Page 196 of Sexting the Pakhan

I shake my head. “Don’t.”

He goes quiet.

After a moment, he asks, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I laugh once and look at him properly. “Because you sent me away. Because your life was full of men with guns and people who died badly. Because I was pregnant and terrified and didn’t trust you to make us safer.”

He takes that without flinching this time.

“I looked for you,” he says.

My chest tightens immediately, stupidly. “I know.”

That surprises him.

I rub my thumb against the seam of the cushion. “Not directly. You never found me. But I saw the ripples.”

“What ripples?”

I hesitate, then tell the truth because we are so far past useful lies. “Police alerts. Local reports. Crime pages. The kind of stories people read with coffee and cluck over before getting on with their day. Warehouse fire. Assault in the docks. A shooting tied to organized crime. A customs raid that vanished from the news in twelve hours. Your name never appeared. But other names did. Places did. Patterns did.”

His expression changes.

“I kept track,” I admit. “Not every day. I told myself it was only when I got nervous. Then I told myself it was because if something happened to you, I should know for the girls’ sake.” I look down. “That was also a lie.”

He’s very still. “You researched me,” he says.

“I monitored you,” I correct.

“Obsessively?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Why?” he asks.

The real answer is sitting right there between us, warm from the shower and six years too old to be called a crush.

Instead I say, “Because I needed to know whether the thing I ran from was still moving.”

He studies me for a long moment. “And?”

“And it was.”

He leans back slowly against the sofa. “I checked records too. Leases. school systems. false names. Anything I could reach without dragging the whole city over your trail.” He looks at the ceiling. “You were better at leaving than I expected.”

That should satisfy me. Instead, it hurts in a new way.

“You looked,” I say.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

His answer takes too long.

“Long enough that stopping felt like failure,” he says finally.

Something in my throat closes. I look away.