Page 101 of Tag
I almost laughed. “Yeah.”
Her braid was coming loose, wisps escaping to frame her face. She tucked one behind her ear, then looked past me to Lindsey, who had stopped shaking and started sleeping, the kind of sleep that takes and keeps.
“Thank you,” Harper said, and the words weren’t fragile. They were flint striking steel.
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “We’re not done.”
Her eyes met mine—steady, assessing, a challenge and an invitation in the same breath. “Good,” she said. “Because neither am I.”
Faron jerked his head toward the hall. “Carter. Walk with me.”
I followed him out. The ER buzz settled back into itself—monitors, low voices, the life-and-death rhythm that keeps going no matter what you drag through its doors.
At the corner, Faron stopped. “First day,” he said. “You didn’t screw it up.”
“I’ll put that on a plaque.”
He huffed what passed for a laugh. “Harper Vale,” he added, like he’d been reading my mind. “Works nights. Doesn’t rattle. The kind who puts herself between the world and the person bleeding.”
“I noticed.”
He started walking again. “Keane’s pulling cams from Coast Highway. He said tattoo guy has two prior arrests tied to a warehouse near Oceanside Boulevard. We move in three hours.”
“Three hours it is.”
When I glanced back through the glass, Harper was at Lindsey’s bedside, head bent, hand steady. She didn’t look like someone who wanted saving. She looked like someone who had made a decision a long time ago and kept making it every day since.
I knew that feeling. It was the only one that had pulled me out of Idaho.
Three hours until wheels up. Three hours to learn a new city, a new team, a new woman’s name in my bones.
I didn’t know it yet, but this was the moment my old life stopped clinging.
And the new one started to bite.
