Chapter 4

4

Tuesday

L eo stood at the mirror in his bedroom and straightened his tie. His gaze was not on his reflection but on his wife, who lay in the bed behind him with one arm thrown over her eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asked without turning around.

“Yes,” she answered without removing the arm that shielded her eyes from the first rays of the rising sun that filtered through the window and cast her in a faint golden hue.

He frowned and walked over to sit on the edge of the bed. Sasha McCandless-Connelly was a creature of habit, and her habit was to rise before the sun, work out, shower, drink copious amounts of coffee, and then eat breakfast with him and their twins. After breakfast, she walked to her office and, as a rule, was well into her workday before any of her colleagues or employees arrived. Today, however, she’d apparently skipped her workout and was still lazing in bed at the indecent hour of seven o’clock.

“Are you sick?”

The concern in his tone must have reached her. She pulled her arm away from her eyes and dropped it down onto the bed with a soft thud before pushing herself up on her elbows to meet his gaze with her bright green eyes.

“No, Connelly, I’m not sick. I’m tired.”

“Tired,” he repeated.

“Yes, tired.”

What he thought, but didn’t say, was she was always tired. As far as he knew, tired was her natural state; she pushed through her exhaustion. But the woman looking back at him was not a woman who was pushing through.

“You’re sure it’s not more than that?”

“I’m sure,” she said, lifting herself from the bed to kiss him lightly. “I worked late last night, remember?”

Of course he did. But she hadn’t worked that late, not for her anyway. He searched her face carefully. “Work’s going well?”

She hesitated before answering, and he felt that she had been about to say something else.

What she said was, “Honestly? I could use a break, but there’s no room in the schedule for a getaway any time soon.”

“Not even a short trip to the lake house?”

She contemplated it for a fraction of a second, then sighed and slumped back against the padded headboard. “Not even.”

“Maybe we could have a staycation—a long weekend. You could take a day off, a Monday or a Friday.”

“Maybe,” she allowed. “I’ll look at the calendar.”

“I thought hiring an associate was supposed to lessen your workload.”

She blew out a long breath and ran her fingers through her messy hair. “Ellie’s great, but she’s a very junior associate. I need to mentor her to make sure we’re building on a solid foundation.”

“One workday—or even two—without your guidance isn’t going to ruin her forever.”

She shrugged, then cocked her head. “What’s with the suit? Wait, let me guess, you could tell me, but then you’d have to kill me.”

“Something like that. Are you mad?”

“I’m not mad.”

To his surprise and her credit, she appeared to be telling the truth. They’d promised one another to stop keeping secrets, but in this case, Leo was nearly as in the dark as she was.

More than a year ago, his boss had been approached to start up a new shadow agency—one so secretive that Leo and Hank still didn’t know what their actual mission was. It wasn’t a surprise that the wheels of the U.S. government’s bureaucratic machine turned slowly, but this wheel didn’t seem to be turning at all. They’d finally complained loudly enough or to the right set of ears and had been called in for a meeting.

“Hank and I have a meeting with some higher-ups. They didn’t see fit to share an agenda.”

“Oh, you’re about to get promoted again,” she guessed.

“Or fired.”

“Bite your tongue. If you get fired, I’ll never be able to take a day off.” She flopped her arm back over her face.

He laughed. “Should we wait for you for breakfast, or should the kids and I do our own thing?”

She groaned. “Okay, okay, I’m getting up. Start breakfast, and I’ll be down after I shower.”

“No workout today?”

“I’ll do it during lunch. If I can squeeze in a lunch.”

“Busy day?”

“Yeah. I picked up a case for Daniel yesterday.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like you don’t have the bandwidth for that.”

“I don’t. But it’s Daniel. Besides, you gave me a brilliant idea.”

“That sounds like me. What pearl of wisdom did I bestow upon you?”

“This case is perfect for Ellie. I’ll bring her on to help me with it.” She grinned up at him from under her tangled hair.

“I am brilliant,” he agreed.

She laughed and stretched like a cat. Then he caught her eyeing the coffee he’d brought her over an hour ago.

“Don’t drink that,” he warned. “It’s gonna be lukewarm.”

“I need it.” She picked it up, took a cautious sip, and grimaced. “Why is room-temperature coffee so bad?”

He snatched it from her. “Go start the shower. I’ll bring you a fresh mug.”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“You deserve so much more,” he corrected her. Then he planted a kiss on the top of her head. “Now go.”

She pulled herself from the bed and he gave her a gentle push in the direction of their bathroom. He watched her go and considered stopping her and pushing her to tell him what was wrong. Because something was wrong. But he understood her well enough after all these years to know the harder he pushed, the more she’d pull back. She’d talk to him when she was ready. Until then, he’d keep her fed, loved, and caffeinated.

Sasha stood beneath the stream of hot water, clutching a stainless steel travel mug of coffee in her hand. Shower coffee was a new low even for her, but desperate times called for desperate measures. She was tired, just as she’d told Connelly, but she wasn’t just tired—she was more than tired. This was a bone-deep weariness she hadn’t been able to shake for months.

For her entire professional career, she had bounded from bed, if not bright-eyed and bushy tailed, always eager and ready to face her workday. But now, it was as if her brain were wrapped in cotton and her limbs were encased in cement. Getting herself moving physically and mentally was becoming harder every day.

In fact, last night’s scare in the office had been surprisingly comforting. The fear that gripped her when the lights came on in the hall had been the first real spark of energy she’d felt in a long time, and she was gratified that her instinct had been to spring into action rather than to freeze. Not that it mattered, not really. As terrified as she’d been in the moment, she realized the whole thing had almost certainly been a glitch—a problem with the sensitivity setting on the sensor, most likely. She added checking the sensors to her endless mental to-do list, right under getting new shoes for Finn, whose feet were growing at a disconcerting speed.

As she washed and rinsed her hair, she fantasized about checking into some obscure bed-and-breakfast in a European village where she didn’t speak the language and sleeping until mid-morning, then moving into a garden or a pool chair and reading and resting all afternoon. This fantasy filled her with guilt because her husband and her children played no role in it. As if on cue, her phone chirped on the ledge outside the shower to remind her that her law firm—the firm she’d built from nothing, the one that bore her name—was also not in it.

She turned off the shower and stepped out into the steamy bathroom to dry her hair. Then she dressed quickly and swiped a berry-colored lipstick over her mouth. As she stepped into her favorite tan pumps, she promised herself she’d spend some more time digging into what was bothering her. She needed to shake things up, but for the first time in her life, she was at a loss as to how to take action or what action to even take.

But introspection and reflection would have to wait. She needed to get into the office, review her notes on Daniel’s case, and bring Ellie up to speed. That was the thing about handling other people’s problems for a career: it gave her precious little time to deal with her own.

She headed down the stairs with Java winding around her ankles and meowing. At the bottom, she was greeted by Mocha, whose tail thumped excitedly against the hardwood. She bent and gave the cat and the dog each a scratch between the ears before continuing on to the kitchen.

“Morning, sunshine; morning, firecracker.” She dropped a kiss on each of her twins’ damp heads, then smoothed Finn’s cowlick.

“Dad already tried to make it lay down,” he protested.

“It’s a losing battle,” Connelly agreed from the stove where he was flipping pancakes.

“Pancakes? Nice.”

“Blueberry pancakes,” Fiona corrected her. “Whole-wheat blueberry pancakes, Mom, for protein and to give us energy throughout the day.” She took the travel mug from Sasha’s hands and refilled it with all the efficiency of a miniature barista. “Here,” she said.

“Thanks, darling.”

“Mom, sit down,” Finn said. “Rest.”

She shot her husband a look.

He shrugged. “They’re worried about you. We’re all worried about you.”

He balanced an entirely too-high stack of pancakes on a platter and carried it over to the kitchen table.

“These are piled up to the sky,” Sasha said, trying to lighten the mood.

She failed.

Fiona pointed a fork at her. “You need to see your doctor, Mom.”

“I’m not sick, honey. I’m just tired.”

“Then you need an earlier bedtime,” Finn told her. “No screens after dinner.”

“Hoisted by your own petard,” Leo chuckled.

She glared at him. “Hope you don’t get any syrup on your tie.”

“That sounded more like a curse than a hope,” he said with an easy grin, flipping the tie over his shoulder and digging into his breakfast.

The twins giggled, and she smiled. The banter and familiar domestic routine soothed her heart. But she knew it was only temporary. Moments of happiness and joy like these had been increasingly fleeting in recent months. She added this fact to the growing list of things to worry about later and raised her coffee mug to her lips.