The badge felt like a lead weight in my pocket, even though I had officially left it on Izzy Rinaldi's marble counter. It was a phantom limb, a part of my identity I'd spent fifteen years growing, now severed and cauterized by the heat of Nate's betrayal.
I wasn't a Detective anymore. I was a woman with a set of coordinates, a tank of gas, and a pragmatism that was rapidly curdling into something much sharper. I didn't head back to the precinct. I didn't go home, and if I went home, Ryan Mitchell or the Internal Affairs sharks would be waiting with a pot of coffee and a recording device. Instead, I drove three hours south, away from the glass towers of D.C. and toward the salt-rotted docks of the Chesapeake.
