Chapter 9 #2
"Everything I do works, Cassar. I'm very good at my job.
" She picked her pen back up, all business now, because Von's love had always looked like competence.
"Reassignment I can do. FTO change mid-cycle isn't even unusual, I'll paper it as a scheduling thing, it won't touch his record.
You two dating once he's off your evals and out of your chain — that's two adults, and it's nobody's business, and I'll go to the mat on that with anybody who wants to make it their business, including Falk, who can come talk to me directly if he's got a problem, and I'd genuinely love the conversation.
" She started writing. "It's not zero risk, Dom.
There'll be talk. Some of it ugly. You're going to have to be the guy who's a little bit gossiped about, and I know how much you'd rather die.
But fired? No. Not if we do it clean, and we're going to do it clean.
" She looked up. "Go get him. If he'll have you, which — you threw him away on the worst night of his life, so that's on you to fix, and it should be, but go. That's an order, Cassar."
Dom huffed something that was almost a laugh, the first one in a while.
"That's my line," he said.
"I know. It's a good line. Go."
***
Jonah's building had a buzzer that half worked and a lobby that smelled like radiator and somebody's cooking, and Dom stood outside apartment 4C at five in the morning having driven straight there, having not slept, having rehearsed nothing, because he'd learned from a twenty-four-year-old that the only way you ever do anything brave is fast, before the smarter part of you can file an objection.
He knocked.
It took a while. When the door opened it opened on the chain — an echo of his own door, a week and a lifetime ago — and one pale grey-green eye and a slice of Jonah, wrecked, hollow, days of not sleeping written all over him, and the sight of it went through Dom like a blade because he'd done that, he'd put that there.
"Go home, Dom," Jonah said. Flat. The formal voice, the furthest-from-okay voice. "Whatever this is. I can't. I'm running on fumes and I can't do a scene right now, I don't have it in me."
"I stepped down." Dom got it out fast, before the door could close.
"As your FTO. An hour ago. Von's papering it now.
I'm not signing your evals anymore, I'm not in your chain, there's no power thing, there's no ethics thing, there's nothing standing between us but me, and me is the thing I came to fix.
" The eye didn't move. "Ten minutes. You can time me.
You gave me ten minutes once and it was the best thing anybody ever did for me. Let me give it back."
A long silence, on the other side of the chain. And then — the same mercy, the same sound — the chain slid, and the door opened, and Jonah stood back to let him in, and it was so exactly the mirror of that night that Dom's throat closed.
The apartment was a mess in the way Dom's was empty — a real life, cluttered, a roommate's stuff and Jonah's stuff and a couch, an actual couch, the couch he'd joked about not having.
Jonah stood in the middle of it with his arms wrapped around himself, holding himself the way Dom had watched him hold himself against the side of the rig, and he did not perform anything, there was nothing left to perform with.
"Say it, then," Jonah said. "Your ten minutes."
And Dom, who had rehearsed nothing, who did not do feelings-talk, who had spent twenty years making a religion out of not saying the things he meant, said the things he meant.
"You were right. In the office. You said I keep saving you by leaving, and that it's not saving, it's just leaving with a better story, and you were right, that's exactly what it is, that's what I did to you and it's what I did to Ray's memory and it's what I've done to everybody who ever got close enough to cost me something.
I lay the photo face-down. I close the drawer.
I tell myself the dark is a mercy." Dom's hands were shaking and he let them, didn't hide them, held them right out where Jonah could see.
"I opened the drawer tonight. Ray's stethoscope.
Eighteen months. I'm wearing it, look, because you were right about that too — being close to somebody isn't a murder weapon, and refusing to look at the people you lost isn't honoring them, it's just being a coward with better lighting.
You taught me that. A twenty-four-year-old with two coffees taught me that in about six weeks and I paid you back by breaking your heart on a sidewalk.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Jonah. That's most of the ten minutes. The rest of it is—"
"Don't." Jonah's voice cracked. "Don't say something nice to me right now, I can't—"
"You told me about a medic." Dom kept going, gentle, relentless, the way you keep going when a life depends on it.
"On a floor. Seven years ago. The calm one, the one who got down next to you and said you did everything right.
And you've spent seven years trying to be him, and two days ago on a sidewalk you decided he was a liar, because being right didn't save your brother, so being enough must be a lie, so you must be nothing under the medic.
" Jonah's face broke at that, at nothing under the medic, because Dom had reached right into his chest and named the exact thing.
"Listen to me. That medic wasn't lying. And he didn't save Sam — you're right, he couldn't, nobody could, Sam was gone.
That's not what he did. What he did was get down on the floor next to a terrified kid and make him not alone for one minute on the worst day of his life.
That's the whole thing. That's the entire job, under all the tubes and the drugs — the job is you don't let people be alone in it.
And that kid — you — never forgot it. Seven years.
One minute of somebody being there and it built your entire life. "
Dom stepped closer. Jonah didn't move away.