28. Ronan
RONAN
I'm off the floor and reaching for the throw blanket before Cali can even sit up.
I drape it over her fast, so Isabella won't see anything she shouldn't. Then I'm on my feet and moving toward the stairs like this is the most normal thing in the world. Cali makes a strangled noise behind me, clutching the blanket to her chest.
"Hey, malyshka," I say to Isabella in a reassuring voice. "Bad dream, huh?"
She nods. Her lip is wobbling, the calm before the storm of tears that is to come if I don't intervene. She's got the caterpillar's shoebox pressed against her chest, and her hair is stuck up on one side.
"What was it about?"
"There was a big fish," she whispers. "And it ate Doctor Fuzz."
"A big fish." I crouch down in front of her. "That sounds scary."
"It was really big."
"Well." I hold out my hands. "Doctor Fuzz is right here. Safe and sound. See? The big fish didn't get him."
She looks down at the shoebox. She peers inside, checking. Then she nods, satisfied.
"Come on. Let's get you back to bed."
I scoop her up. She's light, and she smells like strawberry kid shampoo and sleep. She wraps one arm around my neck and holds the shoebox with the other. I carry her up the stairs while Cali scrambles for her dress behind me.
Isabella's room is dark except for a nightlight shaped like a seashell. I lay her down in her bed. She wriggles under the covers, and I set the shoebox on the nightstand where she can see it.
"There," I say. "Doctor Fuzz is standing guard. Nothing's getting past him."
She yawns. Then she looks up at me, and her eyes are so pure. Trusting. Open. She doesn't know who I am or what I've done, only that I'm there for her when it matters.
"Mr. Ronan… Will you be here for pancakes in the morning?" she asks.
I've been shot before. I've been stabbed. I've had men swing lead pipes at my head and I didn't flinch.
But this little girl asking me about pancakes in the morning takes the air out of me clean.
Because the only acceptable answer is no. I need to be gone before the sun comes up, before I get too woven into the fabric of this house, this family, this thing that has no room for me. Men like me don't get pancakes.
And yet…
"Yes," I hear myself say. "I'll be here for pancakes."
There it is then. I'm a liar in all the ways that matter and a fool in all the ways that don't.
But that's not the worst of it. Just as the word leaves my mouth, I realize I actually mean it.
I want to be here for pancakes. I want to sit at this small kitchen table and watch Hayden read me facts off the back of a cereal box and watch Isabella feed her caterpillar and watch Cali drift around in her socks with her hair a mess, and I want it so badly it scares me more than any man wielding a pipe ever could.
"Promise?"
"I promise."
She's asleep before I finish the word. Just like that. One breath, she's awake, and the next, she's gone, the way only children can do it.
I stay crouched by her bed for a few moments longer, just to be sure.
When I stand and turn, Cali is in the doorway. She's back in the red dress, though the zipper's still open in the back, and she's watching me with an expression I can't read. She heard the whole thing. The pancakes. The promise.
She doesn't say anything. She just reaches out and takes my hand and squeezes it, once, and leads me back into the hall.
"Thank you," she whispers.
"You don't have to thank me for that."
"I do, though." She looks up at me.
I can still feel the fire for her burning in me, but it's no longer quite so urgent. Strangely, I don't feel the frustration I normally would, even with Cali's sweetness still simmering on my lips and the sight of her making me harden and twitch.
She looks up at me, mouth open as if to say something. Then she changes her mind and sighs.
"Bathroom's down the hall if you need it," she says instead. "I should check on Hayden."
"Go. I'll wait."
She slips off, leaving me in the hallway darkness alone. Not long afterward, I feel a vibration in my pocket.
I only brought one phone with me: the third phone, the one that shouldn't exist. So I know without looking who's calling me.
I turn and trot down the stairs, then let myself out the front door onto the stoop before I answer. The night air is cool for June.
"What is it, Navi?"
"Sorry to interrupt your romantic evening," he begins.
"Don't apologize, just tell me why you're calling."
"Two things." I can hear him settle in, hear the click of a lighter, the drag of a cigarette.
"First one's good news, depending how you look at it.
The paperwork's done. Ready to file. I had our guy triple-check the shell so there's no fingerprints on it, nothing that comes back to the firm.
It's clean. You give me the word, I push it through Monday morning and the whole thing's done inside a week. Bradshaw Holdings dissolves, we insert, and the company changes hands so quiet nobody notices a thing.”
The company. Her company.
It could be mine, at the snap of my fingers.
I don't think there's a word in the English language for how that makes me feel.
"And the second thing?" I rasp.
Navi exhales. When he speaks again, the humor's gone out of his voice.
"The second thing is why I'm calling on a Saturday. Remember those little red flags in the ledger? The discrepancies Pyotr left behind?"
"I remember."
"Somebody queried one."
Everything in me goes still.
"Queried it how?"
"By the looks of it, it's an outside party.
It seems as though they pulled a filing on one of the shells.
Nothing dramatic yet—it could easily be nothing, just some bot scraping legal files, or some junior analyst who fat-fingered the case number.
But it could be something." He drags on the cigarette again.
"And there are a lot of bad forms of 'something.
' FBI, SEC, federal regulators. Or somebody underground who doesn't love us poking around to see what shakes loose.
" He hesitates. "I don't like it, Ro. I don't like not knowing. "
I look out at the dark street. A car passes, its headlights sweeping the parked cars, then gone.
I don't say anything.
"So here's my thinking," Navi goes on. "We push the Meadows deal through now.
Fast. This week. We get the engine in-house, we point it at our own books before anybody outside can, we find every one of Pyotr's little mistakes and clean them up before the party who's asking questions gets close enough to ask a real one.
It could be all handled very quickly. But we gotta do it now, while we've still got a comfortable margin, instead of waiting around for you to work up the nerve. "
Again, I don't respond right away. I stand on Calista Meadows's front stoop with her children asleep upstairs and her taste still on my mouth, and I think about pushing a button that takes the thing she loves most and rips it out from under her.
"I want to wait," I say.
The silence on the other end is almost painful.
"Wait," Navi repeats. "You want to… wait."
"Not long. A week. Two."
"Ro, are you listening?" he says, aghast. "You just heard me say somebody's asking questions. You understand what that means, don't you? That's the whole reason we needed her tool in the first place. Waiting could get us exposed. Or locked up. Or killed."
But I'm as stubborn as they come, and now that I've said it out loud, I know the path I intend to take. "I want to do it right."
"You want to do it right, or you don't want to do it at all?"
My answer is all the answer he needs.
"That's what I thought." He exhales, long and slow, and I can picture the smoke rolling out of him, up into the ceiling shadows. "You know, back when this was a plan on paper, it was easy. I just never pegged you for the kind of guy who gets cold feet."
I put my free hand against the warm iron of the stoop railing and grip it until my knuckles ache. "What's the rush? We have time."
"Maybe we do, maybe we don't. If it's a junior analyst at some bank somewhere having a slow week, we've got months.
If it's the front end of a federal agency with a subpoena behind it, I'm already too late making this call.
" Another impatient drag. "The longer you dawdle, the faster the clock runs. You taught me that."
I feel as sick as Hayden upstairs. A strange mix of anger, regret, and the unease of a wild animal backed into a corner.
"Give me the week," I say. "If anything moves—if someone so much as twitches toward anything that matters—you call me and we go that hour. But you don't push anything without me. Understand?"
Navi is quiet for a beat.
"You know what your problem is?" he says finally.
"Enlighten me."
"You built this cage. But now, now you're standing inside it with her, and you don't want to close the door, because closing the door means she's stuck in it, too.
" He pauses. "But the thing is already built, Ro. You built it. Sooner or later, somebody will close it. Then both you and her will lose everything.”
I close my eyes. He's not wrong. He's never wrong. That's what makes him worth keeping around and what makes him unbearable to talk to.
"A week," I say again.
"If that's what you want," he agrees dubiously. "I hope she's worth it. Because you're gambling with more than your own neck now. You know that."
He hangs up, leaving me marooned on the stoop with my dead phone in my hand.
Down the block, that dog barks once more, then gives up. I hear a light tinkling sound come through a distant window, and it makes me think about my mother sweeping up glass on her hands and knees, apologizing for a mess she didn't make.
Will you be here for pancakes in the morning?
I don't know how to be a man who says yes to that and also a man who does the things I must do to Cali and her children. I've spent my whole life believing I could hold two things in two hands and never let either one touch the other.
A man needs a code.
Lines he will not cross.
Well, I'm not sure anymore which line I'm standing on.
I let myself back into the house, quiet, and lock the door behind me.
I'm going to tell her. That's the only way.
I climb the stairs with that intention in mind.
I mean it this time. I've meant it before and talked myself out of it a dozen ways, but standing on that stoop with Navi's voice in my ear, I decided that I'm going to tell her what I am.
Not everything, maybe. Not the guns, not the men digging graves in the marshes. But enough. Enough that she knows, so that when the cage door closes—and Navi's right, it closes, one way or another—she doesn't look at me and see another Todd.
I get to her bedroom door with the words on my lips. There are some things you need to know about me, kotyonok.
It's cracked a few inches, warm light spilling out into the hall. I push it until it swings inward.
She's in the bed.
She meant to wait up. I can see it in how she's lying—on top of the covers, not under them, one arm flung out toward the empty side, still in the red dress with the zipper open down the back.
She fell asleep waiting for me.
Her face is soft. All the sharpness she wears in the daylight, all the armor, is gone. Her mouth is parted just slightly. Her hair is a beautiful disaster, fanned across the pillow. She looks, for once, like a woman who feels safe enough to let go in the dark.
I stand in the doorway and I don't wake her.
I could. It wouldn't be hard to sit on the edge of the bed and say her name and tell her everything. Maybe it would go the way I want, or maybe it wouldn't. But either way, my conscience would be clear, and she would be free to decide things for herself.
But she's asleep.
So I take it as a sign. It's a coward's move dressed up as mercy, but it's an easy thing to justify. I'm very good at that.
I ease the phone out of her hand and set it on the nightstand. I flip off the lamp. I stand in the dark until my eyes adjust, until I can see the rise and fall of her breathing.
Then I undress quietly and fold my clothes over the back of the chair in the corner—the chair I sat in all night the last time, watching over her. I don't sit in it tonight.
Tonight, I lift the edge of the covers and slide in beside her, careful not to wake her. She stirs anyway and turns toward me. Not fully awake, but some small part of her finding my warmth and moving toward it. Her hand lands on my chest. Her head tucks into my shoulder.
I hold still and let her.
In the morning, I'll make pancakes. I told a little girl I would, and I don't break promises to children.
After that, I'll decide the rest.