38. Lydia
LYDIA
The detective's coffee has gone cold in front of him and he still hasn't touched it. I've been in this room for two hours and I haven't touched mine either.
"Walk me through it again," he says. "From when you got the phone call."
"I've walked you through it three times."
"Walk me through it a fourth."
So I do. I keep my hands flat on the table and tell him my rehearsed lines.
Frank called my mother's line pretending to be a nurse.
I drove to the house. Frank had a gun. By the time it was over, he was dead in the driveway, and Nico was in handcuffs telling three uniforms it was him and only him. I'd never even touched the gun.
That last part is the only lie in the whole story, and it's his lie, not mine.
"And the recording," the detective says.
I already gave it to them. I gave it to them within the hour, before I'd even stopped shaking, because I understood something in that kitchen with more clarity than I've understood anything in my life: a dead man can't be charged with anything, but a recording of him bragging about ordering my father's murder can still burn down everyone he built his career on top of.
"The recording speaks for itself," I say.
He looks at me like he wants to argue and doesn't have the energy. Good. Neither do I.
"You understand what's on that recording implicates your husband too," he says. "In other things."
"I understand it implicates a lot of people. Frank most of all."
"He's dead. Dead men don't get implicated."
"Then it's a good thing he confessed to it while he was still breathing."
The detective almost smiles. Doesn't quite make it there. Slides a form across the table instead and tells me to sign at the bottom, and I do, my hand steadier than it has any right to be.
Nico's lawyer didn't come out of a phone book. His voice is low and rough and unhurried, and he doesn't introduce himself so much as arrive, already knowing everything, already three steps into a plan I'm just now hearing the outline of.
"The recording is enough," he tells me on the courthouse steps, the second day.
"It's more than enough. It ties him to Harry Mitchell's murder, to years of coercing your mother, and to at least four officers he was running like personal staff.
Internal Affairs has had a hard-on for this captain for a decade and didn't have a hook. You handed them the whole fish."
"I didn't hand them anything. Frank did that to himself."
"Sure," he says, in the tone of a man who has learned not to correct a client's grief. "Either way. Give it four, five days."
"That's it? Four days, after everything?"
"Internal Affairs has been sitting on a captain they couldn't touch for ten years. You just handed them motive, murder, and a list of officers on his payroll, in his own voice. They're not going to sit on that. They're going to move fast so nobody above them has time to bury it again."
Four or five days. I've waited longer for a table at a restaurant. It shouldn't feel this heavy, and it does anyway, because Nico is somewhere behind a door I can't get through, wearing someone else's jumpsuit, sleeping in a room he shouldn't be in. I put him there as much as Frank did.
"Tell him something for me," I say. "Tell him I'm working on it."
"He knows you're working on it. That's half of why he's not losing his mind in there."
I don't say that part out loud.
The days blur into each other in the particular way that waiting does, where nothing changes and everything is different by the time you look up again. I sign things. I answer questions I've already answered. I sit in my mother's room at the care facility and hold her hand.
But I don't tell her about the cops who died in her house, because some things don’t need to be carried into her new life.
On the second night, my phone buzzes with a news alert. Local captain named in ongoing corruption probe. I read the first three paragraphs standing barefoot in my kitchen, coffee going cold, and I don't recognize the man they're describing as belonging to the same house I grew up in.
Sources say the investigation now includes an unsolved homicide dating back over a decade.
They don't say dad’s name yet. But in time, they will. I put the phone face down on the counter and don't pick it back up for an hour.
By the third day, the lawyer stops calling with updates and starts calling with confirmations.
Four more officers named. Two Internal Affairs interviews already conducted.
A department spokesperson stands in front of a microphone and claims irregularities, when what he means is crimes and he doesn't want to get sued for saying so.
"They're not just clearing Nico," the lawyer tells me. "They're gutting the whole case Frank built against him. Church shooting, everything. It was never a real investigation. It was a leash."
"I know what it was."
"Then you know what it means when the leash's owner turns out to be the one who should've been in cuffs the whole time."
I go back to the house exactly once, because someone has to.
Frank kept an office in the back room my mother never used, all dark wood and heavy locked drawers, more furniture than the room could reasonably hold.
It smells like his cologne even now, something expensive and cold, and I hate that my body still flinches at it.
I go in with a box and a list from the lawyer, documents relevant to the estate, and I tell myself that's the whole reason I'm standing here breathing air that still smells like him.
The desk drawers aren't locked anymore. Nobody's afraid of him anymore.
I go through folder after folder, insurance, deeds, the ordinary paperwork of a man who spent decades pretending to be ordinary.
My hands do the work while the rest of me stays somewhere outside the room, watching.
And then, near the bottom of the second drawer, under a stack of bank statements he probably never thought anyone would read, I find it.
Power of attorney. My mother's care, her finances, her medical decisions. Already signed.
I sit down on the floor because my legs stop being something I trust.
It's dated to the same time as when I handed over the information about Terminal 7 to him.
He'd already signed it. He'd had it in a drawer the whole time.
He never needed to say no. He just needed me to keep asking.
I don't cry. I want to say that like it's a strength, but it isn't. It's just what happens, my body deciding there isn't room for one more thing today.
I sit on the floor of his office with the paper in my lap and I think, so this is what it costs to make someone feel like nothing.
Not much. A signature. A drawer. A little patience on his part, watching me beg.
It doesn't change anything. He's dead. The paperwork means nothing now. I already have every authority I need without his name anywhere near it.
That's the worst part, maybe. That it changes nothing and confirms everything.
I fold the paper once, put it back exactly where I found it, and leave the box behind. Someone else can finish the estate. I've got what I came for, even if it wasn't what I was looking for.
The doctor at the facility doesn't ask me for permission anymore. That's the first thing I notice, three days later, standing in the hallway outside my mother's room.
"We'd like to adjust her pain management," the doctor says. "With your approval."
With my approval. Not someone's approval, not a call to legal and a wait for the account holder to sign off. Mine.
"Yes," I say. "Whatever she needs."
It's such a small sentence to carry so much weight. Six months ago I would have needed three phone calls and a fax number to say it. Now I just say it, and the doctor nods and writes something down. That's that. It's done.
I stand there a second longer than I need to, because some part of me is waiting for the catch, the follow-up call, the man on the other end saying it isn't that simple. It doesn't come. Frank is dead and with him died every single door he used to make me knock.
I owe her everything, my mother. I've spent so long carrying that debt as a weight, a thing I could never pay down fast enough, and standing in this hallway I understand, quietly, that paying it doesn't have to mean suffering for her.
It can mean this. A doctor asking me a simple question and getting a simple yes.
I go sit with her for an hour. She doesn't know who I am today. Some days she does and some days she doesn't. But she lets me hold her hand and hum something off-key, and I let myself have that, an hour where nothing is a fight.
The call comes on the fifth day.
"He's out," the lawyer says. "Processing now. Should be walking out the front in under an hour."
I don't remember driving there. I remember the parking lot, the gray concrete, my hands too tight on the wheel the whole way, and I remember standing outside the doors with my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
Everything about what happened between us the night before the standoff is still sitting in my chest, unresolved, ugly, mine to carry along with everything else.
He didn't reach for me after. I don't know if he's going to reach for me now.
I don't know what we are, walking out of two separate kinds of captivity and back into whatever's left of a marriage that broke the night before it nearly ended for good.
I know one thing I haven't told him yet, and it isn't the moment for it, not standing in a parking lot with cameras still lingering by the entrance, waiting to catch the corrupt captain's downfall from every angle they can get.
But it's there, low in my body, quiet and real, a fact that's going to change both our lives whether either of us is ready for it.
I've known for a week. I've said it out loud exactly zero times, not even to myself in the mirror, like saying it might make it something I have to explain before I'm ready to.
There hasn't been a version of the last eleven days that had room in it for that conversation.
There's a dead man, a police report, my mother's medication schedule, a lawyer who calls before eight in the morning.
Somewhere underneath all of it, quiet as anything, there's a version of Nico and me that neither of us has met yet.
I press a hand flat against my stomach without meaning to. Just for a second. Then I make myself stop.
The doors open.
He walks out in borrowed clothes someone brought him, and for a second he just stands there under the gray sky, still, blinking, letting his eyes adjust.
Then his eyes find mine.
Amber, steady, the scar along his jaw catching the light for a second before he moves. He doesn't run. Neither do I. We just stand there, ten feet apart, two people who know exactly how much wreckage sits behind them and no idea yet what happens next.
"Lydia," he says.
That's all. Just my name, in the voice I haven't heard outside of a locked room in five days, and my knees nearly forget how to hold me up.
I don't know what I'm going to say back. I don't know if sorry is even the right word for what happened between us, or if there's a word for it at all.
But I take the first step anyway.
He meets me halfway.