Page 69 of Hunted in the Silence

The center had been the beginning of something. Every girl who’d come through the door had been the beginning of something. Every thread on the corkboard that had eventually led to Devlin’s arrest had been the beginning of something.

She was good at beginnings. She’d built a life out of understanding that beginnings were not a lesser version of what came after them. They were the thing itself.

“Dax and Quinn are coming to Blackridge next weekend,” Cole said. “He mentioned it when we were working the plant’s approach. Said Quinn had some things she wanted to discuss about a piece she’s working on, something about advocacy work and systemic gaps. She wants to talk to you.” He glanced at her. “Carson and Nora said they’d host dinner. Everyone will be there.”

Brynn looked at him. Quinn’s name sitting quietly between them since the night Cole had spotted the paperback on her desk and said nothing and texted Quinn instead. The promise he’d been holding since before any of the rest of it had happened.

“You arranged that before the case broke,” she said.

“I arranged it the day I saw your copy of Justice Delayed,” he confessed. “The one with two Post-it flags.”

She looked at him for a moment, a bit of shock working through her. He’d noticed. He’d acted on it. He hadn’t said a word about it until now.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“I told you I keep my promises,” he said as he glanced at her once more.

She looked out the window at Blackridge, at the town she’d built her life in, the streets she’d walked for six years, the places that had been part of the investigation and the places that hadn’t been touched by any of it and were just the ordinary map of a life being lived.

Ruth Marsh’s street was somewhere to the north. The advocacy center was two miles east. The Calloway plant was behind them, already a crime scene being processed, already becoming part of the past.

She thought about next weekend. About Carson and Nora’s house, which she’d never been to but could picture from the way Carson talked about it in passing. A house with a preschool daughter underfoot and food on the table and the kind of warmth a place that had been built for living in had. About Dax and Quinn. About Silas and Harper, who Cole had already mentioned might make the drive. About Olivia, who would come if invited and claim she was only there for the food and would be the last to leave.

About what it would feel like to sit in a room with all of them and not be the person who showed up alone and left alone.

She thought about going toward instead of away.

“Cole,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you’re not careful anymore.”

He glanced at her. The corner of his mouth curved up. “I’m still careful about most things.”

“I know,” she said. “Just not the one thing that mattered.”

He reached over and took her hand where it rested on the console between them, and they continued their drive. Ahead of them was dinner next weekend, and the week after that and all the weeks after that, and none of it was certain and all of it was possible.

She held his hand and watched her town go past the window.

It looked, she thought, like the beginning of something.

Chapter 22

He resigned on a Wednesday, and by Thursday morning he was sitting at the kitchen table in Brynn’s apartment with a yellow legal pad and a cup of coffee, writing down everything he knew how to do and everything he wanted to do with it and seeing how much the two lists overlapped.

They overlapped considerably.

Brynn had left for the center at seven-thirty, dropping a kiss on the top of his head on her way out the door with the easy, unselfconscious naturalness that came with decided what she’d wanted and got it. He’d watched her go and sat in the quiet apartment that belonged to someone else and felt, for the first time in a long time, like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

He called Carson at nine.

Carson picked up on the second ring. “I heard,” he said before Cole could say anything.

“Small town,” Cole mused.

“Very small town. How are you?”