‘Isn’t this usually the other way around?’ asked Stark, alluding to the times Kelly had stood beside his hospital bed.
Kelly smiled. ‘It’s still two-one.’
‘Let’s leave it at worst out of three.’
She took in his battered face and stiff movement with her physical therapist eyes. ‘You look worse than me.’
‘Superficial.’
She let that pass. ‘Where have you been? I thought you’d be here when I woke?’
It burned that he’d not been. ‘I had questions to answer.’ And many more to follow. Any Authorized Firearms Officer responsible for a fatal shooting was automatically suspended pending enquiry, and Stark wasn’t authorized. Stevens now had two sticks to beat him with. But none of that mattered.
Kelly nodded. Even now, her concern was for him, though she’d just endured ample demonstration that threats against him put his loved ones in collateral danger. It was over, now, this time; but it would never be over.
‘My mum’s on her way,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know what to tell her.’
‘Tell her everything. She never liked me anyway.’
‘She adored you.’
‘She watched me making you unhappy.’
Kelly blinked at his uncommon bluntness. Her mum had never said anything, but Stark knew he was right. ‘Is this what it’s like, Joe? In your world.’
She meant in his head, and what it would always be like. Stark wished he had a way of sugar-coating it but could only shrug.
Kelly looked appalled. ‘It’s not fair, Joe … You’ve spent all this time trying to re-learn how to live a normal life …’
She looked like she might cry, and he wasn’t sure he could bear that. ‘If I’ve learnt anything,’ he forced a smile, ‘it’s to take each new normal as it comes.’
Kelly shook her head with a sad sigh and gestured to the visitor’s chair. ‘Can you stay a while?’
He sat, and she held out her hand for his.
Her grip was tight. The initial crying had just been the beginning. Stark knew that well. He hoped her path back to the light would be swift and conclusive. His own had lost ground last night. One rebirth too many. But now was not the time to address that. He’d already texted Hazel, asking her to drop by and see Kelly. Everything else could wait.
The numbness had faded, leaving him sore and too tired even for regret.
He wanted to get out of these clothes and shower and eat and sleep and get on with trying to pretend none of this had happened – that Kelly hadn’t come within a blade’s edge of paying for his sins with her life.
She ran her thumb over the bandages on his wrist, ripped raw from the bonds. One pain lost among many, he could hardly feel them at all. Her eyes lingered on his hands. ‘Thank you,’ she said, squeezing even tighter. Tears twinkled in the corner of her eyes.
‘You wouldn’t have been near any of this, were it not for me.’
She shook her head. ‘This isn’t your fault, Joe, you know that.’ Stark nodded but she wasn’t fooled. ‘When will you learn the evils of the world are not your responsibility?’
‘When the world stops directing evil at the people I love.’
She blinked again, then took a deep breath and sighed. ‘I love you too, Joe.’
An old argument. A familiar tone. It was just as over as before this terror, almost certainly more so. Love might survive seeing the other person willingly kill, but not untarnished, and theirs was a long and winding road already. Sadness felt as meaningless now as anger, hate, love or hope. He was just relieved she was able to look on his face without recoiling.
She had finally seen what he really was. If she could still say she loved him after that, then that was a victory. As ever, bitter-sweet.
All those unspoken words seemed to fill her eyes now, surely drawing the same conclusion. ‘Joe …’
‘Kelly!’ Robert rushed into the room.
Stark relinquished Kelly’s hand and stood, backing away. Robert seized it in his and kissed her, pouring his concern over her like a waterfall, words gushing from him. No wonder Kelly liked him, after Stark. What might he think of Kelly still carrying a photo of her and Stark in her purse? Well, it was gone now, and Kelly was crying, and smiling. The happy ending. The cosy diorama.
The blithe optimism of the scene stung.
No doubt Robert would have words for him too, and questions. If the man was half as generous with his bad opinion as he seemed with his good, then Stark didn’t care to stick around to hear it. Silently, he backed out and left them to their world, retreating into the shadows of his.
Kelly accepted Robert’s fawning concern, wincing at the pain of his embrace and consequent apologies.
When she managed to look up, Joe was gone.
Last night she had finally seen the monster that terrified him, the darkness he caged inside himself and which caged him in turn. When fear would paralyse most and despair take the rest, he’d reached inside for something more. Combining the fury he dreaded with the indomitable courage he denied, he had done what he had to. And in the terrifying aftershock, consumed with rage, radiating the fearsome joy of righteous destruction, he’d looked her in the eye and packed it all away.
But the bleakness that replaced it was enough to make her weep.
She had finally seen the one thing he most feared showing her – exactly what he was capable of. In this, as in so many things, he was the strongest man she knew. But whether, having shown her his darkest side, he would ever forgive himself, was another matter. Before Robert’s untimely arrival, he’d hardly been able to tolerate her gaze. While the events of last night might haunt her for weeks, months or years, she knew that sharing this last of himself with her might haunt Joe forever.
And now he was gone. Again.
She’d missed her chance. In the pub, yesterday – to tell him she was standing at a crossroads looking back. And now – to tell him she’d seen past all his fears to the light at the centre of his darkness.
A blonde girl had helped her to the ambulance, whispering about the sleepy girl’s voice answering Joe’s door buzzer that morning, a lifetime ago. Joe’s wounded colleague, finding sanctuary, a friend-in-need, nothing more. Such a pretty girl, with something similar in her eyes to Joe’s. Kelly could only cry more in response. And now Robert’s arrival had cut off her apology, and any chance of more, perhaps forever.
Missed chances.
Love flew or fell on timing.
She’d stumbled across a star lying broken in the sand and held the pieces to her heart until it burned. And now, as finally its fusion had begun to re-forge him, she must endure seeing his glow recede into the void, leaving only the memory of heat, of churning fire in the vast, cold vacuum – brightest star in a sky of lesser objects.
‘Don’t ever do this to me again,’ complained Robert, still holding her hand too tight.
She looked at his handsome face, creased with sincere concern, and forced a smile.
He let out an exaggerated sigh of relief as if all the pressure of the world had been on his shoulders tonight, and not the man who’d just stepped out of his way. ‘I love you.’ He beamed. ‘There … I’ve said it. Kelly Jones, I love you.’
Good-looking, kind, generous, funny, demonstrative and emotionally available … What more could a girl wish for?
Kelly nodded and sighed, forcing another smile and wiping at her tears. ‘I know.’