Page 78 of In the Dark of the Past

I pulled into my spot and sat for a second with the engine idling, hands on the wheel.

River didn’t ask what I was thinking. She never did, which had always been one of the things about her. She understood the difference between a silence that needed filling and one that needed leaving alone.

“Hey,” I said finally.

She turned.

I didn’t have a good way to say what I meant to say, that the morning I’d just woken up to was the first in years that hadn’t felt like something I was surviving, so I didn’t try to say it right.

“Thank you,” I said. “For not running.”

She studied my face for a moment. The early light was starting, just barely, to separate the sky from the mountains.

“I’m working on it,” she said quietly.

Not I won’t. Not I’m done running—even though she’d already said that.

Just I’m working on it.

Honest. Careful. Hers.

I nodded. “That’s enough.”

We got out of the truck.

Atlas was at the front desk with a coffee so dark it was basically a threat when we walked in. He clocked us coming through the door and tilted his head toward the bullpen.

“You saw it,” he said.

“Forty minutes after four.” I took the coffee he offered. Didn’t taste it. “She forwarded it to a county address routed through a private server.”

Atlas went quiet in the particular way he had when the math was doing something he didn’t like. “Grant.”

“Grant.” I nodded.

“So, he’s been running her?” Atlas said.

“Or someone above him is.” I set the coffee down. “She should be here in the next twenty minutes or so. I want everyone to act normal. Nobody looks at her sideways. Nobody gives her anything to read.”

“You want her to feel safe,” River said.

“I want her to feel like she’s the only one in the room who knows what’s in that file.” I glanced at the bullpen, at the morning shift slowly filtering in and settling at desks, at Linton already vibrating. I’d briefed him last night. He was twenty-six, ambitious, and terrible at keeping secrets, which made him both a liability and an asset, depending on the day. “Tell Linton to breathe,” I said to Atlas.

Atlas looked over, looked back at me. “I’ll tell him. I can’t promise he will.”

Jordyn Vale walked through the door eleven minutes later, coffee in hand, uniform pressed, hair back.

Eyes too bright.

Too aware.

She scanned the room in a way that would have looked casual to anyone who wasn’t watching for it—but I was watching for it. River was watching for it. We’d both spent the last however many years watching for tells in people who were very good at not having them, and Jordyn Vale was not that good.

Her gaze landed on me for half a second.

“Morning, Sheriff,” she said. Bright. Easy.

“Morning,” I said.