Page 75 of Hunted in the Silence

She thought about a man who had come through a door she was holding open and stayed.

Cole’s hand found hers under the table. She turned hers over and held it without looking at him because she didn’t need to in order to know what she’d find.

Harper said something across the table that made Quinn laugh, and Olivia’s mouth pinched in on itself as she tried to hold in her own laughter. Carson refilled everyone’s glasses without asking, Mae continued sleeping, and everything felt…perfect.

Brynn squeezed Cole’s hand and looked at the table full of people who had shown up and stayed—each for their own reasons—and realized that together they made something she didn’t have a word for. Something bigger than family, more deliberate than found, and so right it settled straight into her chest.

She thought about what Cole had said on the night everything ended.

There’s more.

There was more. There kept being more.

She was done being surprised by that.

Chapter 24

The nursery was almost done.

Cole stood in the doorway with a paintbrush he'd forgotten he was holding and looked at the room. Pale yellow walls, Brynn's choice, because she'd said she was tired of gendered colors and yellow was the color of new beginnings. A crib they'd assembled on a Sunday afternoon that had taken three hours and one moment where Cole looked at the instructions and then at Brynn, and she took them from him and had it figured out in ten minutes. A small bookshelf already half-filled, because Brynn had been buying books since February and showed no signs of stopping.

He set the paintbrush on the drop cloth and looked at the room a moment longer.

Seven months ago, he wouldn't have been able to picture this. Not the room specifically. The life the room was part of. The house on Clement Street with the backyard he was slowly learning to garden in. The kitchen table where they had coffee every morning. The ordinary rhythm of a life that was his in a way nothing had been his since before Abby died.

He heard Brynn in the kitchen below, the refrigerator and then the kettle, and went downstairs.

She was at the counter in one of his flannel shirts, the one she'd claimed in October and never returned, her hair loose, one hand on the counter and one hand resting on the curve of her belly. Seven months along, still moving through her days with the same focused energy, though she sat down more.

She looked up when he came in. "You have paint on your face."

"I know."

"It's yellow."

"I know that too." He walked over and kissed her mouth, then ran his hand over her belly and accepted the cup she'd already poured. They stood at the counter together while outside the window November pressed its cold fingers against the glass.

"Silas called," she said, breaking the quiet.

"What did he want?"

"He's consulting on a case in the city. Wants to know if you're available next week." She looked at him. "I told him probably. Okay?"

"Sure." He drank his coffee. "How are you feeling?"

"Good." A sigh he recognized well fell from her lips. "Tired. But good."

He looked at her in his flannel shirt and her loose hair and her hand on her belly and knew without a doubt he would never take this life with this woman for granted.

His phone buzzed on the counter.

"Delgado."

"I have something to tell you." Olivia’s voice had the flatness it got when the news wasn't good. "Devlin died last night. Heart attack. Prison medical couldn't save him."

Cole went still.

"Cole?"