Chapter Four

Campbell

O’HARE IS, QUITE frankly, one of the worst airports on the planet.

Yet it’s a devil I know, so working through its labyrinthine terminals takes about half the time warned on the TSA signs outside security. Once our luggage is taken care of, my only obligation is finding three connected seats until they start calling for tickets. We’re flying first class, but I can’t stand most of the lounges, appealing to a false sense of luxury with forty-dollar cocktails and every television flipped to the dull rumble of some British broadcaster.

I snare a small row of chairs by the front desk, taking the center so Justine and Sofia can claim a spot on either side. It’s busy for a Sunday, the usual jet-set and commuting crowd filled out with a few Palestinian families escorted by a translator and a cadre of nuns cutting a black-and-white swathe through the room. One of them glances at me and starts counting the prayer beads in her hand a little faster.

Fair enough.

“Do you want your book?” Justine asks, gesturing to her purse.

Flights are one of the occasions I have to read, but a quick check of my watch confirms we have ten minutes max before they’re going to shuffle us onboard. “I’ll wait.”

“Finding out you’re one of those people who buys airport bestsellers has shattered my perception of you,” Sofia jokes. “You wear tailored suits worth fifteen grand but read thrillers barely worth the paper they’re printed on.”

The suits are about image. Vanity has no purpose to me. “I like to turn my brain off every once in a while, and nothing does it faster.”

She pauses, then laughs. “Okay, I can’t argue that.”

Static pops as the flight attendant prepares to call our number on the PA, beating my estimate by five minutes. I’ve never understood the appeal of boarding a plane before everyone else, but first-class seats are brazenly better, positioned up front as a reminder to those who can’t afford the privilege. The privacy is what sells me, especially since the average passenger tends to throw on noise-canceling headphones and pass out by their third vodka tonic.

Sofia, as it turns out, is closer to the median than I expect. She falls back into her seat and immediately produces an orange prescription bottle, popping off the top with a decisive click. After turning out two pills onto her palm, she swallows them both dry.

“I hate flying,” she casually admits, prying the cushioned eye mask out of the laminated bag hanging on the armrest. “So I’m going to let the Xanax do its work, and you can wake me up when we’ve become reacquainted with gravity.”

“Sweet dreams,” I say.

She flips me off with a New Yorker’s reflexive grace, and Justine tries and fails to stifle a laugh next to me.

“Want anything to drink?” Justine asks. “They’re already looking down the row to sedate as many of us as possible.”

“Water’s fine.” I stay sober for professional reasons, but even so, a plane sounds like the worst possible place to get drunk. “I would like my book though.”

By the time we’re in the air, I get through three chapters of middling action and the most ham-fisted investigation of a serial killer I’ve ever had the amused pleasure of reading. Sofia is dead to the world, but Justine has fiddled with her straw to the point of destruction, bending plastic at the seams until it splits open.

“Do you want to talk?” I ask quietly. “I can get your mind off things.”

A hint of color warms her face, but she nods. “Sure. At this point, my catastrophizing is breaking into its own bonus apocalypses, complete with internal lectures on my failure as a person. Fully voiced and professionally acted lectures, to be clear.”

I tuck one of the airline brochures into my book to hold the page and set it aside. When I offer Justine a hand, she buries her fingers between my own. “Is that what you want to talk about? Or something else?”

“Anything else,” she mutters, then gives me a searching look. “You’ve never told me about your parents. Is that because…”

“Parent,” I clarify. “And yes, my mother’s dead.”

Justine bites her lip. “God, Campbell, I’m sorry.”

The pain is too old to feel now, deadened nerves under a ligature of scar tissue. “Don’t worry about it. My father might be alive out there somewhere, but he left my mother pregnant at nineteen, so his name never made it on the birth certificate.”

And if I ever happened to meet the man, I would orphan myself in a heartbeat.

“Were there complications?” Justine asks.

“No.” Although I chalk that up to luck more than anything else. “She was young enough for people to be sympathetic, which got her a job until she had me. But the state only cares when you’re carrying. After the birth, the support went away. Her family was in the Midwest, and she’d moved out to California to be with my would-be donor. From what I gathered, going back was out of the question.”

My mother never spoke about herself. It took years for me to comprehend how much she must have endured while I was growing up, scraping every last cent together so I would never go without a meal. Her only friend was an older woman at the SNAP office, and that single buoy kept us above water until I stumbled into my teenage years.

Justine brings my hand to her lips, pressing a light kiss to my knuckles. “Then what happened to her?”

“I was seventeen. She was so proud of how I was doing in high school, but giving her straight A’s felt like the least I could do.” Studying kept me from getting into fights with the kids who sensed I didn’t belong, even before I had the words for why. “She wasn’t the only one either. The military had an office right across the street, and the principal let uniforms wander around and talk to us during lunchtime. They could make any promise they wanted.”

Revulsion tightens Justine’s mouth, twisting to dread when I ask, “Do you know what the army likes to call smart, poor kids?”

She shakes her head.

“Recruitment material.” Material in the most literal sense, a resource to be cut up and divided, only to be shown off like a peacock’s feathers. I remember seeing quotas on an office wall with a big red circle around my school, which served the most destitute district in the city. “They gave me a twenty-dollar gift card to take their test, and the only thing on my mind was that it’d let me buy my mother dinner. So I sat down and took it. Aced every section.”

Which was my first mistake. Infantry types are a dime a dozen in their books, but anyone they can class into technical fields is worth bonus points, a little gold star for the board everybody else sees. I was hounded for months on the way to class, offered rides home in SUVs worth more than the crumbling house they took me back to. The recruiter who chased the most was only five years older than me, serving out the rest of his tour stateside after a bomb shredded his leg from the knee down.

He insisted living with it wasn’t so bad. I believed him back then because the alternative seemed so much worse.

“I signed on a couple weeks before my birthday. You need parental permission before eighteen, but my mother didn’t hesitate. They were offering security she couldn’t give me.” With my scores, getting into college would have been easy; paying for it was a different story. “And after basic, I was guaranteed to make more than she ever had in her whole life.”

A lot of drama is made out of those ten weeks, but most of my training passed in a blur, one harshly regimented day spilling into the next. The people who struggled the most came from means, their pride ground to fine dust against the cycle of humiliation and failing in front of everyone else. I found the pain irrelevant compared to the promised reward, and most drill sergeants move on to softer targets when their bait isn’t swallowed whole.

“She sent me letters every day for a month,” I say. The texture of the envelopes is etched into my fingertips, easy to recall with a second’s thought. “When they stopped, I assumed she was taking extra shifts at work again. Fifty, sixty-hour weeks were the norm.”

Justine’s face falls.

“She had a bad heart, it turns out.” A simple defect, one any physical could catch if a doctor had ever bothered to make a diagnosis. Dozens of medications and procedures exist to correct it now, ones I could pay for a hundred times over. “My mother died alone at home, and it took a while for them to find her. It took even longer for them to find out where her next of kin was. And they don’t let you take phone calls when you’re in the tank.”

I found out on graduation day, pulled aside by my CO with a solemn look on his face. He offered comfort the way most military men do, telling me to use my grief as fuel, to turn it into a weapon someone else could use. In the end, I suppose I did, if not in the way any of my fellow soldiers would expect.

“That’s horrible,” Justine whispers, then sighs. “And I’m sorry, Campbell. I wish I could have met her.”

“I’m glad you can’t,” I confess, tension creeping up my jaw. “She died thinking I would have some bright, heroic future. I can’t imagine her seeing what I became afterward. Who I am now, what I’ve done.”

Because that’s the only tenuous connection to guilt I have: knowing how the women in my life might see the monster an inch under the skin. The rest slips off like vapor, never lasting long enough to matter. It’s part of why I don’t think about my mother very often in the first place; after so much time, the catacombs of my mind are full to bursting, and the oldest bodies might as well be dust.

“Who you are gave me everything,” Justine says, eyes locked with mine. “It’s the only reason I’m alive right now.”

And I could never trade anything in place of that. “I’d do it again. No question.”

She tilts her head up to kiss me, lingering soft and sweet against my lips. I lean into it, brought to heel by the warmth of her mouth, the tangle of our fingers. Forty thousand feet over the earth, Justine is my center of gravity, the axis on which the world turns. I might as well be a god, hanging above the mortals below.

“You’re my first, you know,” I whisper against her mouth. “I’ve never met the family of anyone I’ve been with.”

Justine smiles, joy highlighting the deep brown of her eyes. “They’ll like you. You’re unduly charming.”

“You have a particular weakness for it,” I tease.

That earns a laugh as she gently pushes me away. “Maybe. But my parents have always been worried about me ending up alone. Mom especially.”

“Why?”

“She thinks that a free spirit like mine burns through life too fast. That it’s easy to end up with nothing but ash by the time you stop.” Justine flinches. “But getting chained down cost me a lot more, didn’t it?”

That’s part of the reason I’ve never pushed her for more commitment, beyond our mutual agreement to monogamy. I can’t begin to guess how long it will take for Justine to sort through the wreckage Richard made of her life, or if she’ll ever see marriage as anything but a death wish. I’m not arrogant enough to think that my asking would make it better; everyone makes exceptions for love, but trauma colors our minds down to the deepest, primal root.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I say. “Being tricked into a sacrifice isn’t the same as giving yourself up on purpose.”

“I know. But I still don’t know how much I’m going to tell them.” Justine clears her throat, quickly adding, “About what Richard did, I mean. Not…anything else.”

“I’m not worried about that.” She’s known enough to ruin me since the day we met; I understand Sofia’s wary instincts, but Justine’s already proven to me how well she can keep a secret. “What I worry about is you martyring yourself to make amends. Give them the truth if it feels right, not because you think it’ll clear a debt.”

Her mouth opens and closes twice before she lets out a shaky laugh. “The debt’s always there, Campbell. They’re Chinese and Catholic.”

I tilt my head. “You’ve never struck me as particularly religious. Did they name you after one of the saints?”

“No. My mother picked it from a movie she liked.” Justine smiles. “And I went to church growing up, but faith didn’t really take. I picked Justina of Padua for my confirmation because her name was easy to remember.”

“What was she famous for?” I ask.

A brilliant blush paints Justine’s face before she says under her breath, “Virginity.”

I manage not to laugh, but I can’t help a grin. “Good choice.”

“Hush.” She nudges her shoulder against mine, then frowns. “Would it be terrible if I meet them by myself first? I don’t want to leave you out on the porch or anything, but breaking this into two pieces might make it a little easier to chew.”

“Sure. I was going to rent a car at the airport, so I can drop you off and then take Sofia back to her place. Whenever you’re ready for me to come back, send a text. I’m sure we can keep ourselves entertained for a few hours.”

If nothing else, we can start searching for a new contract. I purposefully left work off the books after Justine and I got away from Paris, but I know better than to go too long between killings. The call comes to me the same way a working cur needs to hunt. If the right prey isn’t around, anything that bleeds will do, and I’d rather not reach that point.

Justine’s relief is plain, her shoulders relaxing by a level inch. “Okay. That’s great, then. One step at a time.”

She sighs and closes her eyes, adjusting so she can lay her head on my shoulder. I kiss the top of her hair and retrieve my book, intending to while away the last hour of our flight with as many hackneyed gunfights that can fit in two hundred pages. Justine dozes off in a matter of minutes, breath tapering to a slow, even rhythm.

With her warmth flush against me, it’s the closest I’ve ever been to peace.