CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR #2
Winters’s eyes did that narrowing thing she did whenever someone handed her a form to sign. “He has a network,” she said. “That’s the part that changes everything. We knew he had… acolytes. We didn’t know he had employees.”
She ticked points off on fingers that had bitten a few people in their time.
“He gets one man to impersonate Santos and carry out a stabbing in a federal prison. He recruits a former marine to execute three carefully staged murders. Either he has so many followers that losing three is nothing.” She held up the second finger.
“Or he has such a hold that dying for him feels like a goal, not a consequence.”
“Suicide as a leadership technique,” Kate said. “Hard to put that on a performance review.”
“Either way,” Winters said, not smiling, “the hill we thought we were climbing turned into a mountain range. And you’re the flag he keeps planting on the peaks.”
Kate felt the old heat rise—anger’s little cousin. “His obsession with me hasn’t faltered.”
“You know it,” Winters said. “He wants your attention. Whether that’s down to some sort of perceived rivalry on his part or…”
“He has a plan for me,” Kate said, simply.
Winters nodded, stirred her coffee as if it had personally offended her. “Because of that, I’m going to say something you will disagree with. Duck out, Kate. Transfer. I can move you into a different unit. A different building. Let somebody else pick up the thread. You’re—”
“No,” Kate said.
Winters’s eyebrows lifted a millimeter. “I said ‘disagree’, not ‘interrupt’.”
“I’m interrupting because I don’t want to make a speech,” Kate said.
“I won’t duck out. And not because of loyalty to Marcus,” she added, before Winters could load that bullet.
“Though I owe him plenty. If anything, the fact that he’s…
here”—she tilted her head, meaning the floor above their heads and the tubes and the beeping—“makes me more adamant. I want Cox brought back to jail, and buried there. Then I want the world to stop.”
Winters’s gaze stayed on her for a long, quiet moment. When she finally spoke, the steel came wrapped in velvet.
“I am going to ignore that answer,” she said.
“And give you a week to think it over. That’s my offer.
Seven days. No heroics. No grandstanding.
Just a major, career-changing decision given the full weight of your attention.
” She leaned back a fraction. “Don’t make this a reflex.
Don’t make it about me, or Marcus, or your need to be the one who solves it all.
Make it about your life. You actually do really only get one. ”
Kate looked down at her cup. The coffee had developed a skin. She set it aside.
“Okay,” she said. “A week.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” Winters said, which in her vocabulary meant: I will hold myself to holding you.
They stood. Winters smoothed an invisible wrinkle out of her jacket.
“You going up?” Kate asked.
“In a minute,” Winters said. Her voice was neutral; her eyes were somewhere else. “I’ll be along.”
Kate left her there with the bad coffee and the dusty plant, walking back to 412 with two paper cups balanced in the cradle of her good hand.
A volunteer pushed a library cart of paperbacks with faded spines.
Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d read anything that didn’t include graphs or units per fluid-ounce.
Just for a moment, the notion of an easy job, the haven of a desk and paperwork, seemed quite attractive.
Just for a moment.
Cheryl looked up as Kate slid into the room.
“Milky and moral,” Kate said, passing the cup.
“Perfect,” Cheryl said, and wrapped both hands around it.
They drank for a while, the way people drink when the drinking is not the point. And they fell into silence again, one of those good ones that didn’t require anyone to do tricks.
The machine at Marcus’s shoulder clicked, a sound it had been making all morning. Now it sounded like it meant something else. Very slightly, his right hand moved under the sheet. Not a gesture. The hint of one.
Cheryl froze. Kate set her coffee down too fast and blamed the splash on the cup lid.
“Hey, babe,” Cheryl said, leaning in, voice suddenly steady. “Hey. It’s Cheryl. You’re safe. No moving. No jokes. Just… stay.”
Marcus’s eyelids gave a small, irritated twitch, the same one he deployed when a witness started a story three centuries too early. The breath under his ribs changed rhythm, not faster, not slower—more… his.
Kate felt something she had kept folded for seven days unfold a little. She put two fingers on the rail to keep herself from touching him.
“Marcus,” she said, softly. “It’s Vee. Get up, will you?”
She didn’t know why she said that. But Cheryl’s laugh broke into a sob, and that set Kate off, too.
So they were crying and laughing together when door opened. A young neurology resident in a superhero scrub cap slid in, checked the levels, the pupils, the numbers, and made a pleased noise that suggested med school had not entirely eliminated her joy.
“We’re getting there,” she said, and scribbled on a chart. “But it’s going to be slow, ladies,” she added. “And sometimes things may go back, as well as forwards.”
“That sounded like a disclaimer,” Kate said.
They watched Marcus breathe. Outside, a siren wound down into a sigh. The tree in the parking lot stirred.
Cheryl set her cup down carefully, then wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Thank you,” she said, not looking at Kate. “For earlier.”
“You’re welcome,” Kate said. She reached into her pocket for a tissue and found instead a folded scrap of paper on which she’d written ‘seven days’. Winters’s week.
She tucked it back.
“I have to talk to my boss again later,” she said. “About… work.”
“Is that Winnie the Pooh?” Cheryl asked, a little dazed.
“Is that what Marcus calls her?” Kate chuckled. It was the least appropriate nickname for Winters, which, of course, made it absolutely perfect.
They sat, and the machines made their small, reassuring space noises, and Marcus’s right hand moved again, less of a hint this time, with more intent. A crease appeared between his brows: like he was disagreeing with some invisible traffic cop.
“Here he comes,” Cheryl whispered, and reached for his fingers without quite touching them.
Kate watched the monitor spikes, thought of mountains and how much she’d like to be up one.
She’d told Winters she would think. And she meant it.
She would give the question the dignity it deserved.
She would hold it up to the light and turn it and admit the parts of herself that wanted to say yes for the wrong reasons and no for the right reasons and everything in between.
She would do all of that.
And if, at the end of seven days, the answer was the same, it would be because it had passed her own standard and not anybody else’s.
Marcus’s mouth twitched. It might have been a memory of a smirk. It might have been a dream.
“Okay,” Kate said, softly, to the room, to herself, to whatever was listening. “Okay.”