Yes, because he had no other choice, not if he wanted to find out who had really killed Phil and set up his witnesses. Yes, because if he had to lose her anyway, he wasn’t going to combine that pain with the horror of sitting out the rest of his life in prison.
No, because it would hurt her. No, because it would break the trust she’d shown in him.
No, because he couldn’t stand to leave her any sooner than he had to.
Too many answers to choose from. He couldn’t get the words out.
He said, “What did Martin mean when he said something was written all over your face?”
“He meant I’m a bad poker player. I always have been.” She exhaled, her breath a white cloud in the freezing air. “He meant that he knew that using a personal car wouldn’t be a problem.” Her eyes met his, and he felt another unbelievable jolt of connection, his soul clicking against hers like a magnet against steel. “Mostly, he meant that after all this is over, after we get you safely to Bergen, he and I are going to look into your case and see what we can do to help your appeal.”
“I don’t have an appeal,” Cooper said automatically, too stunned by everything else to even process it. “No one else wanted to take my case.”
“Then we’ll get you a lawyer. A good one.” She scanned the horizon, and he recognized the tension in her body: she was keeping calm for his sake, but she was worried about them being out in the open. “We should get going.”
A few hours ago, if he’d even imagined sitting in the front seat of a civilian car, his hands and ankles both unchained, Cooper would have pictured himself luxuriating in every single detail.
He could roll his shoulders back, working out a crick that had been there all day. He could stretch out his legs. He could enjoy the almost-forgotten pleasure of being somewhere that didn’t have that stale prison smell to it, that fug of unwashed bodies, cramped living conditions, and bad food. Even the regular transport car had had that smell: it had worked its way into the upholstery, with only Gretchen’s fresh scent alleviating it. All Martin’s car smelled like was clean laundry: there was a cotton-scented air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
But he couldn’t focus on any of that.
All he could think about was that Gretchen had just said she would help him.
She believed him. Not only did she believe him, she believed that the possibility of getting him set free would be worth her time and effort. Appeals could be a long, heartbreaking process, with no certain outcome, and there was no way Gretchen didn’t know that just as well as he did. She would have been dragged up to testify at appeals before, some with good grounds and some with only the flimsiest of justifications; she knew how slowly the machinery of the law could grind. But she was willing to sink herself into that.
For his sake. For him.
He said hoarsely, “Thank you. For everything.”
“You don’t have to thank me for doing the right thing.”
He disagreed, but either way: “I want to thank you for believing it is the right thing.”
“You trusted me,” Gretchen said, and he knew that she was talking about the black car—the black car that had stopped being black, with its gunmen who had somehow been able to mask their faces in confusion and distraction. He had believed her, even though it had all seemed to fly in the face of logic. “It’s only fair for me to trust you back.”
But that wasn’t the same thing. Gretchen was so obviously trustworthy that only an idiot would ever think she didn’t know what she was talking about.
“You really think I’m innocent?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t take her eyes off the road, and for some reason, that made him trust even more that she was telling him the truth. She wasn’t trying to convince him of her sincerity. She was as confused about all this as he was, and she was staying focused on the one thing she was sure of: the job. “I know none of this would stand up in court, but I just can’t see you doing anything like that, not in a thousand years. You could have run back during the shootout, but you didn’t.”
“They were shooting at me, to be fair.”
He didn’t want to argue against his own innocence, but he didn’t want her to co
me up with these objections later, on her own. He wanted her to be sure. He didn’t think he’d be able to stand it if he really accepted that she believed him... and then she decided she thought he was guilty after all.
Gretchen did turn around to look at him then, her mouth curved up at one corner in a kind of playfulness he hadn’t seen in what felt like forever. “So in this scenario, the scenario where you’re guilty, you didn’t run back there because you didn’t want to get shot?”
“Somebody could argue that.”
“Kind of a weird choice to try to shield me with your body, then. A little counterproductive.”
He barely even remembered that. It had been pure instinct, even more elemental and primal than any protecting he’d ever done on the job. He couldn’t stand the thought of her being hurt.
“You’re good, Coop,” Gretchen said softly. “You wouldn’t have sold out your witnesses for a little extra cash. I can’t believe that.”
No one had said that to him, not once since all this had started.