Page 173 of Only the Hunter

I look at the open file on my desk. The active one.

The work is still there.

It will still be there tomorrow.

I close the folder.

Not because I’m done.

Because I’m choosing.

I text him back.

Evie

Thai. And stop calling it pretending.

I gather my bag, shut down my laptop, switch off the desk lamp. The office is dim now, the corridor beyond my door quieter than it’s been in weeks.

Before I leave, I glance once at the drawer where Lina’s file now sits in the active section.

Then I turn the lock.

And I go.

This is what peace looks like for me now. Not stillness. Choosing.

Epilogue

Gabe

Six months later

“Is this it?”

The wrought iron gate is open, but that’s only one reason I’m second-guessing myself. The house I remember—the one I spent summers in and out of as Scott’s friend, as the boy who pretended not to watch Evie do her homework in the game room—was stucco. Modest, by Thompson standards. Whatever this is, it isn’t that.

Evie looks up from her phone. “Oh. Yeah. He tore down the old house and built a new one.”

“Are you serious?”

“Said it was cheaper to start from scratch than renovate twenty thousand square feet.” She sighs in a way that contains an entire argument she’s already had and lost. “Don’t ask.”

We pull through the gate and down the drive. The circular fountain is still there—same stone basin, same spray arc—which is the single element I recognize. I pull up alongside it.

“Some things survived.”

Evie grins. “Remember when we’d jump in that?”

“Your dad would say there’s a perfectly good pool in the back.”

“A pool in the shade. Too big to heat.” She tilts her head. “I bet the new pool has the same problem.”

I park in front and take in the house while she’s still talking. Stone facade, arched windows, a front door the color of a federal building—gray, oversized, flanked by topiary. It looks like someone described a French chateau to an architect who had never left DC.

It is, without question, the most expensive home I have ever stood in front of.

I keep that to myself.