The kids would be doing whatever kids did when there were too many of them in a room together—building or destroying something, he'd never been able to tell the difference.
This was what a birthday looked like, apparently. He'd spent enough of them alone to know the difference between alone and this, and this was better by every objective measure.
He just hadn't figured out how to process better, yet.
"Can I ask you something?" Jag said.
Noah glanced at him. Jag had the look he got when he was going to ask something directly, which was the only way Jag asked anything. He'd been a homicide detective before he was a police chief, and it showed in how he approached a question.
"You're going to ask it either way," Noah said.
"True." Jag turned and leaned his back against the rail, facing the house. "Why aren't you and Ziggy together?"
Reid looked at the sky. Troy suddenly found something interesting about his drink. But they weren’t fooling anyone. Noah knew an ambush when he saw one.
"We work together," Noah said. “And she’s my best friend.”
"That's not an answer. It’s an excuse, and for the life of me, I don’t get it.” Jag tapped his finger against his drink.
"It's the only answer I’ve got.” Or rather, the only one he was going to give to her family.
"We've known each other for years, and I've watched you and my sister dance around each other like there's something there, but neither one of you is willing to cut a rug.” Jag shifted. "It's obvious to everyone. I'd like to know what you’re so afraid of.”
The acid hit the back of Noah's throat before Jag finished the sentence.
Seattle had called Noah the Truth-Seeker for years. He'd built an entire career—a life—on the idea that honest answers mattered, that the why behind a story was just as important as the what, that you couldn't expose someone else's lies without doing it with some level of integrity. Verification over speed. Context over sensation. He'd lived by that.
And he was the biggest hypocrite on the planet.
"Ziggy's going to kill me for this," Noah said. "But we tried. A few years back. It was complicated. And obviously, it didn’t work.”
Ziggy wasn’t going to be mad. She was going to push him into Puget Sound. She’d wanted their relationship five years ago to be private too, though for very different reasons. And he understood. Now, it was more because her family liked to play matchmaker, and this wasn’t the first time he’d had to dodge this question.
Only, instead of denying it, he admitted it, which would make for some sticky conversations in the future. But since he wasthe man who sought the truth, he had to ask himself why he answered the question with some honesty.
Part of him knew the reason. He’d fought it for years.
Reid made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Complicated."
"Something funny?" Noah asked.
"No." Reid took a sip of his drink. "Just that complicated is a word I've used before. About Darcie and me. Before we figured our stuff out."
“Not sure complicated is a strong enough word for what happened to Callie and me,” Jag said.
Noah looked between them. He knew enough about both their histories to understand what wasn't being said—that Reid and Darcie had their own version of this, that Jag and Callie had theirs, that both of those stories had endings that currently involved kids eating cake and ice cream at his counter in the kitchen.
Noah looked back at the water.
The thing was, it wasn't complicated. Complicated, he could navigate—he did it for a living. It was about the weight of what Ziggy carried for him. She didn't even know what she'd signed up for the night he handed her that envelope.
“No offense, but this isn’t the same.” And it wasn’t, but considering Jag was the lead detective on a serial killer case—the same killer that had murdered Callie's sister—it wasn’t that much different. And he and Callie turned out just fine.
“It never is,” Reid said. “I used age and Darcie’s career to push her away, while she used my late girlfriend. It was like we had decided we weren’t going to work before we were even out of the gate.”
There was no way Noah could explain this. It wasn't about fear of commitment, bad timing, or the difficulty of loving someone you worked with. It was about the fact that Ziggy had already paid a price for knowing him, and every day she stayedin his orbit was another day she carried something that could detonate her career the same way it would detonate his.
He couldn't say any of that standing on this patio with her brothers.