The high green trees of Rittenhouse Square stirred in the breeze, the faint rattle of their leaves the only sign of the arriving fall. The citizens of Philadelphia lay out in tank tops and sunglasses and strolled the cobblestones in flip-flops and summer sandals. A passing Corgi with its wide smile and panting tongue made Ellery smile and think of home. She walked with Reed in this city that did not lay claim to either of them, betwixt and between as they ever were when they were together. It felt like they were always saying good-bye.
“Do you really think it’s fair to blame Ethan Stone for his son’s death?” she asked Reed from behind her sunglasses. “Carol Frick was the murderer. She killed a twelve-year-old boy, and for what? Revenge? Nothing she did that day helped to avenge her daughter.”
“She was a ticking time bomb,” Reed agreed with a slight incline of his head. “Ethan Stone just pulled the pin. But you could argue he pulled a lot of pins with his gross misconduct over the years. He misused his power and his privilege over those young women, using and abusing them without a second thought to any consequences—a perversion of his office, both literally and figuratively.”
Ellery watched a big-eyed toddler with crazy hair run pell-mell toward the fountain with his mother scrambling fast behind. She caught him just before he would have face-planted into the concrete rim. “Teresa is going to be horrified when she finds out she hired her son’s murderer.”
“It’s not like she could have known. Baltimore PD had Vincent Frick’s death listed as a mugging gone wrong. Carol wasn’t even a suspect.”
“So, what’s the answer? Suspect everyone all the time? Trust no one?”
“Teresa has tried living like that once already. It almost cost her a daughter.”
“Damned either way then,” Ellery said with a sigh. “What about Lisa Frick? Have you told her yet that her mother was a murderer and not the hero they’d believed all along?”
“Not yet.” Reed stopped and squinted into the distance. “I don’t look forward to that conversation. She’s the last one left. Her family destroyed itself around her.”
“The sole survivor,” Ellery murmured. “Not an easy way to live.”
Reed looked sideways at her as they continued walking. “You don’t have to worry that the press will come for her, not after the first wave, at least. There won’t be any books or TV movies.”
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
“There’s no happy ending here.”
It was her turn to stop short. “There never is,” she told him. “There’s only what people want to believe when the credits roll or you turn the last page. In real life, there’s only…” She searched herself for the words. “Enduring. Continuing on.”
His brows knit together in concern. “You’re saying you’re not happy?”
“Right here? Now, with you? Yes. Or close enough to it for it to count.” She tilted her head to the side and forced a smile. She would not cry. Not yet, not in front of him. This was more than she’d ever asked for, and she tried to tell herself it would be enough. Fall was coming, and winter after it. She had to hold tight to the warmth while she could.
Reed appeared to be turning over her words in his head, wondering if he could live with them. “Roll the credits now then,” he said, reaching for her with a smile. She let him take her hand and pull her closer. “Let’s be happy. I’m going to kiss you now and I don’t care who sees it.”
A shiver of anticipation battled with her usual flash of anxiety at being seen with him in public. Let’s be happy. She decided to try, if only for a few hours. She didn’t know when she would see him again after this. They kissed once and then again, more lingeringly. He held her tight against his body and she felt his smile on her neck. “We should go to the hotel,” he murmured. “I want to kiss you again.”
She ran her hand down his back, her nails lightly scratching. “It’s okay. For today, I don’t care.”
“Well now, that’s a lovely sentiment,” he said, extending out his Southern drawl, “but I think the authorities might object to the kind of kissing I have in mind, should we attempt it here in public.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “Lead the way then.”
At the check-in desk, reality tried to prove her point to Reed. The young man with the gold name tag lit up when he recognized Reed’s distinctive moniker. “You’re that FBI profiler,” he enthused, pointing at Reed. “The one who caught Francis Coben. I read your book.”
“Thanks,” Reed said flatly. “Is the room ready, then?”
The guy’s gaze slid to Ellery and his eyes widened some more. “And you’re that girl.”
“Look here,” Reed began, his temper rising, but she laid a hand on his arm to stop the protest. It wasn’t worth it. He couldn’t argue with every bellhop or waitress or gawker in a suit on the subway. She didn’t want to spend her last precious hours with Reed fighting a battle they had already lost.
Inside the suite, he frowned when he saw there was a closet. He removed his necktie and knotted it around the double handle, tying it securely into place. “Will this suffice?” he asked.
She smiled and reached for the buttons on his shirt. “It’s a start.” She thought about all the rules she had for them, all the things she said she wouldn’t do with him, and how she’d tossed every one of them by the wayside, the deeper in they got. Her body usually took convincing even now. It had been conditioned early against the weight of a man above her, trying to force her to feel something, and it didn’t matter that Reed brought pleasure instead of pain. Her brain hushed it up this time as they fell into bed together, or maybe her skin recognized this would be its last taste of freedom for a good long while.
She closed her eyes and the lack of sight magnified all her other senses, filling her with the sounds of them, their breathing and murmurs, the soft rustle of clothing being eased aside, the scrape of his teeth against her plastic buttons as her shirt came undone in his mouth. The man had skills, and she tried not to think about where he honed them, not when his tongue was tracing the outline of her bra as his hands slipped down to her rear, urging her closer against him. Moments like this, she never wanted to be separate again.
In the aftermath, she lay curled on her arm and admired the fringe of his lashes as he slept next to her. She marveled that this beautiful man had somehow been hers to keep in these quiet hours, alone and away from prying eyes. If they could stay like this, just the two of them, she would never leave. He must have felt the weight of her contemplation, because he opened his eyes and looked at her. The slow, appreciative smile that graced his face made her heart hurt for what she had to do. He took her hand and kissed it. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
She shook her head. This small gesture was enough to put him on alert, because he sat up against the pillows.
“No? Are you okay?”
She took his hand this time and held it against her body. She couldn’t look at him. “I love you,” she confessed, and heard his answering intake of breath.
His thumb grazed her navel. “And I love you,” he murmured.
She squeezed him hard and shut her eyes. “But I have to go.”
“What? I thought we had until the morning at least.”
“I’m sorry. I just can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” he asked, confusion evident in his voice.
Her throat closed up so tight she could barely get the words out. “Be with you.” She dropped his hand and fled the bed, picking up her clothes as she went. “It’s not you,” she said with her back to him as she struggled into her jeans. “It’s him. It’s always, always him.”
“Ellery, wait. Please. Let’s talk about this.” He got up naked and came to her.
“No.” She swallowed and stepped back from his reach. “I’m stuck with him forever, but you’re not. You—you don’t belong with me. You have a daughter and a job who need you more than I do. You can have a life of your own.”
“It’s my life. I choose how I spend it, and I choose to be with you.”
She blinked back hot tears. At least he got a choice. Coben was just one of a hundred monsters Reed chased down, another notch on his belt. If people talked to him about Coben, it was with admiration and awe. She was the girl he’d carved up, raped, and left for dead. The scars he’d left on her body marked her as his even as he sat rotting in prison halfway across the country.
“Is this about what happened downstairs?” Reed asked as he put on his clothes. “About the new movie coming out?”
She shuddered at the very mention. “No. And yes. There’s always going to be another movie. That’s the point.”
“Screw the movie. It’ll be fiction anyway, and you know it. It doesn’t matter what story they make up. You and me, we know the truth. We are the truth.” His voice was low and gruff, with a note of pleading that tore at her.
“But it’s not just you and me, is it? It’s the guys I work with and your ex-wife and the people on the street who never stop staring. When it’s just you and me, I’m freer than I’ve ever been, but we can’t stay here, Reed. This isn’t your home and it’s not mine, and neither of us can pack up and be where the other one is. Even if we could, it’s not like we could hide from the outside world forever. Whenever we go out, it’s always the same thing—you’re the profiler and I’m ‘that girl.’ It’s exhausting. It’s terrifying. It’s like I never got out of that closet.”
“You make me sound like him.”
“You’re not,” she said, her voice breaking. “But you’re linked to him as surely as I am, and so he’s there between us whether we want him there or not.”
He sank down on the bed, defeated. She swiped at the tears on her face and tried to calm the erratic beating of her heart. She felt like she was bleeding on the inside. “When did you decide all this?” he asked finally.
“A while ago.”
He nodded to himself. “What was all this, then? One last hurrah?” He gestured at the rumpled sheets around him.
Her chin trembled, emotion threatening to spill out of her again, and she clamped her jaw shut. “I—I wanted to see you,” she said when she trusted herself to talk again. “I wanted to tell you that you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and that’s not because of what happened with Coben when I was a kid. You saved me back then, yes, but it wasn’t any kind of life. I was dead inside, numb to everything.” She stumbled as the tears caught up to her. “Now I can feel, and I know that because my heart is in a million little pieces right now, and even though it hurts like hell I’m still grateful.”
Reed surged upward and took her in his arms with a desperate force. “We can find a way to make it work. We can.”
She let him hold her, this man who always believed the impossible, until she dried her tears against his hot skin. His faith had saved her once, but it wasn’t enough now. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured as she pulled away.
“So that’s it?” he asked, his voice scratchy and raw. “You walk out like this and we never see each other again?”
Their story had been told a dozen times already and would surely be retold a dozen more. On some cable channel somewhere, a not-Reed would find a not-Ellery and pull her from that closet, setting in motion a series of events that would inevitably lead them right back to this moment. She almost laughed from the absurdity of it. “It depends,” she said, giving him a watery smile, “on whether you think the credits have rolled yet. Until then…”
He got her reference. Nodded faintly. “Enduring,” he said with resignation. “Carrying on.”
She kissed his cheek fiercely in one last good-bye. “It’s all there ever is.”