BRENNAN’S DOODLES FILLED HER LEGAL PAD. SHE’D IN tended to take notes about the deposition transcript on her laptop screen, but her pen started moving on the paper—loops, circles within boxes within circles, then triangles divided into smaller polygons, then slashing lines like meteors from the top of the page driving through the aimless shapes before the deeply drawn furrows met the edge of the pad and spilled into air.
She looked back to the screen. She hadn’t focused for the past four pages she’d scrolled through while her pen worked. The answer in the transcript was senseless. She paged back to the last parts she remembered and tore the sheet of doodles from her pad and laid it on the desk.
She turned the page horizontal, the shift in perspective transforming the bolts of ink into cracks across the surface of the paper—as if it were a stone tablet that couldn’t bear the weight of the thoughts she left unwritten. They weren’t mysteries to her. Her parents. Her brother. Her disastrous personal life. The threats against her and now Hunter. These all exerted bathypelagic pressures on her, but the dark, cold tonnage of them held her together. The cracks, splitting the mindless hieroglyphs she’d scrawled on the page, mirrored the fractures she felt crawling across her skin. She hardly dared to breathe, fearing the slightest movement would finally rupture the hull that had carried her to this depth.
The newest threat to Hunter had shaken her. Hunter called to check on her immediately afterward, and they’d agreed not to go to the police. What was the use? Anyone smart enough to use a burner phone and get into his apartment would have worn gloves. It was clear to them both that whoever was threatening them selected his apartment because, unlike his mother and sister, he had no doorman—therefore, no potential witness standing around at all hours. Like Cathy’s old building. They also couldn’t be sure the threat wasn’t coming from the police. After all, the bullet came on the heels of their meeting with McCann.
The siblings gamed out the threat. Their stalker wanted them to stay quiet, but how much further was he willing to go? Neither of them believed he would do anything that might end up being a story that would trace back to him—or McCarthy, if that’s who he was working for. And if it was Jessica’s real killer—Hunter still did not believe it was possible—the killer would face the same double bind. Pressure them enough to stop them, but nothing extreme enough to draw attention. Yet the threats still unsettled her. As a prosecutor, the threats were mainly theoretical (someone might grow violent) or abstracted (a glare, a smile, a disgusting comment). The same for Hunter’s work in war zones. It was dangerous, but nobody was targeting him personally. Still, the siblings agreed that they shouldn’t back down as a matter of principle and practicality. The truth—whatever it may be—was the best way to end the threat.
Brennan ran her hand along the edge of her father’s desk. She’d owned it far longer than he had. She cherished it as a relic of him, but it told her as much about him as a saint’s bone revealed of the beatified. She was a grown woman with a child’s faith in a man long gone. She couldn’t even remember the reasons she’d believed in his innocence other than that she knew him. But what child knows her parents? Even now, her mother lay in a bed dying, and Brennan doubted whether she had ever been happy—or even tried to find happiness.
Brennan glanced up at her laptop screen—more than a hundred pages to read. She’d lost fifteen minutes doodling and staring at the page sitting in front of her. She needed to concentrate. But one particular line stretched across the page uninterrupted—a highway across a vast plain. It demanded an offshoot. Brennan picked up her pen and slashed another crack across the paper two-thirds of the way down. The new line grew a fresh branch as her pen cut another path to the same edge of the page. Then another. Every new pen stroke fragmented the paper into facets. None of the delineations brought any clarity. Her mind became muddier by the moment.
Brennan crumpled the page. The screen of her laptop was dark. She reached forward to wake it, but instead picked up her phone.
Hunter answered. “Yeah?”
“How’s Mom?”
“When I left,she was sleeping.”
“Anybody follow you? Any more surprises at your place?”
“No.And my door’s latched.”
“You around? I’m going to get a drink.” She choked the words out like a drowning woman.
Silence. If he said no, she might text Sean, but she knew that he was at some Broadway show with his wife. Paul? Never. She could drink alone, find someone else at the bar—
Hunter sighed. He loved to let her know when she was putting him out. Every favor came with a loan statement reminding her that she owed him some incalculable interest that could never be repaid. She didn’t have that kind of emotional capital. But she was willing to take on that mortgage tonight.
“Let me throw some clothes on,” he said. “Where do you want to meet?”
#
Brennan’s hair hung in a cold wet sheet that draped down the side of her cheek as she turned to see Hunter enter the bar. He closed his umbrella, water trickling off the point into a scattered trail running across the dirty wooden floor toward her. He took the stool next to her at the bar.
“You didn’t need to have one waiting for me.” Hunter reached for one of the two beers in front of Brennan—the full glass, not the one with a quarter pint remaining.
She grabbed his wrist—still slick with rain—and said, “They’re both mine.”
Hunter withdrew his hand from beneath hers, flagged the bartender, and pointed to her pint.
“You’re wet. You didn’t bring an umbrella?”
“I didn’t realize it was raining.” When she reached her lobby, she’d seen rain falling through the cold LED streetlight. It seemed insubstantial, barely more than a mist surprised that it was heavy enough to fall through the March air. Five blocks of fine droplets painting her, beading on her jacket until she shoved the door of the bar open, catching the light as if her jacket were coated in diamonds. Now, she was merely wet.
“They ruined us, Hunter.”
“Hold up, Bren. I don’t even have my beer yet.”
They sat without words until the bartender—a brunette in a faded Fall Out Boy T-shirt—glided past, leaving his beer in her wake like a discarded thought.
Hunter took a heavy swig. “You were saying?”
“I was good friends with this girl in law school, Wendy.” Brennan explained that Wendy’s dream was to work for the ACLU or the Center for Reproductive Rights or something. They’d gotten drunk after their last spring exam the first year of law school, and the conversation drifted to family. Brennan laid out her father’s story as she knew it at the time.
“When I finished, Wendy sat back, arms crossed, face like she’d been slapped. ‘You forgave him?’ she asked. And I said, ‘Forgave him? He didn’t do it. He was acquitted.’
“‘I’m not talking about the murder, Bren. The affair. She was his subordinate. It was wrong.’
“‘From everything I understand,’ I said—barely giving any thought to how little I actually understood, ‘it was consensual.’ But Wendy didn’t buy it. She said, ‘Brennan, he preyed on her.’ I told her she didn’t know anything about it, but she just said, ‘I don’t know how you could defend him.’
“‘He was my father,’ I told her. ‘I love him. How could I not?’ And then she said, ‘What about this Jessica? She didn’t forgive him.’ What was I supposed to say to that? All I could say was, ‘She died. What was he supposed to do?’ But Wendy just said, ‘Not have an affair with his subordinate.’
“She was so smug about it. So I got defensive. ‘But he did. So now I have to hate a dead man over a mistake he made when I was a child?’ And Wendy said, ‘It’s the principle.’ Then she started to go, but before she left, she looked right at me and said, ‘I really think less of you that you’d compromise on this.’”
Brennan finished relaying the exchange to Hunter and drained the rest of her first beer.
He shrugged. “You know I’m on her side, right? You telling me this to pick a fight?”
Brennan exhaled. “I don’t want to fight with you. I’m not telling you this so that you’ll agree with me. Don’t you understand? I mean, you ever have a conversation like that? About why you’re wrong to love—or even hate—your father? Anyone ever ask you why you never forgave him?”
Hunter glanced over his shoulder at the bartender while he mulled the question.
“After college,” he said, “when I got back to the city, I tried going to therapy.” He’d ended up seeing an older woman therapist. He didn’t need a session to know why he’d picked her. She was the opposite of Jane—short, plump, compassionate. “Toward the end of a session, she asked me why I’d never forgiven Dad.
“I thought it was a pretty straightforward question, so I said, ‘What he did was unforgivable.’ But you know how therapists are. She looked at me with that friendly smile and asked, ‘Was it? Is it for you?’
“‘Why should I forgive him?’ I asked. And she said, ‘Why not?’
“‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t care. He didn’t care. He hurt every-one around him. He doesn’t deserve my forgiveness.’ Then she leaned forward—I can still see her kind face, and how much it pissed me off—and said, ‘Forgiveness isn’t for other people. It’s for ourselves, so I think the real issue is, do you believe you deserve forgiveness?’
“I never went back,” Hunter said.
Brennan caught the bartender’s attention and held up two fingers. She turned back to Hunter. “Why didn’t you go back?”
“Ten minutes ago, you said that they ruined us. Why should we forgive them?”
“You’re deflecting. I asked you why you didn’t go back to therapy.”
Hunter finished the last of his beer. “I didn’t want to deal with it. He has like zero impact on my day-to-day life. If I forgave him, would it make it like our lives never happened the way they did? Nothing—literally nothing—would change. So why tear myself apart for that? It’s a fucking academic exercise.”
“Doesn’t feel so academic sitting here.”
They waited for the bartender to deliver the fresh beers without speaking.
“I never went to therapy,” Brennan said.
“Why not?”
Brennan shrugged. “I had it under control. I was checking all the boxes. Career? Good. I had friends. Never had trouble dating. Family was fucked, but everyone has family issues. I never wanted to be happy. Happiness felt like a show my friends would put on for me. ‘Oh my God! Dave is sooooo amazing! And he’s not afraid to just, you know, cry!’ Then a year later, and fucking Betty’s like, ‘Dave doesn’t ever talk to me about anything. I feel like I’m raising this baby on my own. And he never wants sex anymore.’ Who needs that shit?”
“Relationships are work.”
“Don’t mansplain relationships to me.”
“I’m not!” Hunter raised a placating hand. “I’m commiserating. I never wanted to do that kind of work either. Why do you think I’m here with you?”
“So we’re not working at this?”
“Working at what?”
“At being sister and brother.”
Hunter laughed. “We don’t have to work at being brother and sister. That’s what we are. A good brother? A good sister? Fuck if I know where to even start with that.”
“So then why are you here?”
“You called.”
Brennan drained half her beer. Hunter gulped from his glass to chase her progress.
“Do you think you could ever get there? Forgive him?” she asked.
“For murder? It’s not our place.”
“If he did it, isn’t it, though? A little bit? I’m not saying on behalf of Jessica or the people who loved her. That’s not for us. But he hurt us, too. Can’t I forgive him for that at least?”
Hunter shook his head. “You’re a better person than me.” “That’s not what I’m saying.”
“I’m just saying, you knew how to deal with him as a kid. Make him happy. And after everything went to shit, you believed in him. You don’t think I was jealous of that? That I wished I could be like you? But then you’d throw it in my face, and it made me hate you for that.” Hunter paused. He traced doodles in the condensation on his glass with the tip of his thumb. “This shit about forgiveness…it brings all that up again, and it makes me feel like an asshole. Like I’m not as good as you because I can’t get over it and make peace with him. But how can you forgive him, yet you never forgave me for doubting him?”
“I cheated on Paul.”
Hunter stopped, his beer halfway to his mouth. “Why are you telling me this?”
“So you know that I’m not a better person than anybody, even you.”
Hunter put his beer down. Brennan leaned back on the barstool and stared at her hands in her lap.
“This is what I’ve been trying to get at. My friends, they don’t want to deal with me anymore. They knew Paul. They didn’t understand why I did it. I didn’t have an excuse like, ‘Oh, I met someone else who was wonderful.’ Or, you know, ‘Paul’s an asshole who pays no attention to me.’ Nope. Nothing like that. It was just…flings. For no reason they could understand. Just me, fucking my life up. Like Dad.”
“Did Paul know?”
Brennan shook her head. “What was the point of telling him? I couldn’t explain it. Better to say that I didn’t love him, I wasn’t ready. That I made a mistake in marrying him. That was true, too.”
Hunter didn’t say anything for a moment. He touched her shoulder. “I understand. I don’t think you’re—”
“I’m sleeping with a married partner.”
“Jesus Christ, Bren!”
She started laughing. Hunter laughed along with her until her laughter abandoned her, leaving her bowed over her hands, hair forward over her face, shoulders quaking with silent sobbing. He stood between their stools and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. Her head settled into his chest, and as she gasped for air, Brennan caught the ghost of her father in the warm air trapped between them before it disappeared behind the scent of her rain-wet hair.
Hunter let her go as she took a breath, carefully wiping underneath her eyes even though she wasn’t wearing any makeup.
“I gotta get back to work,” she said.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. No. But what am I going to do? I have work to do.”
“I mean about the escalation in the threat,” Hunter said. “I know you said you were fine. But if that, if everything else, is too much, you can…I don’t know. Put the Dad stuff to the side for now. Let you focus more on work. On Mom.”
Brennan straightened in her chair. “What about you? If you have to go back to work? Leave the country again? Will we have enough time to see it through when we pick it up again?”
She felt like a failure even considering his offer. She knew that she would never have peace unless she did everything she could to get an answer. If she was right, there was a killer out there. If she wasn’t, she deserved the truth.
Hunter nodded at the resolution on her face.
“But we need to be careful,” Brennan said.
“I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe if I come at this from a different angle, it won’t get attention. I found the restaurant he worked at. Mom told me.” He told her about meeting Claude. “He gave me the name of someone who knew Dad. I’ve been trying to find her. But it’s a common name.”
“Why though?” Brennan asked. “Seems like a waste of time.”
He threw a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know. A hunch? I got lots of time and not enough friends? Maybe there’s something there.”
Brennan waited for him to elaborate, and when he didn’t, she told the bartender to close her tab.