Higa nodded.
“I’ll be there, Mr. Esca is staying with me, and Ryder will be there as well.”
“Absolutely,” Lund agreed, glancing at Ella and then back to his boss.
“Good,” Higa said with a nod. “I want a status update every two hours.”
“Yessir,” both Dallas and Lund agreed.
Outside in the hall, Dallas told Ella that he would arrange to have her things collected and brought to his house.
“Thank you,” she said, her arm wrapped around mine, remaining glued to my side. “And thank you for letting me stay with you and Croy at your house. I can really use some normal.”
He smiled at her, nodded, glanced at me, and then turned to go.
“Hey.”
He turned, walking backwards, facing me.
“Get our stuff from the Stanton house too, would you, please?”
“I had one of the agents put our duffels in the back of the Suburban before we left. I just need to grab them and put them in my car.”
“You’re on top of everything.”
He arched an eyebrow for me. “Not everything, but that’s how I like it.”
“Really,” I said pointedly.
No one missed the cackling as he turned and headed down the hall. Lund gave us a head tip and then ran to catch up to Dallas.
People walked back and forth in front of us, in a constant stream, so I walked her backward into a short hallway, until we were both leaning with our backs to the wall.
“He’s handsome,” she said softly.
“Yes,” I agreed, knowing we were talking about Dallas.
“Am I crashing something new?”
“It’s new, but you’re not crashing anything, I promise you.”
She nodded, turning to face me. “Where the hell did you go? God,” she gritted out, frustrated, possibly verging on angry at me all over again, “do you know how hard it is for someone to disappear like you did? No social media, no address or phone number hits in a Google search, you were just…gone. It was years before I realized I wasn’t pissed off at you anymore, and longer still before I could admit that I still cared enough to want some answers from you, but by then it was too late. I finally had the resources to find you, but I was too deep into my assignment.”
“I moved to Chicago.”
Her face clenched up. “Why?”
“A change needed to be made.”
“That didn’t include me?”
What could I say that wouldn’t hurt her?
“You left everything and everyone.”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “So I was collateral damage.”
It sounded so bad when she said it like that. “I guess,” I said lamely.
“No. There’s no guess. I was.”
“You were, yes.”
She was silent, studying me, staring at my face. “Did you ever regret that?”
I took a breath. “I put you out of my mind. I went straight to the police academy, so I was busy. No time to think.”
“And when you saw me there in the driveway?”
I crossed my arms, bracing for the attack. “I thought, ‘It’s sad that I missed seeing Ella become such a badass.’”
“Don’t suck up, it’s too late.”
“Is it?”
She sucked air in through her nose. “You hurt me.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me you’re fuckin’ sorry,” she snapped at me.
“You know I am.”
“Then say it,” she insisted, her gaze pinning me to the wall.
“I’m sorry,” I said adamantly. “I really am. If I had it to do again, I’d choose a different course where you were concerned.”
“We were close, Croy. I felt it, my friends knew it, and so did my family.”
Could that be right? Was I capable of being close to anyone back then? Of feeling true closeness? Was I now? Was I putting Dallas at risk? I’d been told I was trouble, that I was broken, that I was dangerous. If I fell in love with him, and then started to feel trapped or fell out of love with him, what would that do to him? It could happen, because I didn’t know anything about love. I had no example to go by. No one had ever loved me except my grandmother, but even that had been dutiful, familial, and we had seen each other so rarely. How could I hope to be a partner when I didn’t even know how to be a true friend?
“We were acquaintances,” I told her solemnly.
“No, idiot,” she said irritably. “We were friends. We still are friends.”
We were?
“God,” she growled again, exasperated. “I didn’t miss this part.”
“What part?”
“Of you being all in your head,” she explained. “You used to wonder if thinking was the same as feeling. Don’t you remember that? You’d say, ‘If I think I feel this way, does that make it real? Does that make it true?’”
“I know better now,” I told her.
“Oh?”
“When you’re young, you have all that time to study yourself and really do a number on your own psyche with the self-reflection.”
“Not all of us do that,” she reminded me. “We don’t all second-guess ourselves.”
“I just want to do the right thing as much as possible,” I said defensively.