Zoe was at a loss for how to answer the question. It had been horrible. Her partner and best friend had died, on her watch. She’d refused to answer the door or go back to work after her suspension was over. She’d been partnered up with someone new and, yes, managed to solve a case, but almost didn’t make it through. And since then, there had been nothing big to speak of. Nothing interesting she could tell him about. She didn’t have any other friends, either. No one she could share stories about, nothing to distract from her own dire months. How did she answer something like that?
“Zoe?” John asked, his voice pitched low, leaning toward her. “Did something happen? I mean, you went quiet on me with no warning. And seeing you now, it’s… it’s like you’re closed off. Struggling.”
Zoe bowed her head. “You can tell?”
“Of course, I can tell.” John reached for her hand across the table, seemed to change his mind and hesitate, and then lightly touched her fingers. “I like to think we were getting close, before. I can tell when something’s not right with you.”
Zoe nodded slowly. “You are right,” she admitted. “Something has been not right for a long while.”
“What is it?”
Zoe looked up at John’s face. It was open, clear, and welcoming, full of encouragement. Acceptance. She took a breath.
“The last case before I… cancelled our plans,” Zoe said, not quite willing to say before I broke things off with you, “things went wrong. Agent Rose, my partner.”
John squeezed her hand. They had met, after all, on a double date with Shelley and her husband. Back before everything was destroyed. “She was killed.”
Zoe looked up in surprise. “You knew?”
“Of course I knew,” John said, though his tone was gentle. “It was all over the news, Zoe. An FBI agent doesn’t just die in the course of duty without there being reports on it. I went to her memorial service.”
“You did?” A lump was forming in Zoe’s throat. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go. She’d watched from afar and stayed away from the other mourners. She hadn’t felt worthy of joining them.
“I’ve been worried about you,” John said. “I didn’t want to push you, but I guessed it had to be because of Shelley that you wanted to be alone. That’s why I didn’t give up on waiting for you. I wanted to be here when you finally found the strength to push through.”
Zoe stared at their table, trying to ignore the diameter of the circle and the thickness of the wood. He’d known all along, but he’d never said anything. Never forced her to talk about it. At the same time, he’d never given up. She realized that the noise of the bar had faded away for a moment; she’d been able to concentrate.
This was why she had always liked being around John. His patience and thoughtfulness, the way he had always seemed far more interested in her well-being than anything else. Once, she remembered, he’d driven her around for a case and waited outside even though she’d interrupted their date. He was a good man. She had no idea what she could possibly have done to deserve him.
“It has been difficult,” she said, eventually. “But I have been seeing my therapist. I went back to work. I even have a new partner.”
“That must have been hard,” John said, sympathetically. Zoe felt a squeeze in her chest as she nodded. “What’s she like?”
Zoe felt the heaviness in her heart lift a little at the distraction. John was like that. Always knowing when the conversation needed to move on. “He,” she corrected. “He is insufferable, really. A rookie who thinks he is the best agent ever to come out of training. But we solved the last case together, so I suppose he is not all that bad.”
John flashed her a quick grin. “He’s not good-looking, too, is he? I hope I don’t have competition.”
Zoe laughed in spite of herself. “Believe me,” she said. “Aiden Flynn is not competition.”
There was a buzzing in her pocket then, something that she felt even above the sensory overload of the bar, and she reached for her phone quickly. Not that she wanted the distraction—in fact, things were going so much better than she expected. But she was an FBI agent, and you didn’t just ignore a call.
She felt her heart sink as she looked at the screen. She hadn’t been here for ten minutes, and it was Special Agent in Charge Leo Maitland’s number flashing up. In all probability, their date was over.
“I have to take this,” she said, regretfully.
“It’s okay,” John said, with a smile. “Work, right? Go ahead.”
Zoe nodded and got up, her mind tracing the quickest route to the door between the moving bodies of the bar, answering the call as she went.
“Agent Zoe Prime,” she said.
“Prime,” Maitland repeated, his voice a bark in her ear that she made out easily even above the music. “Get here ASAP. We have an urgent case.”
The line cut off almost immediately, before Zoe had managed to get out her affirmative reply. His urgency was infectious; she couldn’t hesitate. She stepped out along the sidewalk and back toward her car, almost breaking into a run as she went.
CHAPTER THREE
Zoe stepped in through the doors of the J. Edgar Hoover Building without paying much attention. It was soothing, in many ways, to come back to headquarters like this; every line of the place was so familiar to her that she could let the numbers fade into the distance. But at the same time, it was so familiar that any little change was jarring, setting the numbers into a domino fall of wrongness that distracted her utterly. She tried not to fixate on the scuffed and folded edge of a carpet that had clearly been damaged somehow in the last week, and took the stairs up to SAIC Maitland’s office.
The climb was not a short one, and Zoe knew exactly how many stairs she had to go before she got there, but the physical exertion was welcome. It was a way to push herself differently, to try to quiet out the numbers crowding in her head. It didn’t always work. But at least she could calculate her own elevated heartbeat, which was useful and interesting, rather than the mundane and not at all useful numbers the buildings and her coworkers threw up.
Special Agent Aiden Flynn was already standing out in the hall waiting for her, which irritated her a little. He had probably taken the elevator, which was almost like cheating given that she had taken the longer and harder route. Still, there was an upside to his beating her there: they could go in together without Zoe having to wait around.
“Been out on the town?” Flynn asked jokingly, nodding at Zoe’s attire. She took in his own clothing—much more casual than she was used to seeing him in, jeans and a Henley, like he’d been sitting around at home—but didn’t bother to reply.
Zoe merely nodded a greeting and knocked on the door right away, listening for Maitland’s deep voice urging her to come in. She stepped inside and faced her boss, which was no small task. At six foot three, with a forty-five—no, she realized; now a forty-six-inch chest, and biceps that were fifteen inches around, the man was intimidating at the best of times.
But under the graying buzzcut, Maitland wasn’t really so bad as all that. He had been kind to her over the last couple of months, giving her and Flynn easier cases to work on, time to work through the pain of losing Shelley. It had been difficult to come back to work for the last case, which Maitland had insisted Zoe was the best fit for. He had been right—but she’d been grateful for the break. Cases that took a day to solve and involved minimal contact with other human beings were always better on her mind.