Page 71 of Breathe

“Oh.” She turned her head into Kane’s side.

“Not yet,” he soothed, moving his hand to rub her back. “You can stay here as long as you like.”

Just stay, a voice in her head said. Just stay here.

No, she answered. This isn’t my life.

The phone rang again, and Carl, who was closest, threw Kane the handset. He kept one arm around Ellen as he pressed the button. He listened for a moment and then said, “What? Today? No, I’m glad to hear it, but...” He took his arm away from her to scrape it through his hair. “What time? Okay. Thanks.” He hung up, looked around at the three of them. “They caught the third arsonist. They’re having a press conference at four.”

“Where was he?” asked Carl.

“In Canada. That’s all the agent told me.”

“Do you have to go all the way up there?” asked Ellen. She was counting the minutes she had left with him as it was.

“No, they said the press conference will be here. I think Leo might have had something to do with that. I’d better call him.”

“Kane,” said Carl. “Let Leo do the conference. You didn’t sleep last night.”

Kane stood up, fast. “No. It has to be me, as I’ve been telling you from the beginning.” He towered over Ellen, and today, all she wanted to do was grab him around the legs and not let him go. Until she had to, anyway.

Carl didn’t seem cowed. “They know about Ellen. They’ll understand.”

“Yeah, sure. They’ll understand that I put my private life before a couple of thousand jobs.”

“That’s what people do,” Carl said mildly.

Kane turned back to Ellen. “I’ll just be gone a couple of hours. That’s okay, isn’t it, hon? You see that I have to be there, don’t you?”

She saw that he was once again refusing offers of help; refusing to give himself the comfort of knowing other people had his back. She’d hoped that she’d given him that for a while, but now here she was, running to him as soon as things got tough in her life, just like his sisters, just like everyone else. It was another reason they wouldn’t have worked. “Sure, of course,” she said.