“You’re joking! I mean, you have to be joking, right? You can’t possibly think this is a good idea!”

“Completely wrong, my dear, sorry to tell you. Caleb’s been telling me for months now that he wants to get out of town, and it sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I already talked to Finnley, and she’s talked to Travis. He doesn’t want you coming in, not when everything’s so up in the air. So you don’t have the excuse of having to go into the office. And if Weston thinks getting out of town is the best thing for you, then that’s what we need to do.”

“Wait a minute. So you two are going to come along? You don’t even know where we’re going. I don’t even know where we’re going. I don’t even want to go!”

As was the case with so many things over the last couple of months, Clara found herself completely flabbergasted and more than a little bit unsettled.  When Weston had returned to his apartment, the place she’d been pretty much terrified to leave after how dangerous he’d made the outside world sound, he’d been a state unlike she’d ever seen in a person before. He’d come crashing inside, his face drained of blood and the veins in his neck throbbing. When he’d told her that he’s been suspended from the force, she’d begged him to let her go so that he could turn back around and tell the captain he’d fixed the problem. Instead, Weston had made it clear that what he wanted was to leave, to go somewhere where he didn’t even have to think about New York City. He didn’t want to think about the city, about the man hunting Clara, or about the way the force had betrayed him. When she’d told him she didn’t think going out of town was going to solve anything, there had been another fight between them, and this one had been a big one. It had ended with her fleeing to her temporary room and calling Elsie. She’d fully expected Elsie to take her side, but instead it went the exact opposite way. As it turned out, telling her about Weston’s desired trip had been the catalyst for that very thing, and two days later she, Weston, Elsie, and Caleb were on a private plane to Hawaii. When Clara thought about it, she could hardly understand how it had come to pass that she could be whisked away when all she wanted to do was bury her head beneath her pillow.

The worst part of it was, this couldn’t have been more perfect in terms of what Marlin Grant had wanted from her. It was so perfect, in fact, that Clara couldn’t stop asking herself if he had somehow been the mastermind to orchestrate everything. It wasn’t really possible for such a thing to be. Of course it wasn’t, but it might as well have been for the massive amounts of good it was going to do the man. And she couldn’t tell anyone. She couldn’t tell Elsie, couldn’t tell Weston, she couldn’t tell anyone that Marlin had tasked her with providing him with information about them all. That was what he’d wanted from her, just to have as much information as he could get his grubby little hands on about Elsie and Caleb, both. He wanted the information for reasons he felt no need to divulge but that Clara could only imagine were the worst kind of devious. He’d also made it very clear that if she didn’t do as she was told, she would not only continue to be in terrible danger, but also that he wouldn’t be giving her the information he was so sure she would kill for. She’d tried very hard to convince both him and herself that he couldn’t possibly be privy to any information she and her hacker friends couldn’t have found themselves, but he’d been very convincing in his assertion that there were just some things only money could buy. Those things, those things that money could buy and she couldn’t, those were things she insisted she didn’t want but in her heart, she knew he had her hooked. There wasn’t only the threat of continued violence, something that was terrible enough all on its own, but now there was the idea that Marlin might actually have found something out about her family, a thing she had tried to do on her own and given up on long ago. If there was a chance of that, even the smallest chance, she couldn’t let it go. She was on this trip with her best friend and her best friend’s lovely man, the two of them and a man she couldn’t help but think of more and more, and it was something that should have been a good time. It should have been, but it wasn’t—because all she could think about was whether or not she would actually betray them all in order to save herself. There was always the chance that nothing of any use would come up, nothing she would be able to bring back to Marlin, but somehow, she doubted it. That would be too good for her, and things weren’t going so smoothly for her as of late. This was just another burden for her to shoulder, another one to pile on top of all of the others, and it was one she carried with her for the first two days of her trip. It was only when Weston confronted her that she even became aware of how down she’d been. That was how accustomed she’d become to feeling like everything was on the verge of totally falling apart.

“Clara, do you want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

“About whatever it is that’s been bugging you. I’m assuming it’s got something to do with me forcing this trip.”

“I wouldn’t exactly say you forced it.”

“I kind of did, actually, but I won’t say I’m sorry for it.”

“Is that so?” Clara laughed, looking at Weston’s smiling face, a smile she hadn’t ever seen there before. “That’s a very strange apology, Weston, if an apology was what you were going for.”

“I guess it is.”

“You don’t need to though. You don’t need to apologize.”

“Okay, then I’m at a loss. Is it because you feel responsible for the suspension? Because you shouldn’t. I made all of my own choices, and that’s what got me here so don’t add that to the things you have to worry about. In fact, you should probably just stop worrying all together.”

“Stop worrying? That doesn’t exactly seem like a viable thing for me right now. There’s kind of a psycho after me, in case you forgot.”

“Sure, but a psycho in New York.”

“Right.”

“And we’re not in New York.”

“Okay…”

“So then stop worrying about it! Do you know what worrying like that gets you? Nothing! It gets you nothing, and believe me, I should know.”

Clara, who was sitting at a little cocktail table in their lavish hotel’s bar, watched Weston in frank amazement. This man sitting across from her, he was nothing like the one she’d come to vaguely know during her brief stint of disrupting his life back in the Big Apple. This version of Weston was almost easy going, or as close to that as a man like him could ever get. It was almost like she was sitting with a twin or something, only a twin that wasn’t quite so glum or weighed down. How was it possible that when she was feeling more broken than ever, he was becoming this entirely different kind of man? Was it really as simple as him having gotten away from the city that had been the source of all of his trouble, or was this some kind of karmic joke. Because if she’d had any question in her mind of breaking the one cardinal rule Marlin had delivered upon her before she’d taken her leave of him in that awful prison, the rule that she was not to tell a single-living soul any of the details of their meeting, seeing this new version of Weston would have put that question to rest. She couldn’t possibly say anything to him now, not when he finally looked like he might be something close to happy.

It was something that made her feel a little bit giddy despite everything else going on. There was a level of magnetism in him when he was like this that couldn’t be taught, and she longed to lose herself in it, to let him convince her that there was no point in being worried about anything when they were in a place like Hawaii. Still, she couldn’t quite understand how he could make so light of this whole thing, but it was subtle enough that she was willing to do her best to look past it.

“What?” He laughed, his eyes sparkling with something that looked an awful lot like mischief. “How come you’re looking at me like that?”

“I don’t know. You just...you don’t seem the same as you were before.”

“You think?”

“I do. Not so angry, not so stressed. You’re almost acting like nothing’s going on at all.”

“Because how else are we supposed to act? Things definitely aren’t going the way we planned, not for either of us. It’s a shitty situation all around, and there’s nothing we can do about it, but we’re here, aren’t we? We’re here, and so we might as well really be here. That’s the thing I’ve been noticing, see? That’s the fucking thing.”

He was up on his feet now, and Clara had to resist the urge to do the exact same thing. There was a mania in him now, a mania she could feel vibrating in the air, and it was nothing if not contagious. There were plenty of things she wanted to ask him right now, plenty of things that didn’t make any sense to her, but she didn’t want to say a word because she didn’t want to do anything that might stop him from being this new, strange person. She wanted him to sweep her up and away so that she couldn't remember anything of the life she had waiting for her back home.

“You know about my parents,” he went on, looking at her so intensely now that she thought she might actually melt right there where she stood. “I guess I told you that. What I didn’t tell you about was my wife.”

“I know.”

“You...what? You what?”

“I know. I know about her. Frankie told me at the bar, that night when I got attacked.  I know what happened to her, and I’m so, so sorry.”

She hadn’t meant to say it; She could have kicked herself for saying anything at all right after she’d told herself that staying quiet was the only way to keep things going well, and now here she was, admitting the only thing she could have said to make him not only stop talking to her the way he was but also to make him completely hate her. She shut her eyes tight, willing time to move backwards so that she could unsay that one truth that should never have been spoken. At the same time, she was sure that any minute now he would shout, say something awful that was also true. He would tell her about how much he wished she’d never come into his life because she had no doubt that it was the truth. For the last couple of months, everything she’d touched had only gotten worse than it had been before, and there was no reason that would be any less true in paradise. When she felt his hands on her, she almost cried out as if she’d been burned. Her eyes shut even tighter, waiting for the inevitable anger to hit. When he spoke and the voice was gentle, she was almost sure it was a trick.

“Clara. Open your eyes.”

“I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because. I’m afraid of what you’re going to say.”

“Open your eyes.”

When she did so, she found that Weston was kneeling right there in front of her, kneeling on the soft earth with his face so close to his that she couldn’t help her mind going straight back to unexpected kiss. And what a thing to be thinking of when things were surely on the verge of turning so bad. If she was really stupid enough to allow a thing like that to happen, she deserved every disappointment she got. If she was stupid enough to have ever allowed herself to think that kiss had meant anything at all, she deserved the worst.

“Are you looking at me?”

“You know I am. My eyes are open now.”

“But are you looking at me?”

“Yes,” she whispered, feeling herself on the verge of tears and desperate to do something to stop it, “I’m looking at you.”

“It doesn’t matter right now. When we go back to New York, we’ll be going back to the real world and that’s something that can’t be helped. But right here? Right now? I don’t want to think about any of that. All I want to do is kiss you again.”

“Me?” she asked stupidly, feeling suddenly so terribly shy she couldn’t stand it. “Are you sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure. I haven’t been able to think about it since my apartment. Come here.”

He pulled her in towards him, and that was it. She was a goner. The two of them were supposed to meet Elsie and Caleb for dinner, presumably to go over the details of how they were all moving forward with their efforts to nab the person tormenting her, but they never made it. They only made it as far as Weston’s room, and even the time it took to make that short journey felt like an excruciating eternity. When Weston finally got her alone, they did not leave his room for a long, long time. When Clara awoke in his arms the next morning, awoke next to this sleeping man she cared more for than she would ever have thought possible for having known him for such a short amount of time, she finally had an answer to the question that had been weighing on her since her visit to Marlin Grant’s prison. It might not have been the easiest decision, not the easiest nor the safest, but it was hers and having made it, she slipped back into the most restful sleep she could remember having had in a long, long time.