Chapter 28

Exhausted, Cielle shuffled toward her bed and sat. She was fully dressed—sweatpants and a black hoodie she wore low across her shoulder blades, like a shawl. She hugged her midsection, her eyes glazed.

Nate grasped her arms gently and lowered her to the pillow. She let him. He tugged the sheets up over her. Janie sat at Cielle’s desk, fist propping up her chin, equally catatonic.

“What did I do?” Cielle asked hoarsely.

Nate could feel his fingernails digging into the flesh of his forearm. “Something brave,” he said.

“Did I just kill myself?”

“No,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

“How will it be all right?”

“Because I’ll make it all right.”

Her blinks grew longer. “I screwed everything up. It was my choice. So I get it if you want to leave now.”

“I’m never leaving you again.”

Her face shifted, a softening. “What do you want?” she asked, not unkindly. “From me?”

“The honest truth?”

“Is there any other kind?”

“So many.” He wanted to pet her shiny dark hair to soothe her to sleep as he used to when she was young, but he restrained himself. Instead he kneaded his palm, working the tiny bones, chasing the burn from the muscle. He was also, he realized, working up the courage to respond. He cleared his throat quietly. “I want the chance to mean something to you again.”

But she was asleep.

He stared across at her doorway, all those pen marks notching off her height, Janie’s scrawl recording a progression of key dates. First day of preschool. Fifth birthday. Elementary-school graduation. Would there be more? College, a wedding? He pictured the bulge of Yuri’s muscles as he’d hefted the rescue saw, tendons shifting beneath pale skin and swaths of arm hair. An obscenity.

Janie’s words were muffled by her hand. “Are you scared to death?”

“No,” he lied.

He rose and walked down the hall into the master bathroom. Shut the door and sat on the floor. He pressed both hands over his mouth and set the back of his head against the full-length mirror behind the door. Pain radiated from his forearm into the crook of his elbow, tendrils of fire. His left hand had gone stiff and dead against his lips, and he squeezed his eyes shut and pictured those marks again in Cielle’s doorway, how they stopped about waist-high. Panic unfolded inside his chest, a poisonous flower blooming. His ribcage heaved, and he pressed his hands tighter against his mouth.

When he dared, he opened his eyes and was not surprised to see Charles sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. His entrails were exposed, his hands charred and smoking, and for once he was not smiling. A feeling of overwhelming helplessness gripped Nate, the same as he’d felt in the car outside Charles’s childhood house, watching Grace Brightbill bustle over the dishes, knowing he was supposed to walk to the front door to serve her son’s death notification. The same he’d felt in this very bathroom, sitting where Charles now sat, unable to move his stubborn body into the next room to comfort his sobbing wife.

“What do I do now?” he asked his old friend.

“You know what you need to do,” Charles said. “You need to keep going.”

“My fucking hand hurts, Charles. I’m losing my body.”

“You can do this.”

“No. I can’t. I’m the guy who froze on the helicopter—”

“No,” Charles said. “You’re the guy who dove into the waves to rescue a drowning girl when no one else would.”

Janie knocked on the door, vibrating the mirror beneath Nate’s shoulders. Charles lifted his face to the sound, smiled enigmatically.

Fear invaded Janie’s voice. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Nate said, rising. “I’m okay.”

*   *   *

Straining to steady his hand, Nate spooned tomato soup to his lips. When he’d admitted, under Janie’s line of questioning, that he hadn’t eaten in a day and a half, she’d heated some Campbell’s. If ever there was a time for comfort food.

In his uncertain grip, the spoon handle rattled against the brim of the bowl, so he set it down gently. “We have forty-eight hours until that list is due in Shevchenko’s hands,” he said. “Our only advantage is that we know now I’m not gonna be able to deliver it.”

“Two days to come up with an alternate game plan.”

“Let’s put you and Cielle on a plane tomorrow. Get you out of here. But we’ll be cautious as hell. We’ll buy tickets the day of, a few hours before the flight. Doesn’t matter how much it costs. And we’ll leave the house separately, at different times.”

“And if Shevchenko finds out anyway?”

Nate pressed the edges of his teeth together. “The deal was that I wouldn’t flee. Not you. I’ll stay right here in plain sight.”

“Doing what?”

“That FBI agent, Abara—he suspects me. But he also knows there’s more to the story.”

“So you’ll go to him?”

“Right now what do I have? A story about a list that went up in smoke? I’ve got to get him something concrete. Something definitive enough that he can move on Shevchenko and his men and arrest them immediately. Something serious enough that they’ll be held with no bail.”

“Which means a murder charge,” Janie said.

“Right. I need to find out why Shevchenko wants those people dead. I connect him to that murdered schoolteacher or those other names, I have something to bring to Abara that might actually save us. Shevchenko goes to prison, you and Cielle go into Witness Protection or whatever.”

“Witness Protection. Jesus.” Janie slid the pot from stove to sink and threw the faucet handle. Steam rose. “How are you gonna go about this now that Cielle burned the list? We don’t even have the names anymore.”

“We’ve got three of them.” Nate slid his computer over and clicked on the history function in the browser. Sure enough, there were the last three Google searches. Patrice McKenna, Brentwood. Luis Millan, Marina del Rey. And Wendy Moreno, Westchester. “Tomorrow I’ll start here.”

Janie nudged his bowl closer to him. “Eat more.”

He reached for the spoon, but his hand was vibrating, the strain of typing having taken a toll. He withdrew it, hiding it in his lap, but not before Janie had noticed. Again. She came around the counter, moving close enough that she pressed against his knees.

She beckoned, a nurse’s impatient gesture. “Lemme see.”

“It’s fine.”

“Come on. I owe you. That day on the beach.”

He mustered a grin. “The tidal wave in the tropical monsoon.”

“The very one. You saved my life.”

“Nah,” he said. “You saved mine.”

Her teeth tugged at her lush lower lip, emotion working on her face. “Don’t get philosophical. It doesn’t suit you.”

Their proximity made itself suddenly known. Her thighs pushing lightly against his knees. Her standing, him sitting on the stool, her mouth slightly higher than his, but close. They searched each other as if trying to read some hidden code. He prayed silently that she wouldn’t step away, and she didn’t.

She twisted the engagement ring around her finger, then became aware she was doing it. Her eyes moved to the diamond. “I think I knew somewhere,” she said slowly, “even when I said yes, but it made sense, kind of, and then it was this thing, gaining momentum.…” Again her gaze found Nate’s. “I’m glad you’re here.” She took a half breath. “He was never you.”

He leaned forward on the stool, bringing his lips to hers. Tender, close-mouthed. She softened into him. Her fingers went to his cheeks, but then she stiffened, shrugging up and out of his embrace. “Sorry. Look, with everything going on…”

“What?” he prompted.

“What if this isn’t real?”

“It’s real,” he said.

She smiled sadly, taking a few backward steps before turning for the stairs.