CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE #2
“But I know enough,” he replied softly. “I know he was ambitious. That he chose the hospital over the home more often than not. That you and your mother waited for him at meals gone cold. That he missed recitals, birthdays, small crises with the casual assumption that his work mattered more than his presence.” His eyes searched her face.
“And I know that when a decision presented itself—a choice between lives—he believed he could make it. That he was qualified to weigh souls.”
Her throat tightened. Images flashed, unwelcome and sharp: her father’s coat over the back of a kitchen chair; his shoes by the door; the empty seat at school plays offset by a bouquet of flowers and an apologetic note.
The stories her mother told about how hard he worked, how dedicated he was, how lucky his patients were to have him.
“Every doctor has to make those calls,” she said. “Every emergency room—”
“Not every doctor plays God,” Cox interrupted, with a sudden, flinty edge.
“Not every man convinces himself that his judgment is clean. Quinn Marsh’s mother died, and your father walked away with a thicker file and a promotion path cleared of obstacles.
” He spread his shackled hands the inch that his chains allowed.
“Tell me, Kate. How many cancelled dinners did that career require?”
She could feel Bailey’s attention, a prickle between her shoulder blades, the room narrowing to the circle of glass and the man in it.
“You’re not talking about my father,” she said, forcing her voice to stay level. “You’re talking about yours. About every man who ever hurt you by not showing up. You’re projecting your mess onto my family because it makes the story tidier.”
His eyes flashed. Just once. Then the calm slid back into place like a lid.
“Deflection,” he murmured. “You learned that from him too, no doubt.”
“Forget it.” She didn’t raise her voice; she didn’t need to. “You don’t get to use his name like a tool. Not today.”
“Why not today?” he asked quietly. “Today you have seen the blood on his hands. The consequences of the lives he chose to value more than others. That is what Marsh showed you. Not vengeance—that is the Lord’s. Correction. A rebalancing of the scales.”
“You’re giving Marsh far too much credit. He wasn’t some holy auditor. He was a disturbed and violent man who latched onto your delusions because they gave him permission to act out his own. You’re both just… broken mirrors, reflecting each other’s madness back and calling it God.”
He considered that, a faint line appearing between his brows. “And yet,” he said slowly, “you cannot deny that something has shifted for you.”
She thought of Chicago. Of Marsh’s cracked voice as he talked about the winter of ’81, about his mother’s ventilator, about a man in a white coat deciding who breathed. Of the way her father’s name had sounded in his mouth: not as a saint, but as an executioner.
She thought of the motel room afterwards, the Bible, the cheap art, the debris of her struggle with Marsh. Of Marcus bursting through the door, eyes wild, as if the universe had finally decided to cut her a break.
Something had shifted. She just wasn’t about to hand Cox a map to it.
“What shifted,” she said carefully, “was my understanding of a case. Of a suspect’s motive. Not of my father. He was a human being. Flawed. Brilliant. Exhausted. The fact that you can only see people as all-good or all-evil is your problem, not mine.”
His mouth curled, faintly contemptuous. “You cling to contradiction as if it were virtue.”
“Because it is,” she shot back. “It’s a virtue just to understand that. Relationships are complicated. They’re dynamic. People hurt each other and love each other at the same time. They fail and they repair. They grow or they don’t. You don’t seem to have any frame of reference for that.”
He opened his hands again, as far as the chains allowed. “Enlighten me.”
“You call what you had with your followers ‘love,’” she said. “It wasn’t. It was control. Manipulation dressed up as devotion. They adored you because you demanded it, because you fed them certainty and shame. That’s not love. That’s slavery with nice language.”
His eyes cooled. “Careful.”
She laughed— almost. “Why?” she asked. “You can’t hurt me from in there.
That’s the one thing about this room that I truly appreciate.
” She leaned forward, elbows on the narrow ledge beneath the glass.
“You want to talk about the fifth commandment? Fine. It’s not about putting your parents on pedestals.
It’s not about worshipping them or pretending they never screwed up.
It’s about honor. And honor is a verb. It’s something people do, and stop doing, and start doing again. ”
“You quote scripture to me now,” he said softly. “How far you’ve come.”
“I’m not quoting scripture,” she said. “I’m quoting my mother, and the fallout of this case.
” She exhaled once, steadier than she felt.
“Honoring my father doesn’t mean agreeing with every choice he made.
It means living the values he tried to live by: service, compassion, responsibility.
I did that when I chased Marsh. I’ll keep doing it whatever happens to me next w… .”
She stopped herself. But it was too late. Cox smiled. He pounced on personal details like a cobra.
“Next week, Kate? Now what’s happening next week?” He tutted. “Back in the Principal’s office, again? Naughty girl.”
“What will be, will be.”
“It’s a convenient narrative you’ve found,” he murmured. “You just rewrite the commandment to fit your life. Like everyone else.”
“No,” she said. “I resist letting men like you rewrite it for me. There’s a difference.”
For the first time since she’d sat down, she saw something flicker behind his eyes that looked almost like—hurt? No. Offense. The affront of a man whose sermon had been interrupted.
“You pity me,” he said. The words were almost wonderingly spoken.
“Yes,” she said simply. It surprised her how true it was. “I do.”
“Why?” The word was sharp, stripped of his usual languid cadence.
“Because you’ve never had what I’m talking about.
” She said it gently now, not as a weapon, but as observation.
“You’ve never been in a relationship that wasn’t about power.
Your parents, your lovers, your flock—maybe even your God.
It’s all hierarchy to you. Someone above, someone below.
Someone commanding, someone obeying. You think love is total surrender or total control. Anything else just doesn’t register.”
His jaw tightened. “You presume a great deal about my life.”
“That’s my job,” she said. “Reading patterns, building profiles. And every pattern you show me says the same thing: you don’t understand mutuality.
You don’t understand forgiveness. You don’t understand change…
that’s why you’re obsessed with what’s eternal.
And it’s why you can’t imagine a daughter loving a flawed father without either excusing everything or condemning him outright. Nuance flies right over your head.”
He stared at her, eyes dark, hand frozen around the phone. On the wall behind him, the institutional clock ticked in dispassionate seconds.
“Love is obedience,” he said finally, as if issuing a verdict.
“No,” she said. “Love is showing up. It’s sitting at a kitchen table with your mother and listening to her talk about the man she married instead of the saint you built.
Or listening to her tell the same old stories you’ve heard for decades, because it gives her comfort to tell them.
It’s my partner sitting in a car outside a crappy motel all night, and being angry with me, but wanting to protect me at the same time.
” She held his gaze. “You don’t have any of that.
You have acolytes. There’s a difference. ”
Something twisted in his expression—too quick to name, gone almost before she registered it.
“You think your realignment will save you,” he said quietly. “From what’s coming. From the weight of the covenant you’ve spent your life ignoring.”
“I think,” she said, “that what saves me is people holding me to account when I screw up and loving me anyway. Not some man in a cell telling me what God really meant.”
Bailey shifted against the wall. “Time,” he called, voice low but firm.
Cox inclined his head, the courtroom-polite gesture of a man concluding arguments.
“I am glad Marsh brought you this far,” he said. “Truly. It will make the next act that much more… profound.”
“There is no next act,” she said. “Not for you. Not for your little fan club.”
He smiled. “You cannot close what you did not open.”
She set the phone back in its cradle with more force than necessary. The line clicked off. On the other side of the glass he remained still, watching her with that unsettling, inward-focused attention, as if he were memorising her for later use.
For one brief, absurd moment, she had the urge to lay her palm flat against the glass. To feel the cold, to confirm the barrier, to reassure herself that this man was contained by more than words. She let her hand hover an inch away, then dropped it to her side.
Bailey opened the door. “This way, Agent.”
Her legs felt heavier on the way out, as if each step had to be negotiated with gravity.
The fluorescent lights seemed harsher, the buzzing louder, flattening her thoughts into a dull hum.
Rivera met her at the security desk, returning her watch, her phone, the small constellation of items that meant outside.
“Everything okay?” Rivera asked, not unkindly.
“Fine,” Kate said. “He was… himself.”
Rivera shrugged. “Ain’t we all?”
Sunlight and heat hit her as she stepped out of the last door. The fences shimmered, razor wire haloed by pale sky. Her car looked small again, waiting obediently in its space.