"I know." My voice comes out steadier than it should. Doesn't match the cold spreading through my chest. "Eight judges. Three months."
He pulls out his phone and types something quick. Kade, probably. The response comes fast.
"Still no leads on the pattern." He sets the phone face-down on the cushion beside him. "Vanessa's running new algorithms. Nothing yet."
Sixteen days.
On screen, someone stirs risotto like it matters. Like anything matters except the fact that judges keep dying and no one knows how to stop it.
His hand returns to my knee. Warmer this time. Deliberate.
I focus on the risotto. On his hand. On anything except the countdown that keeps getting shorter.
His phone buzzes twice more through the afternoon. He reads, responds, sets it aside without comment. I don't ask. Don't want to know which lead went cold, which thread unraveled, which theory fell apart under scrutiny.
Silence from the team means no answers. No answers means we wait.
I'm so tired of waiting
But underneath the quiet, his eyes follow me through the afternoon. Not surveillance-watching. Something else. Patient, like he's waiting for me to decide something I haven't named yet.
Cole's phone buzzes. He glances at it and then turns it to show me the message.
Xander:All quiet. Pizza consumed. Movie started. She's fine.
The tension in my shoulders eases.
After dinner, Cole clears the plates in silence. I settle back on the couch with my book, the same paragraph I've read six times without absorbing a single word.
Why am I waiting for him?
"There's something I want to show you."
I look up. He's standing by the kitchen doorway, watching me the way he does—patient, like he's been waiting for the right moment and just decided this is it.
"Show me what?"
"Not here." He stands straighter. Deliberate, like everything he does. "My place."
The words land wrong. Or right. I can't tell.
His place. Somewhere I've never been. Somewhere I can't picture because I've never even tried. Two weeks of him living in my guest wing, cooking in my kitchen, learning the creaks in my stairs, and I don't know if he has a couch or what color his walls are.
He knows my coffee order, my daughter's favorite color, which step I skip on the staircase. I don't even know his address.
"Why tonight?"
"Because she's safe. Because you have the time." A pause. "Because you asked me to stop hiding things."
Did I ask that? Or did I demand it?
Both, probably.
I should say no. It's late, and I'm tired, and going to an unfamiliar place with a man I've known for two weeks—well, known again for two weeks—is the kind of decision that Dr. Peters would have opinions about. Several opinions. Delivered in that carefully neutral therapeutic voice that somehow manages to convey judgment without technically judging.
But he just spent two weeks learning every corner of my world without inviting me into a single corner of his.
"Fine." I stand. Smooth my shirt. "But I'm driving."