42. Mat
MAT
While Afon goes to the nurses’ station to “ask about visitor passes for the Oglethorpe family,” I’m left alone with the manila envelope they handed me on my way out of the precinct.
I sit down by the window and open it up. They didn’t return much because there wasn’t much to take in the first place. Keys, belt, watch, cufflinks.
And one folded square of paper.
I unfold it on my knee.
The sonogram is creased now in places it wasn’t creased before.
Someone unfolded it, looked at it, then refolded it badly and shoved it aside.
I picture a uniformed cop holding it up under a fluorescent light, him squinting at it, deciding it was nothing important, and crumpling it back in the envelope.
I look at it carefully. I’ve done this before, of course, but it’s a different experience doing it now. What’s the thing Heraclitus says? No man ever steps in the same river twice, for he is not the same man and it is not the same river?
I’m no longer the same man.
This river has fucking changed, too.
When Cass first handed me this, I thought there’d be a clean way out for us. Freedom, as I said to her and to Afon and myself over and over again.
Now, I see that there’s no such thing as that. We’re all tied down in one way or another. Freedom is an illusion.
But maybe this little life can be free in a way I’ll never be able to. It’s only a small thing now. If my math is correct, its heart has only just begun to pump.
For the child’s sake and for its mother’s, I’m going to do what must be done.
Freedom. If not for me, then for them.
But in a sick twist of fate, for right now, the freest place Cass can be is in a jail cell. Those locked doors keep her caged in, but they also keep Vainakh caged out.
I want so badly to tear down the walls of that jail and bring her back to me. I can’t do that, though. The minute I post her bond, send her a lawyer, or so much as wave at her across a courtroom, I tie her to me publicly. I tie her to the Bratva.
Worst of all, I tie her to whatever I do next.
Which is going to be ugly. No way around that.
So I have to leave her there. As long as she’s in there, she’s safe. I just hope that, when the time finally comes to free her, she’ll know I did all this for her.
I fold the sonogram back up along its creases and tuck it into my breast pocket, right over my heart, where it has lived since the moment she gave it to me. Where it will live until I can hand it back to her in person.
I am still here, I tell the baby. I’m still here, and I love your mother, and I am coming back for both of you.
A commotion down the hall draws my attention. It’s not much at first. A beep sharpening into an alarm, a voice raised slightly higher than before.
Then that alarm sharpens into a code. More voices join the first. footsteps start to accumulate.
A nurse jogs past the waiting room door. Another comes after. Then a man in scrubs racing with a crash cart, the wheels skidding on the polished floor. A doctor follows at a dead sprint, white coat flapping in the wind.
I jump to my feet and follow the herd. They’ve stopped outside a room four doors down on the left. The door is propped open. I can see, in the gap, the foot of a hospital bed and the pale shape of a sheet.
And on the pillow, I see a wheat-blonde chignon, half-undone.
Susan.
A woman who must be Caroline, the daughter, is being held back by a nurse a few feet from the door, both her hands clamped to her face. Her shoulders are shaking. The doctor is barking numbers I can’t quite make out over the alarm. A nurse pulls the pale-blue curtain across the doorway.
The last thing I see before it closes is Caroline sinking to her knees on the linoleum.
Afon appears at my elbow, speechless. We watch as the alarm goes on for another sixty seconds, maybe ninety. Then it stops.
Because there’s nothing left for it to measure.
Slowly, numbly, I drift backwards, away from the mayhem. Caroline’s wails are painful to hear. When I’m far enough back, I turn and walk away.
Afon converses with a nurse quietly for a few minutes. He hands her something, thanks her warmly, and then joins me in the waiting room.
“They are saying,” he murmurs, low enough that only I can hear, “that her heart gave out with no warning. Very unfortunate. Very sad.”
“Her heart. A perfectly healthy sixty-three-year-old woman with no cardiac history.”
He nods.
“That’s not a coincidence, either,” I decide.
“No, plemyannik . It is not.”
Down the hall, Caroline is sobbing into the doctor’s shoulder. I touch my breast pocket. The sonogram is still there. Cass, somewhere across town, is, too.
Susan Oglethorpe, who knew the name of the man who runs Vainakh, is not.
Whoever these people are, they are very, very fast.
I am going to have to be faster.