She hadn’t thought of that. She should have. She was a forensic sketch artist who’d been doing small stuff for local PDs. The work was intermittent, so she’d also taken on parties to pay the rent. Since moving here, she’d been trying to get on at the FBI, and she had a consultation in two weeks in Billings. It would be her first federal contract work, the thing she’d been building toward.
Could that be in jeopardy now? She mentally swore. “Blake didn’t tell them.” She hesitated. “Right?”
Mack went still. The silence that meant the answer was worse than she was imagining filled the room
“Tell me.”
He held her eyes. “I don’t know, Lyss.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think he would, but he’s involved in something illegal.”
“Mack—”
“Look,” he said, “I don’t have the answers you want.” His tone wasn’t cruel or dismissive, just…tired. “Some things will have to keep until morning.”
He knew more than he was telling her. She should push. Wanted to. The new version of herself, the one she’d been painstakingly assembling in therapy and solitary mornings and deliberate choices, would push.
But she looked at his face and saw something she hadn’t expected. He was protecting her. He thought the information would break something in her.
The terrible thing was that he might be right. She might not be ready. And she was tired and scared enough to let herself have a few more hours of not knowing.
Tomorrow, she told herself. You can fall apart tomorrow.
She pressed her fingers to her temple—the scar, the familiar pressure point—and counted the hours mentally until morning.
He saw it. She saw him clock it the way he used to, the silent cataloguing of her physical state that she’d found endearing and infuriating when they were together. Mack Callan had memorized her migraine tells.
She dropped her hand. “I’m fine.”
He said nothing.
“I said I’m fine.”
“I heard you.” And then he went to her bag, grabbed her pill bottle, and set it on the table in front of her.
She gritted her teeth, picked up her coffee, and decided this was not a battle worth fighting with a ticking migraine and a cartel bounty on her head. Without another word, she downed a pill.
“Take the bedroom,” he said.
She opened her mouth to argue that she could sleep on the couch perfectly well. She didn’t need to be managed. She was a grown woman who had been taking care of herself since she’d moved here just fine, thank you?—
“Lyss.”
Just her name. Nothing else.
She closed her mouth.
The thing was, she knew what it meant, him giving her the bedroom. This was his home—sparse and controlled and carefully arranged to reveal nothing about the man living in it. The bedroom was the most private room in this small cabin, the one place where a person could close a door and be unreachable.
He was giving that to her. Not because he was being chivalrous, though he was. Because he knew her. Still knew her, in the way of people who had once been each other’s entire world. He knew she needed a door to close. Needed the illusion of her own space, even borrowed space, even temporary space.
She hated that he still knew that. She hated more that she was grateful for it.
“Where are you sleeping?” she asked.
“I’m not.” He said it the way he might say the roads are closed or the storm is worsening—factually, a condition of their situation rather than a choice. “I’m keeping watch.”