JAKE

When the tech team sent the photo, I already knew what I was going to see.

They didn't.

To them, it was just another assignment—enhance the blurry image, clean it up, run it through the system, and generate a digital reconstruction of what the unsub's face might look like. Just routine. Something they could do while completely detached. Just another fragment of evidence in a case that had already eaten months of our lives.

But... I had already solved it.

Somewhere deep down, I had known. The moment I had seen that reflection—however distorted, however fractured by beveled glass and layers of software—something inside me had already screamed her name. Not just because of the face. It was the way she held herself. That poise, that stillness I could pick out in a crowd of thousands.

Still... seeing it rendered clearly—finally, undeniably real—broke something in me I hadn't even realized was still intact.

The cursor blinked next to the filename as if waiting for me to act, to confirm, to move. But I didn't. Not right away.

I just sat there, staring. Then, finally, I clicked, and she stared back at me.

Emma.

My Emma.

No, not mine. Not anymore. Maybe not ever...

I just stared at the image—at the truth I never wanted confirmed—while something behind my ribs slowly gave out. My lungs didn't feel like they were working right, and my fingers had gone numb where they hovered over the keyboard.

All I could see was her. Not the woman in the enhanced image, not the thief on paper. Her.

Standing on the rooftop of the Met, just a silhouette back then. A shadow I couldn't identify. But she had always been her.

Even then, she was calm, composed, sharp as glass, and just as dangerous. Witty with the few words she shared. Daring with everything she did.

I had watched a ghost vanish into the night, never realizing she already had a name. A smile that would soon undo me. A laugh that would echo in the spaces I didn't know were hollow. A heartbeat that I would come to know by memory as she fell asleep against my chest.

The woman I had been chasing all along was the same woman who had kissed me just last night. Who curled into me like that space between my arms had always been meant for her. Who made love to me like the world didn't exist beyond the walls of our apartment.

The same woman who slipped a sketch into my hand, a quiet drawing of us by the lake, wrapped in soft lines and softer memories, and smiled like we had forever.

But we didn't. And maybe I should've known that too.

Maybe I should've seen it in the way her fingers lingered on my cheek. In the way she looked at me, like she was memorizing me, like she knew she was about to leave something behind.

Maybe I should've realized that moment was a goodbye. The kind of goodbye that didn't ask for forgiveness. The kind that just... ached.

And maybe I did know. Maybe some part of me felt it, but I buried it, because I didn't want to hear it just yet.

I didn't remember standing up from my desk. Didn't remember grabbing my coat. Couldn't even tell you what route I took or how I crossed the bridge.

All I knew was the burning in my chest and the tremor in my hands that wouldn't quit, not even when I clenched the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned bone-white.

Snow had started falling sometime during the night. I hadn't noticed. Not while I was huddled in that office, coming to terms with the fact that the last year of my life—every kiss, every laugh, every late-night whisper—had been built on a lie so brutal it knocked the air from my lungs.

The flakes drifted down in soft, silent waves, coating the windshield like a veil. I didn't bother brushing them off. I just kept driving, letting them blur the world in front of me.

My jaw was locked tight. I didn't even realize it until I tasted blood at the back of my mouth from biting down too hard, too long.

I should've turned around. Should've called Ashford. Should've reported it like any other case.

But this wasn't just any other case. This was the woman who had wrecked everything and still had my heart in her hands.

As I drove, the memories came like ghosts. Fast, relentless, out of order, and each one cutting deeper than the last.

Emma, at that damn coffee shop. Hair loose around her shoulders. Those blue eyes—wide, curious, disarming. Innocent. Even though now I knew they were anything but.

That day, she smiled like she wasn't about to break something open inside me just by looking at me. Like she hadn't already decided to make herself unforgettable.

The woman who made me lower my guard before I even knew I had one. The woman who asked about my work with that soft, careful curiosity, and made it sound like small talk, like harmless conversation over coffee.

The woman who leaned in a little closer every time she laughed. Who held eye contact like it meant something. Who made me feel like I was being seen, not for the badge, not for the job, but for the man underneath.

She had gone to Luke's wedding with me. Wore a shade of green that took my breath away, like she had stepped out of a dream I didn't realize I had been having. She danced with me, laughed with me, made me believe, for the first time in a long time, that love—real, steady, no-catch love—wasn't just something other people got to have.

She kissed me at the top of the Empire State Building. Kissed me like the world had stopped spinning, like there was nothing beneath our feet but air and possibility.

And God, I remember thinking I never wanted to let her go. That maybe, just maybe... I wouldn't have to.

She wore my sweatshirt on lazy Sundays. Danced barefoot in my apartment like she owned the place. Burned pancakes and said it was my fault for being too distracting. Mocked my playlists—said I had the music taste of a teenage boy in the middle of an identity crisis—but still hummed along when she thought I wasn't paying attention.

And she always fell asleep on my chest halfway through movies we never finished, her hand curled against my side, like that was where it belonged, like I was where she belonged.

One night, with the TV still flickering blue light across the room, she whispered something into the dark.

"This is the safest I've ever felt."

And I believed her. That was the part that gutted me the most. I always fucking believed her.

She came with me to Thanksgiving dinner. My mother hugged her twice before she even made it through the door. They cooked together—laughing over mashed potatoes, whispering like old friends—and later, she sat beside her with a paintbrush in hand, helping her finish a half-finished canvas that had been sitting in the kitchen for years.

My father pulled out the family photo album as if she were already one of us. Told her stories I hadn't heard in decades. Let her keep score during our ridiculous backyard baseball game like it was some sacred role.

And Kaylee—Kaylee, who never liked anyone I dated—pulled me aside, looked me dead in the eye, and said, "She makes you less of an asshole. Keep her."

And then there was the lake. That night stripped everything down. No defenses. No guards. Just her and me, under the starlight, and the kind of raw honesty I didn't know I was capable of giving.

I told her I loved her with everything I had. Told her she made me feel alive. And she said it back. She cried. Held me like it meant something. Kissed me like she couldn't bear not to.

And then, that kiss in the rain—hands tangled in each other's clothes, lips pressed together like we were trying to memorize the moment before it slipped away.

We talked about the future that night. A quiet life, maybe even kids, as if we had any right to dream that big.

And then, she asked me that question—"What if the world ended... like right now?"

I remembered the tremor in her voice and the pang in my chest that followed. I thought she was just overwhelmed, caught in the moment.

But now... Now I wonder if some part of her was already mourning it. If she was hurting, even then, knowing deep down that whatever we had could never last.

Because nothing could ever survive when it was built on a lie—and not just any lie. This lie. The kind that rewrote everything. The kind that made you question who the hell you were in their story.

Damn it, Emma.

Now, a part of me wished the world had truly ended that night, after that kiss. Because at least then, it wouldn't hurt like this.

I was getting closer, street by street, block by block—closer to the apartment, closer to her. And I had to remind myself—over and over again—that the woman I was about to face wasn't her.

Not the woman I kissed before heading to work. Not the woman who made me believe there were things that mattered more than arrests and closure rates.

Not the woman who looked at me as if I were her home. Who made me want to stop spinning in circles, to settle down, to build something real, to choose her, over and over, for the rest of my life.

Not the woman I would've burned the whole damn world for. Because the truth was... she was the one who lit the match.

Because before she was my Emma, she was someone else. She was the woman I held at gunpoint on the rooftop of the Met the night of the heist. The woman who had just stolen a Van Gogh painting and vanished before I could get a good look at her.

She was the woman who showed up at a coffee shop on purpose, who smiled at me and slipped into my life like smoke. Who stole my focus, my time, my trust... my heart. And she did it with full intent.

She asked questions about the case, about the investigation. She had listened to me vent about Declan—how much his death haunted me. She let me bleed all over the floor in front of her while she smiled and handed me the knife.

Every plan that fell apart, every lead that vanished, every night I stayed up wondering if I was losing my mind.

It was her. All of it.

She was the saboteur inside my case. The ghost behind every dead end.

And yet, I kissed her last night and held her this morning, like a goddamn fool.

She smiled at me as I left for work, wished me luck, and said she would see me later, like it was any other morning, like we weren't living in a dream she had stitched together from lies.

And now here I was, standing in front of her door, photos in my coat pocket, betrayal burning a hole straight through my chest.

It took three knocks before I even registered what I was doing.

The door creaked open, and there she was—the woman I loved and the woman who ruined me.

Her eyes were glassy, red-rimmed, and her face was pale. She had been crying.

And suddenly, I hated her for it. Because a part of me still wanted to reach for her, wanted to wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her neck and pretend this was all some kind of mistake.

That it wasn't real.

That it could be undone.

That I could still hold on to her without breaking apart.

But I couldn't. We couldn't. And maybe we never could have.

We stared at each other, silence stretching between us, sharp and unbearable, like it had teeth... like it was daring one of us to speak.

She didn't ask why I was there, and I didn't explain—because we both already knew.

I saw it in her. The way her shoulders dropped. The way her breath hitched. The way her eyes faltered—like she had finally stopped pretending.

There was no story this time she could weave. No sarcastic remarks to mask the truth. No carefully crafted lie to soften the blow.

Just her, looking at me, while everything inside me screamed.