Chapter 28
The restof the day is easy. Short. Isolde doesn’t go to the museum—instead she meets with a retired professor who scowls at me from their café table until Isolde comes over and apologetically explains that he’s not a fan of the American military and has somehow guessed my former occupation by my demeanor. To be polite, I step outside and sip hot black coffee as colorful leaves flutter down in the park nearby.
Even though I’ve never seen Morois House in any season but late spring, I find myself daydreaming about what it looks like in autumn. Falling leaves and mushrooms congregating in the shade. Blackberries, ripe and staining, and silver rain to chase us inside.
When I used to imagine going back, I was back with him;it was the two of us in the same kind of dreamy frenzy as there was before. But now I picture Isolde there too. I imagine watching her and Mark play chess by the fire, Mark telling her the names of all the flowers and trees. Kissing her in the small family cemetery as the fog settles, both of us kissing her, the three of us in his bed…
Isolde walks out of the café with a pensive expression.
“Ready to go back?” I ask. We’d walked here rather than taking the car, since it’s one of those moody fall days that begs for you to be outdoors.
“Do you mind if we walk around a little? I don’t think I can go back and stare at more pictures of lumpy bowls.” She makes her voice intentionally low and gruff for the last few words, imitating me.
I mock-glare at her. “You better be careful. I know where you sleep.”
At that, her playful demeanor vanishes. “Yes, you do,” she says heavily.
I don’t know what to say to that, so I just tilt my head toward the street, and she nods. Together we start walking, and she grows thoughtful again. The breeze tugs at her hair, and she’s got her hands buried in the pockets of her trench coat, her head down.
We walk toward the Sava, into one of those trendy neighborhoods that’s half gentrified, half bohemian still. Isolde doesn’t seem to notice, though, even as we pass huge murals and sleek nightclubs and small dingy restaurants that have the best smells coming out of them. She keeps her gaze on the ground and her face covered by curtains of hair.
We get to the river and mosey down the well-kept path there, until we reach steps leading down to a narrow railed-off area overlooking the water.
“Did the professor give you a lot to think about?” I ask as she hugs herself and stares at the Sava.
“Hmm? Oh, yes. He thinks the bowl might be older even than the current estimate.”
“Ah,” I say, like this is meaningful to me. We don’t speak for a moment, her returning to her silence, me stealing glances. She was made to stand next to Old World rivers in trench coats. That is a fact.
“Can I ask you something?” Her voice is quiet, barely louder than the river slopping nearby.
“Of course, honey.”
I don’t mean to say it, but her face softens when I do, and I don’t regret it.
“Do you ever wish you hadn’t joined the army?”
I did not expect this, and I find my brain whirring with a thousand answers, a thousand explanations. All of them conflicting.
But Isolde just watches me with that patient, assessing gaze of hers, not pushing me, not prompting me. I’m grateful for her patience and grateful that she doesn’t try to take the question back, that she doesn’t interpret my pause as reluctance and release me. It gives me the few moments I need to scrape together some words, and anyway, I want to answer it. For her, but also for myself too.
“I wish I hadn’t killed Sims,” I say finally. I turn with my back to the railing and lean against it. The day is young yet, and so the river walk is filled with parents pushing strollers, tourists taking selfies, an unending plague of bicyclists. “I wish I hadn’t been too late to save McKenzie in that alley in Krakow. I wish I hadn’t killed the other people I’ve killed. I wish it so hard that my teeth hurt.”
She turns too, her back to the railing, staring at the happy tourists and residents along with me. Clouds build on the horizon, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to rain.
“I don’t know how I can wish those things and not wish I hadn’t joined the army. One decision. One choice. The single seed of all my nightmares and regrets.” I look down at my feet. Feet that used to wear sneakers and then combat boots and now tactical shoes that look like dress shoes. “But I know what the Tristan who went to West Point wished for. He wished to be good, to make a difference, to save lives. He thought that was how.”
“So you’re saying wishing doesn’t change anything.” The words are flat. Almost bitter.
I look at her. “It changes what I do now,” I say. “Why are you asking this?”
“I have something unpleasant I have to do for work,” she says after a minute, and irritation flares in me, itchy and hot.
Trying to put a price tag on something only a handful of people can afford or are even interested in is not the same thing as being too late to save a dying friend. As knowing the last sounds they heard were bullets and the oblivious music harping and thrumming from the nearby concert hall.
It’s not the same thing as shooting your best friend through the neck because he was ready to kill literal children for reasons you still don’t understand.
But there’s something about her expression right now, the way her eyes are fixed on the middle distance, that stops me from telling her the two things aren’t the same.
“I think the more important question is if you believe in your work,” I say, trying to sound encouraging. It’s important to her, clearly, and anyway, after going to war, it’s stupid to play the who’s had higher stakes game. I’ll always win, and I’ll win at the cost of understanding the person I’m with. “When McKenzie died, it was easy to keep going because I knew I was in the right place. I knew that I was doing what I was meant to be doing.”
“But you lost that. After you had to kill your friend.”
“I’d still be there, right this minute, if I believed I was actually making a difference.” I touch her arm. “If you still believe that you’re making a difference, that you’re giving the world more holy and beautiful things, then what are a few bad days?”
* * *
Mark doesn’t callIsolde that night or me the next morning, and it’s probably a good thing because I feel like my and Isolde’s new sleeping arrangement is something I’d inadvertently reveal. She wore shorts to sleep last night, thank God, but she’d turned in her sleep, her back to my chest, and I’d woken up with one hand cupping her breast and my dick wedged against her cheeks. Even after another self-care shower, it’s all I can think about.
And I can’t shake the feeling that Mark is going to know, somehow, magically, just from the pitch of my voice alone.
Because Isolde’s day is meeting-free, she decides to go for a jog, and as a decent bodyguard, I go with her, enjoying the crisp October air and the pretty girl next to me, and for the hour we run, I pretend that she is my girlfriend or even my wife. That we’re together and that life is as simple as going out for runs together, as enjoying a new city and looking for new places to get coffee or some burek.
But if life were that simple, there’d be no Mark. I don’t think I’d want that either.
Isolde leads us on the same route we took to the Sava yesterday, through the trendy neighborhood down to the river walk. Even midmorning, the neighborhood still has the feeling of dragging itself out of bed. Sleepy-eyed young people with wireless headphones and coffee cups, nightclubs with their doors flung open for deliveries.
We do a couple of miles up the river walk and back when my phone rings. I glance at my watch, thinking it might be my dad—sigh—or Mark, which I wouldn’t mind—but it’s neither. It’s a number I don’t recognize with the name of a cheap hotel chain underneath it.
Weird.
“Sorry,” I pant to Isolde. “I want to see who this is.”
We both come to a stop as I answer the phone.
“Hello?” I ask.
“Tristan?” comes a voice I haven’t heard in months. My stomach swoops, sinks, rolls itself right into the river next to me.
It’s Cara Sims. Aaron Sims’s sister.
“Cara,” I say. I’ve dreaded this since our first call was cut short.
I’ve also wanted it, perversely.
Not only to put me out of my misery, but because I deserve whatever she wants to say to me. It can be true a hundred times over that I had no choice that day in the forest—and it can also be true that Cara should have her nosy, boisterous, affectionate older brother alive today.
Isolde is looking at me, and I cup my hand over the phone. “It’s Sims’s sister,” I say as quietly as I can. “I’m sorry.”
Don’t be sorry, she mouths, her eyes soft. I can run back on my own?
“No, Isolde—” Fuck. A good former lover and present-day…bed-sharer wouldn’t let her go back alone. Also Mark would kill me.
But it’s broad daylight and also it’s Isolde, who’s kicked my ass with nothing but a rubber knife. She’ll be safer than most men twice her size would be.
She’s waited politely, too well-bred to just jog off, even though I can see she wants to. “Okay,” I say, sotto voce. “I’ll be right behind you.”
She nods, gives me an encouraging smile, and then starts jogging ahead, her braid bouncing against her shoulder and her ass moving temptingly in her tight leggings.
“I’m sorry, are you still there? I was with someone, but she’s gone now.”
“I’m here,” Cara says. She sounds brittle, tired. “I’m sorry it took me so long to call. I’ve been trying to find a place to lie low.”
I start walking in the direction of the penthouse. Isolde’s already out of sight. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”
Cara’s laugh disturbs me. It’s caustic. Utterly devoid of hope. “I don’t think anyone can help me.”
“Cara, just tell me where you are and what’s going on.” I look at my watch. “I’m in Serbia now, but I can?—”
“Aaron spent so much time trying to save me,” she says, ignoring me. “And I didn’t need it then, not really. Yeah, I had shitty boyfriends and got in some trouble, but it was all… Well, I had control over it, you know? And now the one time I don’t have it under control, when I wish he would come save me, he’s not here. And it’s his fault.”
I don’t really understand what she’s saying, but I feel the need to tell her how much Aaron loved her and worried over her since he can’t do it himself. Since I killed him. “Cara, Aaron cared so much—and I’ll never be able to say I’m sorry enough for what happened?—”
“Tristan, you’re not the reason he’s dead.”