Detective Claire Codella was used to waking up at all hours of the night. After all, murders in this city—in any city—did not conveniently occur only between nine AM and five PM. But no call had come from Manhattan North this morning. No murder explained why she had been lying awake since four AM.
She slid her palm across the mattress to the other side of the bed where the sheet was cool to the touch, no body heat to warm it, and for an instant she regretted that she had sent Brian Haggerty home, that she had chosen to face this morning alone. In the very next instant, however, she reminded herself it was better this way. Wasn’t it just naïve to think that anyone—even the person you were closest to—could ever really accompany you into your own dark places? And anyway, how close was she really to Brian? Until three months ago, they hadn’t spoken in a year, since the night at the St. James Pub when he’d worked up his courage from way too much Knob Creek and told her—albeit inelegantly—how he felt about her. He’d expected her to admit her feelings, too. But she hadn’t. Instead, she’d accepted a promotion and run all the way to Manhattan North. Then she got the lymphoma diagnosis and went through ten months of cancer treatment without even calling him—how could she? And he hadn’t called her, either. Only later did she learn that he had come to the hospital to visit her, stood outside her room, and seen her at one of her lowest moments—when she was rattling the side rails on her bed and screaming for the nurse to bring morphine. He’d known she would be furious, that her dignity would be crushed, if she knew he’d seen her like that. And so he’d walked away, as hard as that had been to do.
Cancer had made her a little more vulnerable, she supposed, a little more receptive to him. She cared about him, of course, but she wasn’t one of those women who needed someone around all the time, someone to tell her everything was going to be all right. She’d been taking care of herself for as long as she could remember. She’d gotten herself to New York on her own, she’d earned her gold shield without any help from an uncle in the ranks, and during her chemotherapy, she’d earned the equivalent of a PhD in self-reliance. She didn’t need Haggerty or anyone to give her reassurance. She would be fine. And if she wasn’t—well, then so be it.
She whipped back the blankets and sat up. The room was as cold as her fear. The frigid February air from her open window helped her sleep at night, but it did not make rising very easy or comfortable. She dragged herself to the bathroom, closed the door against the bedroom’s cold front, flipped on the bright, uncompromising light, and stared into the medicine chest mirror. Her black hair was disheveled from Haggerty’s hands. The pale skin around her lips was red from his wiry stubble. And the crow’s feet at the outer edges of her eyes seemed to have disappeared. She remembered kissing him in her living room. And then she closed her eyes and relived the rest of the night with equal measures of satisfaction and apprehension. Her relationship with Haggerty was never going to be the same again.
She splashed warm water over her face. Did her need to forget about this morning explain why she had let him come here last night? Or had she simply given in to desire that had been on hold for too long? It was probably a little of the first, she admitted, and far more of the second. She had been a stranger in her body for more than a year. Cancer had moved in and evicted her desire, and when the cancer had moved out, she had been too terrified to reclaim what was rightfully hers.
To his credit, Haggerty had sensed this, and he had let her call the shots. Even when she was on top of him, even when he was inside of her, he had waited for her to make the first move. “Go ahead,” he had whispered as if he knew she needed coaxing, as if he understood she was afraid to try this ultimate act of vulnerability and pleasure that she had not experienced since cancer had changed everything. And while he had whispered his permissions, she moved—tentatively at first, then with growing desire, and finally with need that erased self-consciousness—until she exploded into a mushroom cloud of sensations that fragmented her whole being like atoms dispersing. When she had finally rolled off of him, she felt her first moment of deep peace in almost two years.
But now that peace was decaying like a radioactive isotope, and in its place, cold dread was forming once again.