a moment. "Thank you," she says finally. "For telling me that."

"You told me something important and intimate. It felt wrong not to give you something real back."

"You waited awhile."