“Henry…” he murmured. “You…”
“Killed my parents and then handed over their money like that balanced it out?”
“Hey—no. Don’t do that.” He cupped my jaw with both hands and kissed me softly. “You spent your entire adult life trying to stop what happened to Philip from happening to anyone else. You didn’t just walk away from it. You didn’t bury it and pretend it didn’t happen. You stayed. You fought it. You’restillfighting it.”
A small breath left him. “You’re basically some terrifyingly competent, hyper-intelligent vigilante with a PhD and a moral compass that refuses to quit.”
Something warm cracked through the weight in my chest, and despite everything, I laughed.
God.
I loved him.
Harder than I knew what to do with.
“Careful,” I murmured, my hands wrapping around his waist, pulling him closer. “You’re starting to sound impressed.”
“I am impressed,” he shot back, not even pretending otherwise. “And a little concerned. But mostly impressed. You have… friends in the FBI? Do they know what you did?”
“I wouldn’t call them friends,” I said. “They’re connections. SSA Selena Chen is who I maintain contact with. I was already planning to write the memoir by the time I found her. She read the truth of it before the rest of the world… or as much as I could put on paper without compromising anything still in motion.”
Archie blinked. “She knows?”
“She knows enough to understand why I didn’t let it go and why dumping money into the unit was so important to me. I told her enough about what I knew so she could launch an official investigation, but she doesn’t know I set the fire.”
I cocked my head. “She might suspect though.”
Archie was quiet for a second, studying me through the lenses of his glasses before something shifted across his face.
“Did they ever find Philip?”
The question settled heavily between us.
“No,” I said after a moment.
His throat moved hard.
“Chen told me once that only a fraction of trafficking victims are ever formally identified, and even fewer actually make it home. The numbers are worse once international networks get involved.” My jaw tightened. “A lot of families never get answers at all. Just empty space where someone used to be.”
Archie looked down then, fingers curling tighter against my shirt. “But you still kept looking anyway.”
“I did.” I exhaled slowly. “For a while, I was obsessive about it, but eventually Chen sat me down and told me there was less than a one percent chance Philip was still alive.”
Archie’s expression twisted. “Henry?—”
“After that, I stopped looking for him everywhere.” My thumb brushed absently against Archie’s waist. “I stayed in contact with Chen. I funded the task force. I buried myself in my work.”
A humorless smile pulled briefly at my mouth. “I spent years studying grief and trauma and violence, like if I understood pain well enough, I could make sense of what it turned me into after he disappeared.”
Archie stared at me for a second before huffing softly through his nose. “So basically your response to unresolved trauma was becoming a terrifyingly overeducated expert on human suffering.”
“More or less.”
He nodded once. “Love that for us.”
My brow lifted. “Us?”
“Henry, I cope by overanalyzing everything until I emotionally dissociate from it.” He gestured between us. “We’re the same kind of damaged.”