The station was quiet in the early hours, the way it always got after a case closed but before the paperwork finished bleeding.
Camille Jacobs was safe. Mason Juno was in holding, his world of control reduced to a four-by-eight concrete box. Jessa was still crying in an interview room, and the inn manager was busy negotiating her own destruction with a public defender. Everything had a label now: Closed. Pending. Charged.
But Harley didn't feel the weight lift. She sat at her desk, her pen hovering over a report she'd already rewritten twice, staring at a blank line like it might finally tell her what she was supposed to feel. Outside the windows, Grayhaven was a smudge of wet silver and blurred streetlights.
The bullpen was nearly empty. Alex had gone home hours ago. Brian was asleep in the break room, his jacket folded under his head like a sad, makeshift pillow. Lucas was still at his desk, methodically finishing a statement as if he could outrun his own exhaustion with sheer precision.
Isaiah was near the file cabinets. Harley hadn't heard him move. She rarely did. He stopped a few feet from her desk—not looming, but existing in her orbit the way he always did when he didn't know what else to do.
Harley didn't look up. "You're still here," she said quietly.
"So are you," Isaiah's voice was a calm anchor in the room.
A beat passed. Harley finally glanced at him. "What do you want, Isaiah?"
He didn't answer right away, which meant the thought wasn't small. He leaned one shoulder lightly against the file cabinet, trying to look less present. It didn't work.
"You went to the water again," he said.
Harley's mouth tightened. "You following me or monitoring me?"
Isaiah's gaze didn't flinch. "I don't know the difference anymore."
Silence stretched between them. Harley stared back at her report. "I got a message," she said, her voice dropping an octave.
"What kind?"
"The kind that tells you someone sees you even when you're alone."
Isaiah didn't ask to see her phone. He didn't ask what the message said. He just stood there, letting the space hold whatever she couldn't say out loud. Then he spoke.
"Harley." She looked up. His expression was unreadable, but his voice was softer than she was used to. "Stop going places you think you deserve to be hurt in."
Harley's throat tightened. It wasn't a lecture; it was a truth, sharp and uncomfortable. "You think I go there to get hurt?"
"I think you go there because it feels like control," Isaiah countered.
Harley's fingers curled around her pen. "That's not fair."
"No," he said quietly. "It isn't."
The room stayed silent. Harley stared at him, then looked away first. "I don't need you policing me, Isaiah."
"I'm not."
"Then what are you doing?"
Isaiah hesitated. That hesitation was the closest thing to fear Harley had ever seen in him. But he spoke anyway. "I'm trying to make sure you don't become one of the cases we write reports about."
Harley swallowed hard. "You can't control that."
"I know." He pushed off the cabinet and took a half-step closer. "Which is why I'm asking. Let us carry it with you."
The words landed wrong at first—too intimate, too close. Harley's instinct was to recoil, to shut it down with a sharp comment or a humorless laugh. But she wasn't built for pretending tonight. She looked at the restraint in his face and the discipline in his posture.
"Sometimes," she said quietly, "I don't know how."
Isaiah's eyes softened—just barely. "That's fine."
"That's not an answer."
"It is. Because you don't have to know how. You just have to stop trying to do it alone."
Harley stared at him. "I don't want to be a burden."
"You're not." His response was immediate, almost reflexive.
Harley's laugh came out small and dry. "That's easy to say."
"It's true."
__
Across the bullpen, Brian snored softly. Lucas's pen scratched against paper. The world kept moving. Between Harley and Isaiah, something unclenched—not fully, but enough.
Harley looked down at her report and wrote one line. Not for the case. For herself.
Ask for help sooner.
She capped her pen and looked up. Isaiah was still there, waiting. Harley nodded once. It wasn't dramatic, and it wasn't a confession, but it was permission.
Isaiah exhaled quietly. He stepped back, giving her space without actually leaving. Harley understood then that the distance between them wasn't absence; it was a choice. And tonight, she'd chosen less of it.