"That's...actually a lot of words for my father."
“Six, if you include the greeting, which bordered on a grunt.”
She was laughing again, shaking her head, and the canoe rocked gently with the movement. Her sketchbook slid, and she caught it. He saw the edge of a drawing peeking from between the pages—not a face, but a dress. A bridesmaid's dress, sketched in soft charcoal, with Jenna written underneath.
She saw him spot it. Her smile shifted—still warm, but with tenderness. She’d moved through grief and come out the other side into a place that held both the loss and the love without needing to choose between them.
"The honorary bridesmaid dress," she said. "It'll be displayed at the ceremony, next to her photo." She paused. "Her mom helped me pick the color. Jenna would have wanted yellow, but Margaret talked me into sage green because, and I quote, 'Jenna's taste in colors was her only flaw.'"
Mack smiled. He'd never met Jenna, but he knew her through Alyssa's sketches and stories, and he thought Margaret Lopez was probably right.
"It's going to be a good wedding," Alyssa said. She said it as if she were reminding herself. Like the goodness of it still surprised her sometimes. A wedding. A home. A career. A life that belonged to them and not to the crisis that had brought them back together.
"It is," he agreed.
"Even if I never find peonies."
"Even then."
She leaned back in the bow, arms behind her head, face turned up to the sky. The canoe drifted. The lake held them.
The Board for Correction of Military Records had reviewed his case in March after Blake's confession and the supporting documentation from the FBI investigation. The hearing had taken less than an hour. His administrative separation had been vacated, his record corrected, and his service characterization upgraded to honorable.
He'd sat in a conference room in Arlington and listened to a three-star general say the words "administrative error" and "corrective action" and felt almost nothing.
That wasn't true. He'd felt something, just not what he'd expected.
He'd expected vindication. Triumph. The satisfaction of being proven right. Instead, what he'd felt was closer to relief. He could finally stop carrying that weight.
Garrett had offered him the team lead the same week. Not because of the cleared record—Garrett had never cared about the discharge, but the timing felt right. Mack was ready. He had something he hadn't had six months ago—a reason to come home at the end of every assignment.
Alyssa Bennet, lying in the bow of a canoe on Flathead Lake, worrying about peonies and seating charts and caterer headcounts.
She'd started the Billings position in February. Two months in, she'd already cleared a backlog of cold case composites that had been sitting in the field office for eighteen months. The agents loved her. Not just because she was good—she was exceptional, and everyone who worked with her knew it within a day—but because she listened.
She sat with witnesses patiently, without rushing, giving people the space to remember details they didn't know they'd stored. Her composites had already contributed to two identifications. She was building a reputation, case by case, sketch by sketch. She was also learning software programs to create digital sketches.
He was so proud of her that sometimes he didn't have words for it, which was fine. He'd never been good with words. He was better with actions. With showing up. With sitting with her while she cried. With buying a canoe that didn't leak, driving her to a lake, and making her put the phone down for one afternoon.
"Mack?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for kidnapping me."
"Anytime."
She smiled, eyes still closed, sun on her face. And him? He was in a canoe that didn't leak, on a lake that reflected the mountains, with a wedding three weeks out, a team to build, and a clean record. He had a woman who loved him and a future that looked nothing like anything he'd planned and exactly like everything he wanted.
He leaned back against the stern. Let the canoe drift. Let the sun do its work. Let the silence stretch between them like something solid and warm and theirs.
The lake rippled. The mountains watched. Alyssa shifted to tuck herself in next to him.
And finally, Mack Callan closed his eyes and stopped keeping watch.