And in the background, she remembered how he’d forced her to choose between him and Mack.
She realized she was touching her scar. She pulled her hand away and pressed it flat against the sketchbook page.
Mack shifted, his gaze flicking to her. “You all right?”
“Not really, but I will be.”
He didn’t say anything else. He gave her space, patient and waiting if she wanted to talk. She was grateful and frustrated by it in equal measure. Part of her wanted him to push. Part of her wanted him to ask the questions she wasn’t brave enough to answer unprompted.
The rest of her knew that was the old pattern talking—waiting for someone else to pull the truth out of her because offering it voluntarily had never gone well.
That’s not who you are anymore. She set down the charcoal. “I need to tell you something.”
He glanced at her. Back to the road. “Okay.”
“Six months ago, I saw something on Blake’s phone.” She kept her voice level. “He left it on the kitchen counter at his place. A text came through while he was in the shower, and I looked. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”
“What did it say?”
“It was a message from a name I didn’t recognize, referencing shipments, timelines, and dollar amounts.” She turned the charcoal over and over. “Blake started wearing an expensive watch, easily five thousand dollars. He bought a new truck with cash.” She went on, letting all her doubts spill out. The way he’d started locking his office door when she came over. The paranoia, the secrecy, the phone calls he’d take in another room.
“I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I told myself it wasn’t my business. That he was an adult and working for Rob, so it had to be legitimate. I thought I was just overreacting.” She paused and drew a breath. “I wasn’t, was I?”
“His job with Thorne is legit. That’s how he used last night’s party to cover for his illegal activities.”
“Some part of me knew, and I—I chose not to ask him.” The admission tasted bitter. “Questioning him has never ended well for me, and I wasn’t ready to—” She stopped, tried again. “If I’d looked into it and found out he was involved in anything criminal, I would have had to do something. Choose something.” Just like he’d said to her at the end of the call. “It felt like betrayal, and I couldn’t do that to him.”
She stared at the landscape blurring past the window. She felt hollow and scraped out, the way she always felt after saying something true that she’d been holding in too long.
“You think that makes you complicit,” Mack said.
“Doesn’t it? Jenna might be alive if I’d said something six months ago. If I’d told someone. If I’d been braver.”
“That’s not how it works.” His voice was steady, certain in that way she’d always both loved and resented—the way he stated things as fact rather than opinion. “Blake made his choice. The cartel made theirs. You not telling anyone about a gut feeling regarding your brother’s spending habits didn’t get Jenna killed.”
“But—”
“Does guilt feel productive right now? Sure. It feels like something you can do, something you can control. But it’s a lie, Lyssa. It’s your brain trying to make sense of something senseless by putting you at the center of it.”
She blinked. “How do you know that?”
“Because I did the same thing with Morrison.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “David died because Blake disobeyed a direct order. But I spent two years telling myself it was my fault—that I should have seen Blake’s instability, reported it to our CO, done something different. And maybe that’s partly true. But the guilt was easier to carry than the truth.”
“Which was?”
“That I trusted the wrong person and someone else paid for it.”
The words hung in the space between them. She understood what he was giving her—not just empathy, but a mirror. I trusted the wrong person, too. The same wrong person.
They drove in silence for another mile, maybe two. The mountains hadn’t changed, the sky was still that punishing blue, but something in the cab felt different. Lighter, or at least less suffocating. She’d said the ugly thing, and the world hadn’t ended.
She touched her scar again. This time, she didn’t pull her hand away. “You asked me once about this,” she said.
Mack’s gaze flicked to her hand, to the thin white line through her eyebrow. “You told me it was a climbing accident.”
“It was.” She turned the charcoal pencil over in her fingers again, watching it instead of him. “I just left out the part that matters.”
He waited. He was good at waiting—sniper patience, the ability to hold still for hours until the moment arrived. She’d forgotten how much safety there was in that patience, how different it felt from Blake’s silences, which were always loaded, always a performance designed to make her fill the gap with apologies.