Page 94 of Code Name: Harbor

“Yes, it does,” he agrees. “That’s as crazy as our lives get after tonight, okay?”

I’m smiling now, my eyes prickling with tears of relief. “Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Pizza. Tomorrow.”

“Pizza tomorrow. I love you, Josie. Go do your day. I’ll pick you up when you’re ready to come home.”

Home.

I want it more than anything.

After we hang up, I stand with my phone in my hand and my back against the cold tile. I let myself have ten seconds of feeling all of it at once—the sting of being benched, the guilt of telling Finn about the op, the fear sitting low in my gut, and underneath all of it the warm impossible fact I’m in love with a man who’s going to be my home starting tomorrow.

I give myself thirty seconds.

Then I push off the tile, run the cold water, and press my wet hands to my face. I look at myself in the mirror all flushed, bright-eyed, and managing to hold it together.

Tonight I’ll sit at Finn’s and twiddle my thumbs and wait for a phone call telling me how the operation went.

Tomorrow there’s pizza.

I dry my hands and I go back to work.

CHAPTER 23

Finn

I’m in my mother’s kitchen, even though she’s long dead and I haven’t been here in years. It smells like the powdered creamer she kept in a coffee can because real milk was too expensive and only to be used for my cereal.

I’m sitting at the card table where we ate every meal when I was a child. It had a folded matchbook under one leg so it wouldn’t wobble. The linoleum’s peeling up at the seam by the stove and there’s a water stain on the ceiling shaped like the state of Florida.

It’s exactly as I remember it and deep in my subconscious, I know it’s a dream, yet the details are frighteningly vivid.

Mom’s at the counter in her blue housedress, the one with the faded daisies, pouring hot water over a tea bag she’s already used once today.

“Sit up straight,” she says, not turning around. “You always slump when you’re thinking too hard.”

“I’m not slumping.”

“You’re slumping, Finn.”

Begrudgingly, I sit up.

She brings the mug over and sets it on the table and lowers herself into the chair across from me with the small sigh she makes at the end of every day. It’s the sound of a woman whose feet hurt from standing at a register for nine hours. She wraps both hands around her mug, knuckles swollen but eyes kind.

“I’m proud of you,” she says.

It’s not something she ever said to me before and my chest flares with warmth. “Yeah?”

“So proud.” Her eyes shine. “My boy. The best there ever was. People talk, you know. They say there’s never been a smuggler like you. Not in this country. Not in the whole world, maybe.” She reaches across and pats my hand. “And you did it all yourself. From nothing. From this.” She gestures at the kitchen, the peeling floor, the Florida stain. “Look what you made of yourself.”

I should be happy she’s proud. That’s all I ever wanted… to make her proud. To make enough that she’d never reuse a tea bag again.

But something’s wrong with it.

“Mom,” I say slowly, the way you talk in a dream, like through a long tunnel. “I’m giving it up.”