With a flush, she guessed she’d spoken aloud. “I always told Daniel . . .” She paused, wondering if she had the stuffing left in her to go there. “I told him that it was never too late. That the things he’d done in the past didn’t have to define his future. I think toward the end, he’d given up on himself. He’d stolen from my father and me and his friends. He’d been arrested burglarizing a house and also on felony theft of an auto and then while trying to hold up a liquor store. That’s how I got involved with doing pro bono. I was in and out of various jails for the five years before his death. I felt like I wasn’t helping him—but maybe I could someone else, you know? And I did . . . I did help people.”

“Grier—”

She waved him off as her voice hitched. She was finished with crying. There was going to be no more of that and no more dwelling on what couldn’t be changed. “Do you want to go through this now?”

As she indicated the dossiers, he shrugged and went to the door, settling into a lean against the jamb. “I really just came to check on you.”

In the still air, his low-lidded eyes warmed her from the inside out. Such a contradiction he was . . . between his trained-killer job and his Boy Scout heart.

She glanced down at his picture. “You look like you’re tracking something here.”

“I was about to get on a plane, actually. I had the feeling someone was watching, but I couldn’t tell from which direction. I was waiting at an airbase to go overseas.” He cleared his throat like he was sweeping the memory from his mind. “Your father’s passed out upstairs. He spent about two hours on the phone, as far as I can tell.”

“It’s been that long?” She glanced at her watch, and as she shifted her wrist around, she became aware of all the kinks in her body. Stretching her arms over her head, her spine popped. “How are things going?”

“I don’t know. Before he lay down, he told me that as long as we can make it until tomorrow night, we’re in business. He’s pulled multiple contacts from the CIA, NSA, and the presidential cabinet, and we’re meeting right here so that I don’t have to move. The missing piece is Jim Heron—we’re still waiting for him to get back—although if we have to, we’ll go forward without him.”

“Have you gotten a . . . response? You know, from them.”

“No.”

Fear tickled across her ribs and hit her heart like a battery charge. “Can you last until tomorrow night.”

“If that’s the way it has to be, yes.”