"Kathryn--"
Okay. He never used her name. Or rarely.
"I'm going to be leaving."
"Now? It's not that late."
"No, I mean moving."
"You're..."
"There's a start-up in Seattle wants me. May be the new Microsoft. Oh, and how's this? It's a new tech company that's actually making money."
"Wait, Jon. Wait. I--"
"Please?" He was so even, so gentle, so reasonable.
"Sure. Sorry." A smile and she fell silent.
"I'm not going to use the cliches people throw around at times like this. Even though--didn't you say cliches are cliches because they're true?"
A friend of hers, not she, but she didn't respond.
"What we've had is wonderful. Your kids are the best. Okay, maybe those are cliches. But they are the best. You're the best."
She gave him infinite credit for not talking about the physical between them. That was wonderful and comfortable and fine, sometimes breathtaking. But that wasn't a spoke of this discussion's wheel.
"But, you know what? I'm not the guy for you." He laughed his soothing laugh. "You do know what I'm talking about, right?"
Kathryn Dance did, yes.
"I've seen you and Michael together. That argument you had on the porch after you came back from Orange County. It wasn't petty, it wasn't sniping. It was real. It was the kind of clash that people who're totally connected have. A bit of flying fur but a lot of love. And I saw the way you worked together to figure out that the killer, the unsub, had done this for hire. Your minds jumping back and forth. Two minds but, you know, really one."
He might have gone on, she sensed, but there was really no point for additional citation; it was a self-proving argument.
Tears prickled. Her breath was wobbly. She took his hand, which always was warmer than hers. She remembered once, under the blanket, she'd slipped her fingers along his spine and felt him tense slightly from the chill. They'd both laughed.
"Now, I'm not matchmaking. All I can do is bow out gracefully and you take it from there."
Her eyes strayed to the bag. He noticed.
"Oh, here." He reached to the floor and retrieved it.
He handed it to her. And she reached inside. As she did, the tissue rustled and Patsy, the flat-coated retriever, thirty feet away, s
wung a silky head their way. Leftovers might loom. When she saw the humans' attention was not on food products she dozed once more.
The box, she noted, was larger than ring size.
"Don't get your hopes up. It's not really a present. Considering it was yours to start with."
She opened the box and gave a laugh. "Oh, Jon!"
It was her watch, the present from Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, shattered in her enthusiasm to flop to the ground, adding credibility to the Serrano "escape." Clutching the Rolex, she flung her arms around him, inhaled his complex scents. Skin, shampoo, detergents, aftershave. Then she eased back.
In his face, a sadness, yes, but not a degree of doubt, not a hint that he hoped for her to protest. He'd analyzed the situation and drawn conclusions that were as true as the speed of light and the binary numerical system. And as immutable.
"So, what I'm going to do now, so I can hold it together--because I really want to hold it together and I can't for very long--is to head home."