It was inevitable that he would end up exactly where he now found himself, trying to figure out how to convince Samiah that everything between them had not been a lie.

“Collins? Collins!”

Startled by his boss’s uncharacteristic bellow, Daniel snapped to attention. Shit. He hadn’t even noticed that Dwyer had joined the meeting.

“Sorry, sir,” Daniel said. “What was that?”

“How quickly can you be back here for the in-person debrief? I want you here by tomorrow afternoon, at the latest,” he tacked on, not giving Daniel a chance to respond to his initial question.

“Well, I guess that means I’ll be there tomorrow,” he replied.

Dwyer’s curt nod signaled that the matter was settled. Daniel slouched in his chair and listened as the rest of the crew gave a quick rundown of where things stood with their current operations. He knew he was deep in uncharted territory when he couldn’t scrounge up an ounce of pleasure over news that Bryce Stewart’s job had suffered a setback. There was no room for gloating here. They were all on the same team; they all had the same goal. Putting the bad guys away.

And they all had to make sacrifices in order to get the job done. Daniel just never thought his sacrifice would be so fucking painful.

Once the meeting wrapped up, he logged off the computer for the last time and packed up the four external hard drives, securing them in the laptop case he would carry with him on the plane. He checked his email and saw that a flight had already been booked for him for ten a.m. tomorrow morning.

His eyes fell shut.

Daniel felt raw. It took several tries before he was able to swallow past the knot of thick emotion lodged in his throat. He doubted he’d ever get past the hollowed-out feeling in his chest. The hole there couldn’t possibly be filled.

He shut the lamp off on the desk and made his way out of the darkened room. He found Quentin in the kitchen sipping on a bottle of chocolate milk, his butt perched against the counter.

“How’d it go?” Quentin asked. “You the star of FinCEN?”

Daniel shrugged. “I did my job. That shouldn’t make me a star.”

“Bullshit. This wasn’t an easy win. You deserve to celebrate it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not really in the mood for celebrating.”

Quentin took a sip from the bottle, then said, “I know you’re feeling like shit right now, but you did the right thing.”

“Of course I did the right thing,” Daniel said. “And we have four people in custody to show for it.”

“I’m talking about that other thing. The thing you had to do in order to get the job done. She’s going to be pissed at you, but if what you had was real, she’ll eventually forgive you.”