The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(38)

We heal, mostly, but even scars can bleed. The young women adopted by this team know that better than most.

Then again, I think, as Bran’s fingers move over my hair, tucking away or smoothing down stray wisps like he used to do for his sister and her friends, so does this team.





13

Dinner is lively, and the careful avoidance of so many uncomfortable subjects is so practiced, so smooth, it doesn’t even seem awkward when someone brushes up against the boundary of one of those forbidden areas. Mostly. I head into the kitchen to make some tea—I’ve gotten two of Vic’s three daughters hooked on it when they’ve been home from school—and hear heavy footsteps follow me. “Would you like some tea, Ian?”

He chuckles, moving to sit on the almost-circular bench in the breakfast nook. “Thank you, yes.”

Vic’s tap is old and a little slow, so it takes a while to get enough water into the kettle. Once it’s on the burner, I pull down one of the tins of tea. There’s an entire drawer of novelty tea infusers, many of them gifted by Priya, who frequently pops across the Channel to England when she’s home in Paris. I sort through them, pulling out one that links via chain to a floating rubber ducky, and another with a flailing astronaut that clips over the edge of the cup. The filled infusers go into two mugs, and I set them by the stove to wait.

“My first time meeting Inara and Victoria-Bliss,” Ian says as I sit across from him.

“You’ve heard about them, surely.”

“Often.” He laughs again. “Haven’t heard Brandon so aggrieved since he was a teenager. They have a gift for pushing his buttons, so I hear.”

“They really do. They mostly mean well, anymore. They sort of broke each other in.”

“The girls? Or Brandon?”

“It was a mutual experience, from what I hear. It took him and the girls a while to decide they actually like each other.”

The kettle shrieks and I get up to turn off the burner. A minute later I return to the table with the mugs, setting the one with the astronaut infuser in front of him. “It’ll need a few minutes.”

He looks morosely into the mug. “Doc wants me to cut the caffeine. Switch to tea.”

“A lot of teas have caffeine, some of them more than coffee, even. Did the doctor give you a list?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“I can write one out for you if you like.”

“Thank you. There’s no hurry.”

He’s followed me into the kitchen to say something, to have some particular conversation, but he doesn’t seem ready to start it. I tap the floating ducky, watching it bob on the surface of the slowly darkening water. Three and a half minutes of silence later, laughter and conversation drifting out from the living room down the hall, I pull out the infusers and set them on a folded paper towel.

“I wasn’t sure I believed him at first when he told me you two were dating,” he says finally. “Just about everyone had given up hope that ‘Brandon’ and ‘dating’ would ever be said together.”

I swirl my tea in the mug, then take a sip.

“Even his mother didn’t ask him if he was going to settle down and get married. He was always going to drift through flings and bar meets and things that didn’t ask anything of him. And then, thirty-eight years old, he suddenly has his first girlfriend. A teammate, no less.”

“Someone who, at first glance, looks enough like his missing sister to be unsettling?”

He nods, eyeing me appraisingly. “You’re good with connections, Eliza, with connecting the dots. Seeing the pattern. Valuable skill for an agent.”

“Not always a valuable skill for a girlfriend.”

“Heh, no, I’d imagine not,” he chuckles. “It can seem a bit like mind-reading.”

Mercedes’s ex-girlfriend used to yell at her about “using her agent voice” to calm her down when she was freaking out about something. No matter how separate we keep our lives from our work—and no one on this team is very good at that—some things simply bleed through, whether by training or by instinct.

“And now that the impossible has happened, everyone wants to know when he’s getting married and having kids.”

“Xio and Paul don’t push,” I protest.

“No, his parents don’t, but the rest of the family does, and half the neighborhood. They can’t see the miracle that’s him dating in the first place. Three years together. It’s impressive.”

That’s when it clicks. “Ian Matson, are you giving me a shovel talk?”

He at least has the grace to look sheepish, and takes a giant gulp of too-hot tea to mask his flush.

“You are. That is absolutely what this is.”

“It’s nearly what this is,” he manages. Then he sighs and scrubs a hand over his face, and just like that, he looks as old as when he stepped into the conference room this afternoon. Older than he is, maybe as old as he feels. “Connie and I never had children. Never tried to find out why, because neither of us wanted the other to feel guilty. Brandon’s the closest thing we’ve ever had to a son. And I’m not afraid you’ll hurt him. People hurt each other, especially when they love each other. What matters is why, and what you do after.”