CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE #3
In the driver’s seat she sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, the fabric surprisingly cool against her palms.
Was any of that necessary? Did I need to give him that?
Yes, she decided. She needed to say it out loud, if only to hear herself choose the version of the story she wanted to live in.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Marcus.
YOU ALIVE?
She typed back:
ALIVE. HE WAS SMUG. AGAIN. MARSH = “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” IN HIS HEAD. CALL LATER. ON WAY TO MOM’S.
Three dots appeared, then disappeared. Then the sequence repeated. Then there was nothing. She guessed what was happening at the other end. Cheryl was probably telling him to put the phone down. She huffed a small, genuine laugh at that, the tightness in her chest easing an inch.
On the drive down to Portland, the road unspooled in long, bare strips. The trees along the highway were skeletal, branch-bones laced against the low sky. Everything was pale and withered, the result of an early heatwave. The radio muttered background noise she barely heard.
Honor thy father and thy mother.
The words had stalked her through this entire case, popping up in crime scenes and phone calls and now, apparently, review board notices.
For years she’d heard them in King James cadence, her father’s voice reading from a church bulletin, her mother’s softer echo at the dinner table after he was gone.
What did it actually mean?
She thought of Marsh again. Of the way he'd spoken about his mother: Mary, the woman who'd worked three jobs and painted pets for extra cash, who'd gone hungry so her son could have new brushes.
Of how that love had been twisted into a justification for murder. Honor as obsession. Honor as a weapon.
She thought of her own father: the hospital corridors, the long nights, the worn lines at the corners of his eyes.
The way he’d scoop her up when he did make it home, smelling of antiseptic and coffee and exhaustion, and listen—really listen—as she told him about a drawing or a science project or some outrage in the girls’ corner of the playground.
How sometimes his pager would go off and he’d set her down with an apology and be out the door again, leaving a mug half-drunk on the counter.
He’d saved lives. He’d also missed vital parts of hers. Both were true.
Honoring him, she realized, had never been about pretending one cancelled the other out.
It was about the choices she made now, with a badge he’d never see pinned to her jacket.
It was about driving toward danger when staying home would be easier, because someone’s kid or lover needed her to.
It was about pushing back against men like Cox who tried to turn commandments into knives.
Living his values didn’t mean replicating his mistakes. Maybe that was the point Marsh had accidentally illustrated, in his monstrous way: idols had feet of clay. The only safe place to put your worship was nowhere at all.
By the time she pulled up in front of her mother’s terraced house, the sky had turned lovely: summer blue with fluffy clouds, the threatened downpour a distant worry. Warm rectangles of light spilled from the front windows.
Catherine opened the door before Kate could knock, wiping her hands on a dish towel. The familiar smell of roasted chicken and rosemary breathed past her, carrying a note of lemon and something buttery.
“Kitty.” Catherine’s eyes did their usual sweep—face, posture, visible number of limbs—as though expecting to find scorch marks. “You’re on time. I was about to start worrying.”
“I know.” Kate stepped inside, letting the warmth close around her like a quilt. “Traffic behaved.”
"Miracle." Catherine took her daughter's coat, hung it on the peg that had always been hers, before she could even reach it. "Any disasters today?"
Kate thought of the prison. Of glass and chains and a man who believed he could read her soul like a legal brief.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she said.
Her mother gave her a long, measuring look. Then she nodded, brisk as ever.
“Good,” Catherine said. “Come set the table. Your hands work fine, don’t they?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kate said.
As she laid out plates and cutlery, the rhythm of the small domestic task soothed something raw in her. Knife, fork, spoon. Glasses by the water jug. Folded napkins, slightly crooked. All the rituals of a life she’d built out of the ashes of another one.
Honoring your parents, she thought, isn’t about never being angry with them. It isn’t about defending them to their last breath against every accusation. It’s about this. Showing up. Carrying forward the parts of them that made you better, and putting a stop to the parts that didn’t.
She passed her mother the salt. Catherine smiled, that brief, warm flash that had gotten Kate through more than she’d ever admit.
Whatever the board decided next week, whether the Bureau kept her or cut her loose, this would remain true: she’d stood between killers and the people they wanted to erase. She’d made choices her father might question, and others he might be proud of, but all of them had been hers.
And that, she decided, was honor enough.