Page 99 of Carry on Wayward Son

“There’s my girl,” he said into my hair. “There you are.”

I held onto him and let myself be held, and for a minute I wasn’t an investigator or a witness or a survivor or any of the roles I’d worn to get through this. I was just his daughter, and he’d come, the way he always came.

“I’m okay,” I told him, because he needed to hear it. “Dad. I’m okay. I promise.”

“You’ve got blood on you.”

“It’s mostly not mine.”

He laughed, wet and startled, and pulled back to look at me, his hands on my shoulders, taking inventory the way he’d taught me to take inventory. The bruise, the butterfly bandage at my temple, the exhaustion. “God, Layla.” He shook his head. “When you told me you were coming back here, I knew this place would try to take something else from you. I just prayed it wouldn’t be the last thing.” His voice roughened. “When the Bureau called—when they told me they had you, that you were alive and giving a statement—I was already at the airport before they finished the sentence.” He stopped. Started over. “I’m just glad you’re standing here, Hummingbird. That’s the whole thing.”

We found a bench against the wall and sat, and he took my hand the way he had when I was sixteen and the world was too big.

“Tell me where everything stands,” I said. “All of it. Don’t manage me.”

“I never have.” He almost smiled. “Halston’s dead. You obviously know that already, but it’s closed, and nobody in this building is asking hard questions about how, so let it lie.” He watched my face when he said it, and whatever he saw there, he moved on. “Your statement’s the spine of the investigation now. That, plus the financial work you and your cousin pulled together, plus whatever your man’s contact sent—Cushley moved on it fast. Faster than I’ve seen the Bureau move in years.”

Your man. I heard that and didn’t touch it. Not yet.

“Cushley’s good. He always was.”

“He’s executing warrants as we speak, in multiple jurisdictions.” He shook his head, the old professional appreciation surfacing through the exhaustion. “They’re pulling the whole structure into the light tonight. Shell companies, the marina, the routes—the whole lot.”

“Edmund. Tell me they have Edmund.”

“They don’t.” He said it flat, no cushion, because he’d never once lied to spare me. “Not today. Maybe not this year. He’s got the lawyers and the distance and a dozen people between himself and anything that could touch him. A man like that doesn’t go down because his son ran his mouth to a woman he meant to kill.”

“So he walks.”

“I didn’t say that.” He turned my hand over in his. “I said, not today. He’s not untouchable anymore, baby. He’s got a name in a federal file and a son who confessed the shape of the whole operation to the one person who lived to repeat it. That machine just woke up, and it doesn’t go back to sleep because it’s inconvenient. The drugs, the trafficking, whatever names sit above the Ashmores—Jace has apparently been chasing them for years—it’s all federal now. It runs way past this island, and it’ll keep running long after we’ve gone home.”

“Jace handed it off.” He hadn’t outright said he was military intelligence, but I’d read enough between the lines to guess this was something he’d been working on.

“Everything he had, from what Cushley implied.” My father studied me. “That’s not nothing, what that man did. Handing off work like that. Most men can’t let go of a thing they’ve carried that long.”

“He let go of it for me.”

“I gathered that, too.”

I was quiet for a moment, turning over the thing I’d been circling since they’d opened the door and let me out of that room.

“My mother,” I said finally. “My birth father. They think I’m dead.” I looked at him. “Is it safe to let them know I’m not? With Edmund still out there, with the whole thing not finished—am I putting them in danger if I reach out? Am I putting myself back in the middle of things?”

My father took his time, and the care of it told me he weighed the thing instead of soothing me. Thirty years of gauging risk worked behind his eyes.

He turned my hand over and followed the scars across my knuckles with his thumb. “It isn’t safe the way it sits tonight, and I won’t lie to you about that. What you did in that room opens a case. It doesn’t close one. Trial could be years out, and until the rest of this operation comes apart, your name still buys something from people who’d pay to make it disappear. Telling the truth to a couple of agents doesn’t change that math.”

“So the answer’s no.” Deep down, I’d known that. But after being seen for the first time in forever, I’d needed to ask.

“The answer’s not yet, which is a different animal.” He firmed his grip on my hand. “A case this size takes years to run. They catch some of these people and lose others, and the danger to you shrinks with every arrest, but it never zeroes out. Never fully. What matters is that smaller danger beats the wall you’ve lived behind for fifteen years. That door used to be bricked over. Now there’s a way to work it open. Slowly, with marshals in the loop and everyone’s safety counted before a single person knocks. Your parents could know you’re breathing. When the time’s right for it.”

Fifteen years of bricked wall. Now a door with a hinge in it. I could accept that hope.

“Not tonight.”

“God, no. Not tonight.” Dad pulled me into his side. “There’s no clock on the rest. It waits as long as you need it to.”

I settled my weight against him and asked myself for nothing past the hallway, his arm around me, my pulse knocking under the bruises.