“When do I leave?”
“Ten days.”
I set the passport down.
“Then I’ve got ten days to become someone else.”
Sam studies me across the table the way he always has, like he’s reading something underneath the surface that I haven’t said out loud. After six years, he usually can.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I know what this costs you. I know what you’re leaving behind. And I know you didn’t choose any of this.”
I meet his gaze. “I chose to stay. In that hospital room, you laid it out, and I chose to stay.”
“You chose to save Riley.”
“I chose all of it.” A pause. “Don’t make it smaller than it is by taking the choice away from me.”
Sam holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he nods, once, and something in the room shifts. Not lighter exactly, but more honest.
He stands and picks up his jacket from the back of the chair. “Ten days.” Moving toward the door, he stops with his hand onthe frame and turns back once more. “She’s going to be okay, Ryan. Sophia.” He says it like he knows I need to hear it, even though I told him not to say it. “She’s stronger than you think.”
I focus on the table. “I know she is. That’s not what worries me.”
Sam waits.
“What worries me is that she’s strong enough to move on, and I need her to be.”
A pause.
“And I hate that I need her to be.”
Sam doesn’t try to answer that.
Some things don’t have answers.
He gives the doorframe a single, quiet knock with his knuckle. It’s an old habit from our partnered days, the way he always signed off, and then he’s gone.
The door clicks shut.
The apartment settles back into silence, and I sit there for a long time without moving.
The burner phone is still on the kitchen counter where I left it.
I don’t pick it up again.
Instead, I open the passport one more time, look at my face staring back at me from under a name that isn’t mine, and I make myself a promise.
I need Sophia to move on.
I know that.
I’ve told myself that every day since I watched them lower that coffin.
She deserves someone who can actually be there. Someone who isn’t dead to the world and walking into Mexico under a stolen name.
Closing the passport, I set it down.
Then I pick it up one last time…