Chapter 31 #2
wasn’t there when my mother died,” she admits, telling Tommy and a roomful of eavesdroppers the thing she hasn’t been able
to say to anyone in eight months.
“I was at work even though I wasn’t supposed to go in that day.
She was dying, and I was supposed to be with her, to help my dad with her care.
But there was a situation that developed, and I—I told myself I’d just go see what was happening and then I’d go be with her after.
But once I got there, things . . .” She stops talking, thinks about her choice of words going forward.
She will avoid the details of the hostage situation that day, another domestic, but this one involved a man, his estranged wife, and their two children.
She continues. “Once I got there, I found out they really needed me. And I couldn’t leave. Or at least I felt like I couldn’t
leave.” It was the children that made her stay. She had to do whatever she could to make sure those kids got out of there
safely. And they did—after nine and a half hours of terror, threats, and fear, they did.
She thinks about that day. Talking to the man with the gun who was threatening the lives of his family even as her personal
phone buzzed in her purse, torn between needing to be in two places at once. She hadn’t answered the calls, reasoning that
she’d check on her mother once the siege was over. She thought her dad just wanted her help. He was afraid of being left to
care for her mother alone; he wanted Hope there all the time. She hadn’t known—she couldn’t have known, as Alex has pointed
out to her again and again—her mother had taken a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse and he was calling to tell her
to come if she wanted to say goodbye. Though she never wanted to say goodbye, she’d missed her chance to say it anyway.
“I broke a promise to her that day,” she tells Tommy now.
“What was the promise?” Tommy asks, his voice breathy, his mouth closer to the phone than it was before. This is the connection
Bo was talking about. When two total strangers find something in common, something that will bind them.
“I promised I’d be holding her hand when she went. When she received her diagnosis—it was cancer—she made me promise that she wouldn’t die alone.”
“But you had to work.” He rushes to her defense because in that moment she represents him too. They are united now, just two
people who tried their best yet fell short anyway.
“You couldn’t help it. I bet she understood that,” he says. And now he is comforting her, or trying to.
Hope wants to smile and cry at the same time. She won’t tell him that she could’ve helped it, that she could’ve let someone
else step in. It is beside the point now. “Just the week before, my mom asked me to take a leave of absence. It was time I
had coming to me. I kept telling myself I would. And at the same time I kept assuring myself we still had time.”
“You didn’t want to admit that you didn’t,” says Tommy.
“You’re right,” she says.
Another long silence elapses. Hope stares at the screen until she loses focus. When Tommy finally speaks, his voice is barely
a whisper. “My dad asked me to go hunting with him that day.”
Hope bites down on her lip, just enough to feel pain. “And you didn’t go?”
“No,” he says. She is getting used to the little defensive laugh he uses as an attempt to disengage. “I had to work. Sound
familiar?” There is a pause, and then he adds, “But that wasn’t even true. I just told him that because I didn’t want to tell
him the truth.”
She takes his cue. “And what was the truth?” she asks.
“I couldn’t go because I’d promised my wife I’d spend time with her.”
In the background there is a noise that is a combination of exasperation and frustration. She hears a woman’s voice that could only be Nadine’s growing louder as, Hope imagines, she runs toward him. In the text box on her screen, Hope types, We need eyes on this situation ASAP.
“Tommy!” she hears Nadine say. “Don’t you dare blame this on me! It’s not my fault! I never asked that of you! I would never—”
Hope hears a scuffle of some sort, then a loud clatter. And then the line goes dead.
Hope sits there stunned before rising and going into the front of the NOC with everyone else. Though the conversation with
Tommy has ended, they can still hear the women and Tommy. (If Tommy was a savvier criminal, he’d have known to check the pizza
boxes for bugs, but Hope is thankful it must’ve never crossed his mind.) She smiles as she hears the women’s voices coming
through loud and clear. It seems the hostages are ganging up on their captor, berating him for what he said about Nadine.
There does not seem to be any danger to anyone, except perhaps to Tommy.
“Well,” says Chris, “I didn’t want to interrupt you since you had a good thing going there, but the dog is here.” He claps
his hands together. “So I guess we’d better make a plan for how we’re going to let him see it.”
Hope looks from the team to Bo, then back to the team. She thinks of what Bo said about lady luck, about the parallels between
her experience and Tommy’s and the strides she just made as they talked. If Nadine hadn’t intervened, she was close enough
that she might’ve talked him into surrendering right then and there. And an idea she’d had—and dismissed—reasserts itself
more insistently this time. “I think I know what I want to do,” she says.