# THOMPSON-HAYES: BLOOD MONEY
## Chapter Fifteen — The Spare Room
Jake slept on her couch for two nights before she found him at the kitchen table at 5:30 in the morning.
He was not on his phone. He was not reading anything. He was just sitting there in the half-dark with a glass of water and the particular expression of someone who had been awake for a while and had decided to stop pretending otherwise.
She was not surprised to find him there. She had expected it, in the way you expect things when you have spent time watching how a person carried themselves. Jake held things quietly. He had been doing it for years inside a family that did not reward the holding or the carrying.
She turned on the small lamp over the counter — not the overhead light, which was too much at 5:30 — and ma
