Page 90 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Could be he’s distancing himself on purpose. If he got nervous, if he started to suspect what the money actually was, getting his name off the paper is exactly what a careful man would do.”

“Could be that too.” I heard how flat my own voice had gone.

“Or,” Madden said, and stopped, because she’d arrived at the same place I had and didn’t want to say it any more than I did.

I said it. “Or he’s a loose end.”

The dining room was quiet. From the kitchen came the sound of Gabi laughing at something, Willa’s voice answering, the ordinary domestic noise of people who didn’t yet have any idea what we were looking at.

“They clean up exposure,” I said. “We’ve watched them do it. Carson. Miles. Diane Crowell run off the road after she talked to us. This is what they do. When someone becomes a liability, they remove them.” I touched the screen, the cluster of recent dates. “You don’t unwind a man like this and let him walk away knowing what he knows. You unwind him so that, when he’s gone, there’s nothing tying him to anything. The clean paper is the prep.”

Madden stilled. “Then why invite him to the party?”

That was the thing that didn’t fit. I turned it over. “Tell me the innocent version.”

“Old friends.” She said it the way you offer up a hypothesis you don’t believe but are obligated to test. “Edmund and John go back years. You can be winding down a business relationship and still want a man at your New Year’s party. People compartmentalize. Or it’s exactly what it looked like—a social event, nothing operational, and we’re seeing sinister patterns because we’re primed to see them.”

“That’s the innocent version.”

“That’s the innocent version.” She looked at me. “You don’t buy it.”

I tried to, because the innocent version meant Jace was sitting in a restaurant having an ordinary, unsatisfying dinner with his father, and the other version meant something I didn’t want to consider. But I’d learned to trust the read my gut handed me, because the times I’d ignored it were the times it had cost me, and my gut was telling me that you didn’t sanitize a man out of your structure and then bring him close. Unless bringing him close was part of how you finished it.

I pulled out my phone.

I texted Jace something that would mean everything to him and nothing to anyone who picked up his phone and read it.

Layla:

Thinking about you. Tell me when you’re heading home. Koa misses you.

Ordinary. The kind of text a woman sent a man she was sleeping with. But he’d know I didn’t send check-in texts, that Koa was a code we’d never agreed on but that he’d understand as me reaching for him, that Tell me when meant Tell me you’re okay.

I watched the screen. No dots. No reply.

I told myself that was nothing. He was at dinner. He’d silenced his phone, the way you do at a meal, the way I’d watched him do dozens of times. He’d said he’d call when he was finished.

I called him anyway.

Straight to voicemail. Not even a ring. The phone was off or silenced or face-down on a white tablecloth somewhere, and any of those was completely ordinary, and none of it should have meant anything.

It meant something. The cold, certain weight of it settled in my chest, the same weight that had kept me alive more than once by refusing to be reasoned away.

I set the phone down and made myself breathe and ran the calculation the way I’d run a thousand calculations.

I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to stay in the house. Sutter House was the defensible position. That was the whole point of me being here instead of the cottage, and leaving it alone was the single thing every protocol we’d set existed to prevent. I knew that. I knew it the way I knew my own name—both of my names. If one of my self-defense students had come to me with this exact situation—a bad feeling, an unanswered phone, a partner at a dinner that was probably fine—I’d have told them to sit down, breathe, wait twenty minutes, and call again before they did anything stupid.

I knew all of it.

And I knew that if I was wrong about going, the cost was my own exposure, my own risk, a thing I’d spent years learning to manage. And if I was wrong about staying, the cost was Jace. Dead at a table next to his father, because I’d done the smart thing and sat in a safe house while my gut screamed.

I wasn’t willing to pay that price. I examined it, turned it over, looked for the flaw in it, and found only that I’d stopped being able to be objective about Jace Hollingsworth somewhere around the storm, and that this was exactly the compromise in judgment I’d spent my whole adult life refusing to allow.

I was going to allow it anyway. For him. Because it was him.

I wasn’t going to take any of these women with me. Whatever this was, I’d brought it to their door. I wasn’t adding them to the ledger.

I stood and stretched like my back was stiff from the chair. “I’m going to take Koa out before he bursts. Back in a few.”