Stay Close Harlan Coben Summary Novels & Stories

But he knew as well as I did that we couldn’t take on Eagle’s Nest alone. I leaned back against the wall, closing my eyes for a moment, trying to steady my breathing. But then something gnawed at the back of my mind, a thought that made my blood run cold. Harlan had made an example of Caleb today. But what if that was just the beginning?

Harlan had watched her for eleven years and described her in careful clinical language and filed his reports and recommended his timelines and at the end of it — at the very end, in the last entry he would ever write — he had looked at what she had become and admitted that he had been wrong. She had outlasted his assessment of her. She had become something his framework had no category for. And she had done it without knowing he was watching. She thought about that for a long time. She found Cole in the kitchen. He was at the counter with coffee, not drinking it, just standing near it the way people stand near warm things when they are waiting for something. He looked at her when she came in

The same clean, deliberate gap as the wolf hall — enough time for whatever had been done to look, on paper, like it couldn't possibly be connected to the man who'd walked out the door before anything went wrong. I was already reaching for my boots, already hearing Dominic's chair scrape back outside my door at the sound of my voice rising, already feeling the full, terrible shape of it close around me. Harlan was three hundred miles from Silver Moon's burning lab tonight. And he'd been standing alone in my father's room forty minutes before my father's heart tried to stop for the second time in a week.

The dim bar in Berlin's outskirts hummed with low chatter and clinking glasses. Coby Harlan, 42 now, nursed a whiskey at the corner table, his broad shoulders hunched under a worn leather jacket. Retirement had not softened him, scars from old wounds pulled tight across his knuckles, and his buzzed hair showed flecks of gray. Ten years since that botched op in Kabul, the one that cost lives and shattered his world. He came here on a whim, chasing ghosts, not expecting to find one staring back.

News of my survival was kept a secret. Drake erased every trace of that night, as if it had never happened. Butcher “disappeared,” and the illegal mining camp was wiped off the map overnight, reduced to rubble. I was taken to recover at the Moon Goddess Chapel of Shadowbite Pack. Lucius and Hale stayed there as well, at least for the time being. Although Drake held resentment toward them, since I still called them Father and Mother, he gave them the best treatment possible.

“Go eat your cinnamon roll and leave me alone already, Caleb Thornton.” He tipped his hat. “Yes, ma’am. But one day, I’ll get you to answer my question.” She just smiled to herself as she watched him—and his tight backside—leave her kitchen. The End Thank you for reading The Nearness of You! I hope you loved Sara and Harrison’s story. Don’t miss Megan and Caleb’s story in The Very Thought of You. Megan Flannigan wants only two things in life: to run her bakery the Rise and Shine, and to avoid the handsome and insufferable Officer Caleb Thornton.