Luke had not expected her.

Out of everyone the Bureau could have sent, Emily was the one person he had least wanted to see standing outside his door tonight. For a moment, even he had nothing ready. He stepped aside and let her in, then closed the door.

She moved into the apartment slowly, looking around the way people do when a space tells them something the person inside it didn't intend to share. The apartment was small and plain—a sofa, a low table, a narrow kitchen behind a half-wall, one lamp casting tired light over furniture that had never quite become comfortable. Clean. But empty in the specific way of a place where someone was living without settling. She took it in without comment, and whatever she made of it stayed behind her expression.

Luke gestured toward the sitting area. Emily sat, but her eyes kept moving across the room for another moment before returning to him.

The silence between them wasn't empty. It had weight on both sides.

Luke broke it first.

"The incident." He kept his voice even, almost careless. "I was impulsive. Got an idea about testing my ability and lost patience. You know how power users can get."

Emily gave him a long look. Something held tightly behind her calm expression moved, faintly, without breaking through.

"That's it?"

"Yeah."

She didn't smile.

Luke leaned back slightly. "Why come yourself, though? This late?" A pause—gentler than everything else he'd said. "Sara and Sera will be waiting."

"The girls are with my parents." Her tone stayed level, but had cooled. "What I need to know is how you're going to handle this."

He gave her a puzzled look. "Handle what? I explained myself."

"Don't tell me you don't know your permit application has been delayed."

That landed differently.

His frown came without effort. "They delayed it? For how long?"

She didn't answer. She only watched him.

He understood immediately.

Director Vale. Of course. That man hadn't changed at all.

Luke let out a quiet breath. A faint mockery came into his voice—easier than the alternative. "So what, you came to get revenge?"

He already knew, roughly, why she'd come. But he kept up the persona of the original Luke: deflecting, performing carelessness.

Emily was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice had dropped.

"I came to cover your tracks." A beat. "I am not a petty person, Luke."

She didn't wait for a response. "I also want to know what actually happened in that alley."

Something moved through his chest that he kept off his face.

"I told you everything."

"Luke." She leaned forward slightly. "Did you lose your memory, or something?"

Her voice tightened—not quite anger. Something underneath it.

"You were one of the best agents in the entire Bureau." She held his gaze. "And I learned from you. Everything—from the very beginning. I can look at that alley and know something happened there." Her voice went quiet. Hard in the way of something controlled under pressure. "You can't fool me."

He said nothing.

He had walked in expecting a routine check. A tired junior agent running down a standard inquiry. He had built his calculations around that expectation. He had not factored in Emily—and he certainly had not factored in Emily turning his own methods against him with the same precision he'd once used to teach them.

For a few seconds, he only looked at her. Calmly. As if nothing she'd said had reached him.

Emily stood up.

She crossed toward him, and he stayed where he was.

"If I'm right," she said quietly, "your hideout is nearby. If I call the Bureau right now and ask them to search the area around that alley—" she stopped in front of him, close enough that he had to hold himself deliberately still—"I may find something. Right?"

Her eyes came up to his.

"Stand up."

He didn't want to argue with her. Not now.

He stood.

They were face to face, and for one moment she simply looked at him. Then her hands moved to his shirt—pushing at the fabric, checking his torso, the way someone searches for a wound they've been trying not to imagine.

Luke caught her wrists. "What are you doing?"

She didn't answer.

She pulled free—and then both arms were around him, her face pressed against his chest, her grip tight in the way of someone holding on rather than reaching. And then she was crying. Not the controlled kind. Her voice broke without warning, and she held him harder while the tears came—

"I thought something had happened to you."

Her body was shaking.

"If something really happened to you—" the words came apart between breaths—"what was I supposed to say to our daughters?"

Her grip tightened until he could feel it through the fabric.

"Please," she whispered, "don't do anything reckless. I don't want to lose you forever."

Luke stood still, arms at his sides.

He knew how this ended. Not this moment—the larger arc. He'd read the shape of the original Luke's marriage: the slow erosion, the suspicion, the way he had kept forcing Emily into a choice until choosing him had become the harder one. He knew she would stop, eventually. He knew she didn't know it yet.

But none of that simplified what it felt like to stand inside her grief.

He couldn't be cruel to someone carrying this. The daughters were real. The tears against his chest were real. Whatever the original Luke had been—reckless, forever pushing at the edges of her patience—the damage was real too.

He brought his hands up slowly and held her, lightly, without saying anything, because nothing honest would have helped.

Gradually, she went quiet.

She didn't let go.

Then she lifted her head and looked up at him—too close, her eyes still wet, her breath unsteady. Something moved across her face that she wasn't quite managing. Her gaze dropped—briefly, involuntarily—to his mouth.

She moved forward.

Luke felt it a half-second before it became something he had to act on. He brought his hands to her shoulders and stepped back.

Emily stopped. She blinked, and the focus returned to her eyes. Then the full weight of what had almost happened arrived in her expression—the colour rising in her face, her hands falling away from him, her eyes going somewhere past his shoulder.

She didn't speak. Neither did he.

The heater hummed. Snow pressed silently against the glass. The lamp threw the same tired light over the same plain furniture it had when she walked in, but everything in the room felt slightly different now—charged, the air rearranged. She stepped back and looked somewhere that wasn't him.

Between them, a line had been crossed that neither of them had been walking toward. And there was no clear path back to the side they'd been standing on before.