Chapter 2 #2
"I should let you get some sleep," Michael said. "You'll meet Mac in the morning. He'll probably try to act like this isn't rattling him. He's good at that."
Michael drained his cup and set it in the sink. "Just—when you meet him. When you see what he does with his face, his voice, and everything, remember it's armor. Remember there's a scared twenty-seven-year-old under there who's really good at pretending he's got this handled."
I thought about the footsteps. The pacing. The restlessness of someone who couldn't settle because settling meant being still, and being still meant thinking about the fact that somewhere out there, a stranger had been watching him for eighteen months.
"I'll remember," I said.
Michael looked at me for a long moment. Whatever he saw made him nod.
"Den's downstairs. Fold-out's already made up. Get some sleep if you can."
He left.
I stood in the kitchen listening to the house settle around me. The refrigerator cycling on with a mechanical wheeze. The furnace kicking in. Somewhere upstairs, a pipe knocked twice and went quiet.
The house breathed with the rhythm of a family. Thirty years of McCabes coming through that front door, hanging jackets on the same hooks, making coffee at dawn, and leaving lights on for whoever came home last. It smelled like safety built one day at a time.
I'd been living in places with no heartbeat. Sterile hotel rooms and my Portland apartment with its blank walls and empty refrigerator. No morning routine that required me to show up.
I'd dated in Portland. Brief things. A bartender for three weeks. A grad student for two months. Both ended the same way. They asked multiple times if they could leave a toothbrush, and I made excuses until they stopped asking.
The truth was simple: I couldn't let anyone close enough to witness me failing again. Couldn't risk someone depending on me when I knew—bone-deep, blood-certain—that I might hesitate at the crucial moment.
Better to live alone than to be responsible for someone else's hope.
For my apartment, I'd chosen the most anonymous building I could find.
Concrete and glass, no shared walls, and no neighbors who'd notice when I didn't come home for days.
I'd furnished it with the minimum required to function—bed, couch, coffee maker.
Nothing that suggested permanence. Nothing that would hurt to leave behind.
I'd built a life designed for no one to miss me when I left.
The McCabe den was in the basement. Wood paneling from the seventies, a fold-out couch that had seen better decades, and one small window that looked out at ground level. Vulnerable.
I sat on the edge of the converted bed and stared at the rain hitting the small window. Cued up my headphones—Coltrane, A Love Supreme. The familiar progression of saxophone and piano, searching for transcendence through discipline and repetition.
It didn't help.
Nothing helped except work. Taking another job and another and another until the jobs blurred together, and I could pretend I was protecting people instead of running from the one person I'd failed to protect.
Kyra Mendez.
The memories always came back, whether I wanted them to or not.
Twenty-nine years old. Investigative journalist. Death threats from a corrupt city councilman she'd exposed. She'd hired me through a personal recommendation—someone who'd worked with me before the failure, when I still had a reputation for seeing threats before they materialized.
I saw it that day.
And I didn't act fast enough.
Late afternoon in October. Autumn light turning everything gold and deceptive. We were leaving the courthouse—Kyra had testified before the grand jury. Clean exit. I'd walked the route that morning, identifying potential approach vectors, cataloguing faces, and noting anyone who didn't belong.
Nothing should have gone wrong.
The courthouse steps were wide, marble, worn smooth by decades of foot traffic. People everywhere—lawyers, defendants, civilians. Normal courthouse chaos.
Kyra was beside me, talking about dinner plans. Where we should go to celebrate. Thai food, maybe. Or that Italian place her editor had recommended.
I was scanning, constantly scanning.
That's when I saw him.
Middle-aged man. Glasses. Carrying papers. Dressed like a lawyer—suit jacket, briefcase, the whole costume. I'd seen him inside the courthouse earlier, sitting in the back of the gallery during Kyra's testimony.
He approached from the left, angling toward us through the crowd. My gut clenched.
Everything about him was wrong. His movements were too focused, too direct. His gaze locked on Kyra with an intensity that made my skin crawl.
Wrong wrong wrong.
But my training said he'd been cleared. I'd seen him inside, and he'd passed through security. He was just a lawyer. Court staff. Someone who belonged. If I needed to worry, backup would have notified.
I hesitated. One second. Maybe two.
His right hand moved, and the papers scattered.
A knife appeared.
I moved, but it was too late.
I shoved Kyra sideways, reaching for his wrist, but the blade was already in motion. It punched through her jacket, through her blouse—through skin and muscle and everything beneath.
She made a sound—not a scream, just a sharp exhalation. Surprise more than pain, like she couldn't understand what had just happened.
I caught his wrist. Twisted until he dropped the knife and ran.
She looked down at the blade protruding from her chest, three inches below her collarbone. The confusion in her eyes was worse than fear.
I caught her as she fell. My knees hit the concrete. Her blood was hot against my hands, and there was so much of it.
"Stay with me," I demanded. "Kyra, stay with me."
Her lips moved, but no sound came out. Her eyes were already losing focus.
The blood kept coming.
"Help!" I screamed. "Someone call 911!"
People were running toward us. Someone was shouting. A siren wailed in the distance.
But Kyra's eyes had already gone vacant.
Three years later, I could still feel her blood on my hands.
I heard what she'd said that morning, before the courthouse. Before everything.
"You worry too much, Eamon. Sometimes you have to trust that the universe isn't always out to get us."
She'd been wrong.
I'd spent three years wishing she'd been right.
Rain pattered against the basement window, pulling me back to the present.
I jerked upright. Hands fisted in the sheets. Pulse hammering.
The den. The McCabe house. Seattle.
I pressed my palms against my face. They were shaking, still shaking after three years.
Behind me, Coltrane had stopped playing. The headphones lay on the bed where I'd left them, cord tangled, small green light still glowing.
I climbed the stairs to the kitchen. Filled a glass with water. Drank it standing at the sink, listening to the house breathe around me.
And underneath the familiar sounds—faint but distinct—someone was moving upstairs. A door opening. Soft footsteps on old carpet.
Mac was awake.
I stood very still and listened as he moved through the upstairs hallway—bathroom door closing. Water running.
He'd be standing at the sink right now, running cold water over his hands maybe, or staring at his own reflection in the mirror and trying to see what the stalker saw. He'd try to understand what had made him a target instead of just another player.
I set the glass down. Dried it carefully. Put it in the rack.
When I looked up, Michael was standing in the doorway.
"Can't sleep?" he asked.
"Don't really sleep anymore."
He nodded like that made perfect sense. Moved to the coffee pot even though it was nearly three, and caffeine was the last thing either of us needed. Poured himself a cup and held the pot up in question.
I shook my head.
Michael leaned against the counter. "He's awake too. Has been on and off since midnight."
"I heard."
"First night's always the worst. The knowing someone's watching. The not knowing what they want." He stared into his coffee. "Or knowing exactly what they want and not being able to stop them from trying to take it."
Overhead, the water shut off. Footsteps crossed back toward the guest room. A door closed.
"You know what Mac means to this family?" Michael asked quietly.
I waited.
"When his dad died—Ronan, my uncle—Mac was ten. Aunt Claire, his mother, went quiet after that. Grief does different things to different people. She pulled inward. Mac started coming here more. Ma basically raised him summers and weekends."
Michael took a sip of coffee, grimacing at its bitter strength.
"He was this kid who'd lost his father and had a mother who loved him but couldn't figure out how to show it without breaking. And then he turned out to be gifted at baseball. Gifted enough that it gave him a way out, a way to build something on his own."
He looked up at me.
"What I'm saying is—Mac's not just my cousin. He's the kid we all helped raise. The one who made it out and made it matter. And if something happens to him..." Michael's voice went flat. "It would break this family in ways we couldn't come back from."
The weight of that settled between us.
"I won't let anything happen to him," I said.
Michael studied my face for a long moment. "You know what I see when I look at you?"
I waited.
"Someone who's been carrying something heavy for a long time.
Someone who thinks that if they work hard enough, they can make up for whatever they think they failed at.
" His voice was quiet. "Mac's carrying something heavy, too.
And if you're both trying so hard not to fail that you forget to actually live, this job's going to eat you both alive. "
I had no answer for that.
"Get some sleep if you can," Michael said. "Tomorrow's going to be a long day."
He left.
I stood in the kitchen a while longer. The rain had slowed to a steady whisper against the windows. Sometime between 1:10 and 2:40, the sedan vanished, but that didn't mean the threat was gone. It meant the stalker was learning to adapt.
When I went back to the den, I didn't bother lying down. Just sat on the edge of the fold-out and watched the small basement window until the sky started turning gray.
Dawn came slowly. The kind of winter morning that never fully commits to being day, just a gradual shift from black to charcoal to the pale non-color of Pacific Northwest winter.
I watched it happen through the basement window. Watched the street go from black to gray to something that might have been light if you were in a generous mood.
Somewhere upstairs, Mac was watching the same morning light. Standing at a different window, maybe, praying to something he didn't believe in anymore.
I wondered what he was praying for.
Safety, probably. The stalker to disappear. His life to go back to normal.
I wondered if he knew that life never went back. That once something broke you open, you could never quite close all the way again.
I hoped he didn't know that yet.
I hoped I could keep him from learning it.
Standing, I stretched the stiffness from my shoulders. My neck cracked from the night's vigilance.
I crossed to the window and pulled the curtain back.
The street was empty. Wet pavement caught the streetlight's reflection, turning it into something liquid. A recycling bin had tipped over three houses down, spilling cardboard into the gutter. Otherwise—nothing.
My attention caught on something else. The house across the street. Second-floor window. A curtain that had been perfectly still suddenly swayed slightly, like someone had just stepped back from it.
I watched for thirty seconds.
Nothing.
It could have been a cat. It could have been the heating system moving air. It could have been nothing.
It could have been someone with a camera and a long lens, documenting the security consultant who'd arrived in the middle of the night.
I made a mental note: check sight lines from that window. Find out who lived there. Add it to the perimeter assessment.
Upstairs, something moved. Not footsteps. Softer. A door opening. Water running through old pipes. The house was waking up in pieces—one room, one person at a time.
Then the smell hit.
Coffee. Strong enough to cut through the basement must. The particular burnt-sugar edge that came from brewing it too dark in a pot that had been making the same strength for forty years.
Ma McCabe was awake.
By sunrise, I'd meet my new client. Not the Mac McCabe from press conferences—the controlled smile, perfect posture, and face that had been on magazine covers and morning shows.
Today, I'd see the person underneath all of it.
The person someone thought they could extract and keep like he was an object to be preserved instead of a man with a life, family, and the absolute right to be left the hell alone.
The person I'd promised Michael I'd keep safe.
Upstairs, a door opened.
Footsteps on the staircase. Not hesitant. Not slow. Someone who'd decided to face the day with whatever armor he could manage.
Mac was coming down.
And I had no idea which version of him I was about to meet—the performance or the person underneath.
I was terrified it might not matter.
Terrified that I'd see both and want to protect them anyway.
Terrified that wanting to protect him and being able to protect him might not be the same thing at all.