I leave her office laughing, which is probably not the normal reaction for an agent who’s just been placed on administrative leave. I get a few baffled looks for it.
For the first time in weeks, I get behind the wheel of my own car and pull out of the garage. Home is waiting, even if I’m not entirely sure it’s home anymore, my cozy little cottage stained with the past month and change. I do stop and pick up a box of cupcakes for Jason, and we share them on his front porch as he weeds his flower beds and I sew the buttons back on his shirts and mend some rips, because if there’s a sharp edge, he’ll catch his shirt on it.
“So it’s all done?” he asks.
“All done.”
“I’m glad it worked out okay.”
I spend the rest of the afternoon puttering around the house, turning on my personal cell for the first time in almost a week and hooking it up to my laptop to move over photos I want to keep. After that, there’s a certain satisfaction in taking out the SIM card and beating the shit out of the phone with a baseball bat. I’ll get around to replacing it eventually, and this time, I’m not giving the number to Esperanza.
I’m aware, mostly, that I could have just gotten the number changed without killing the phone. It’s more fulfilling this way.
Late in the afternoon, I head out to Walmart and come back with a stack of large plastic tubs. The black-velvet bear goes back on my nightstand, safe and sound, but all the rest get layered into the tubs with some mothballs to protect the fabric. The laundry room has a storage closet that’s still in range of the AC, protected from the humidity and anything that can happen out in the garage, and when the door closes on the tower of tubs, it feels a little like cutting off a finger.
My bedroom walls look empty, naked even, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. I change the sheets and sprawl across the bed, warm with sunlight, and let my mind drift across everything that’s happened. I have to make a decision, but Agent Dern says I’ve got time. Don’t rush, because there’s time.
That evening, I head back up to Bethesda. According to the nurse at the station, they gave Eddison another full of dose of Dilaudid less than half an hour ago, so it’s not surprising that he’s out cold when I walk in. Jenny’s gone, but Priya is sprawled on the tiny couch with a stack of photos and an alarming amount of scrapbooking supplies.
“So, Eddison and Sterling, huh?” she asks.
“He tell you that?” I settle into the chair between her and the bed, on Eddison’s right side.
“Sort of? He asked if it would be weird to keep calling someone by their last name after they’ve kissed you.”
“And you said?”
“It isn’t any weirder than calling one of your sisters by her last name all the time.” She grins at me. “I’m glad you’re okay-ish.”
“Okay-ish,” I repeat, tasting the word. “Yes.”
Priya knows okay-ish. She spent five years living with it, and even now, with the healing she’s had these last three years, she still has days where okay-ish is the best it gets.
I pull out a book of logic puzzles so I’m not tempted to peek over her shoulder. She’ll let us see the pictures when she’s ready.
“Ravenna finally made contact,” she announces, frowning down thoughtfully at a photo. “She’s been staying with a friend in the Outer Banks. They have to go to a different island for Internet access, and she hasn’t bothered. She only turned her phone back on today.”
“How is she doing?”
“Okay-ish.” The grin returns, fleeting but sincere. “She’s going to join us in Maryland for the final pictures. After that, she’s going to renew her passport and get everything else in order so she can come with me when I go back to Paris. With an ocean between her and her mother, I think she might start doing better.”
“I’m a little worried what she may learn from you and your mother.”
“There’s a ballet studio down the street from the house. I do a lot of their formal pictures, they let me snap rehearsals and classes, and a few staged projects. I think I’m going to take her down there and introduce her.”
Because Patrice Kingsley grew up loving dance, and Ravenna danced through the Garden to keep herself going, and ever since getting out, she hasn’t known if it was Patrice or Ravenna dancing anymore, dancing for love or for sanity.
“It’s a good idea,” I murmur, and Priya nods, glues down a strip of paper, and reaches for a sheet of rhinestone stickers.
Around midnight, when Priya is fast asleep with a blanket draped over her, Eddison stirs and looks around. “Hermana?”
“I’m here.”
“Get your ass on the bed. My eyes can’t focus to the chair.”
Snickering, I put the book and pen down and ease onto the bed beside him. His left leg is supported by a shaped foam piece but I don’t want to jostle him too much. Fortunately the IV and wires are all on his other side. I settle in against him, head on his shoulder, and we just breathe for a while.
“Did anyone call my parents?”
“They’re on a cruise in Alaska with your aunt and uncle. We told them you were doing well out of surgery, and you’d call them once you weren’t tripping balls.”
“Please tell me you did not—”
“No, we did not tell your mother you were tripping balls,” I snort. “We told her you were heavily dosed.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Poor baby.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” He drifts off again. Eddison’s hatred of high-test painkillers has nothing to do with trying to be manly and tough, he just hates being that out of it.
I’m not sure when I doze off. I’m somewhat aware of someone touching my hair, the weight of a blanket over me, but a voice tells me to hush and sleep, and I do.
30
Bright and early Tuesday morning, I sit on the plain wooden bench outside one of the conference rooms in Internal Affairs, thumbs tapping an endless, anxious tattoo against my phone. My knee bounces, and it’s only through sheer force of will that I keep my heel from hitting the floor to keep time. I am clearly, visibly, a wreck of nerves, and I can’t look away from my hands for fear I’ll see the door opening and freeze.
Steady footsteps approach, and I feel someone settle onto the bench beside me. I don’t have to look to know it’s Vic. Even aside from the familiar sense of his presence, he’s been wearing the same aftershave longer than I’ve been alive. “This is protocol,” he says quietly, still trying to preserve my theoretical dignity even though we’re alone in the hall. “You’ve done it before, you’ll do it again.”
“This time is different.”
“It is and it isn’t.”
Protocol. Because whenever an agent fires their weapon, Internal Affairs investigates the circumstances, makes sure it was the best option, that there wasn’t some other way we should have seen. I have done it before, and most of the time, however uncomfortable it is to sit in front of agents from IA and explain every single little thing you’ve done, it’s actually reassuring. Comforting, in a way, to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that not only did you make the right—the only—call, but your agency is holding you and all of its agents accountable to a high standard of integrity and ethics.
Today it is not reassuring, because today it’s different.
Vic’s hand rests on my knee. Not squeezing, just there. Warm and solid and familiar.