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.”
Epilogue
A dismal January rain slashed at the windows while Reed watched from inside as Sarit unpacked Tula from the back of her Prius and hustled her up the steps to Reed’s condo. He had the oven on to preheat, ostensibly because he intended to bake cookies with his daughter. The truth was he was cold. His most recent case had taken him to Aberdeen, South Dakota, which lay frozen under a foot of snow. That’s where he’d found the missing young farmer, too, with a bullet in his head and a revolver in his hand.
“Daddy!” Tula gave him a wet hug around the waist and he returned it with a squeeze. The only time he felt real emotion these days was when he was with her.
“My sweet,” he said. “I have everything ready for chocolate chip cookies.”
“Yummy,” she proclaimed as she bounded into the house and raced to her room to inspect that it was untouched since her last visit. To his surprise, Sarit lingered in the entryway, her boots dripping on the slate tile.
“I thought you would like to know,” she said stiffly. “I won’t be going to Houston. The job at the Chronicle fell through, so Randy and I are going to have to do long distance for a while. You’ll have to give me some tips.”
“I wish I could.” He looked away. “Ellery and I broke up.” He’d spent the past few months not saying the words, hoping she would change her mind. She hadn’t.
“What? What happened?”
Francis Coben grabbed her off the streets and nearly killed her, Reed thought but did not say. He’d hoped he could be strong enough to outweigh the Coben legacy. He’d spent years looking at the story and seeing himself as the key figure, the hero. Hadn’t the movies always turned on his dramatic rescue? Only now did he understand. His role was incidental; Coben was the reason the movies got made in the first place. As long as the fascination with his murders remained at a fever pitch among the general public, it didn’t matter how many inches of concrete held Coben in his cell. He was everywhere all at once. Even, it seemed, between Reed and the woman he loved. “Long distance is hard,” he said to Sarit. “I wish you luck with it.”
“Thanks,” she said glumly. She looked past him to the kitchen. “Cookies are a good way to drown your sorrows.”
“Would you like to help make them?” he asked, surprising himself.
Sarit appeared downright flummoxed. “Me?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “Tula would love it.”