Wyatt met her gaze. “I couldn’t let them find her. Not through me.”
The words hung in the air between them. Jo felt something shift in her chest—the anger she’d been holding, the suspicion, all of it reshaping into something else.
Wyatt wasn’t the enemy. He never had been.
He was just another person caught in the same web—trying to protect the people he cared about, trying to find a way out of an impossible situation.
Just like Bridget. Just like her.
“Why didn’t you come to us?” Jo asked finally. Her voice was softer now. “Sam, me—we would have helped.”
“And put a target on all of you?” Wyatt shook his head. “My father kills people, Jo. FBI agents. Witnesses. Anyone who gets in his way. If he thought you were helping me, if he thought Sam or Kevin knew anything?—“
“So you carried it alone.”
“It was the only way to keep everyone safe.” He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Except it didn’t work, did it? You figured it out anyway. Kevin figured it out. And now?—“
“Now we figure the rest out together.” Jo leaned forward, her voice firm. “You’re not alone in this anymore, Wyatt. Whatever happens next, we face it as a team.”
Wyatt looked at her like he wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “You’re not—you don’t think I?—“
“I think you’ve been trying to do the right thing in an impossible situation.” Jo reached across the table, gripped his arm. “I think you’ve been drowning, and you didn’t ask for help because you were afraid of pulling us down with you. That stops now.”
Something broke in Wyatt’s expression. The walls he’d been holding up for weeks, maybe years, crumbled. He didn’t cry—he was too exhausted for that—but Jo could see the relief flooding through him. The weight lifting, just a fraction, from his shoulders.
“What do we do?” he asked.
Jo thought about Bridget, waiting at the cottage. About Kevin, who’d been searching for answers and stumbled into something far bigger than any of them expected. About Sam, who trusted his team even when he knew something was wrong. About Shaw, circling closer, running searches from a motel room for reasons Jo still didn’t fully understand.
“First, we bring Sam in. He needs to know what we’re dealing with.” Jo released Wyatt’s arm and sat back. “Then we figure out how to handle Shaw without tipping her off. And we protect those files—because if they contain what I think they contain, they’re not just evidence against your father’s organization.”
“They’re leverage,” Wyatt said quietly.
“They’re weapons.” Jo’s eyes hardened. “And we’re going to use them.”
At the bar, Mick caught her eye. He raised an eyebrow—Everything okay?
Jo gave him a small nod. Not okay. Not by a long shot. But better than it had been an hour ago.
They had the truth now. All of it.
And tomorrow, they’d start fighting back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sam’s cabin sat at the end of a quiet road on the outskirts of White Rock, far enough from town that the nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away. He’d inherited it from his grandparents, and Jo had been here enough times to know every corner of the place—the flow blue plates still arranged in the china cabinet the way his grandmother had left them, the trout mounts on the knotty pine walls from fish he and his grandfather had caught decades ago. Sam had added his own touches over the years, but he’d never erased theirs. Jo understood that. Some things you held onto.
She pulled up beside Wyatt’s car, killed the engine, and sat for a moment in the darkness. Through the front window, she could see the warm glow of lamps, the shadow of Sam moving around inside. Lucy would be at his feet, probably. She always was.
Wyatt was already out of his car, waiting. He’d been quiet since they left Holy Spirits, and even now he just stood there, hands shoved in his pockets.
Jo stepped out to join him. “You ready?”
He let out a long breath. “No. But I don’t think I ever will be.”
Sam opened the door before they reached the porch. He stood silhouetted against the light, Lucy at his side, watching them approach with an expression Jo couldn’t quite read. He’d known something was coming—she’d called ahead, told him it was important, told him it couldn’t wait. But he didn’t know the details yet.
He was about to.