Chapter 38
Once the cars carrying the hostages have disappeared out of sight, Hope turns to Tommy. “You ready?” she asks him.
Tommy nods, stands, and walks over to Hope, transferring Covey’s leash back into her hand. “What now?” he asks her.
“Well, I will walk you out to the officers who are waiting out there, and they will place you under arrest and—”
“No,” he says. “That part’s pretty clear. I meant you. What now for you?”
“Oh, me?” Hope is surprised to be asked. “I guess I’ll wrap up at the station, go home, take a shower, and crash.”
Tommy shakes his head.
“What?” she asks.
“Never mind,” he says.
“No,” Hope presses. “What did you mean?”
“I meant, what’s next? After all this. For you.”
“I don’t really know yet,” she says.
They take a few steps before Tommy stoops down in front of the rack of tourism pamphlets, still in disarray. He looks up at
her. “Mind if I finish this? I started fixing it earlier, but I . . . got waylaid. Won’t take me but a minute.”
“Sure,” she says.
He makes quick work of arranging the remaining pamphlets into neat little stacks, then pushes them back into their designated slots. “All the things we never did,” he says, more to the pamphlets than to her.
He rises again holding one of the pamphlets and holds it out to her. “There,” he says.
She looks down at what he’s given her. It is a pamphlet about the Kindred Spirit Mailbox on Bird Island, a place she’s heard
about for years but never gone. People say it’s special, mystical.
“You said you didn’t have a place to mail that letter to your mom. You could put it here,” Tommy tells her.
She looks up at Tommy. “Thank you.”
“Maybe then you’ll feel like it’s time to go home,” he says. “Like you did what you came here to do.”
Hope thinks of the flowers she left behind, of the birthday she refused to celebrate, of the honor she was ready to refuse.
She sees herself putting the letter she’s carried for months into a lone mailbox on a stretch of undeveloped coastline, then
turning and leaving it behind. “You might be right,” she says.
“Stranger things have happened,” he says as they exit the building.
Outside, Hope and Dale stand on the sidewalk and watch as the officers handcuff Tommy, put him into the police vehicle without
incident, then drive away. Across the parking lot, the NOC is being packed up. Everyone is going home. It’s over.
“Sorry about that oversight,” says Dale. “I feel like an idiot for not patting him down.”
Hope offers him some reassurance. “Well, it was an . . . odd situation. Protocol sort of went out the window when a negotiator
walked in with a dog.”
He chuckles at that. “Definitely a first time for everything. Still,” he says, “everyone got out safe with no use of force.
That’s gotta feel like a win.”
“Yeah.” Hope smiles. “It does.”
“Would you, um, feel like going somewhere to celebrate after we wrap things up at the station?” he asks. Hope watches two
spots of color appear on his cheeks.
“Actually, I’ve got a very important phone call I need to make,” she says. “To my husband.”
He holds up his hands. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“Thank you, though,” she says, “for going in there with me.”
She waves goodbye and walks away from the post office, toward Brower, who, relieved of her traffic duty, has returned to her
car and is waiting to drive Hope back to the station. But first Hope finds the call from earlier, as she walked to work, and
hits Redial. Alex answers on the first ring.
“I was thinking,” Hope says, “that perhaps you could hand-deliver that piece of mail that came for me.”
She hears him exhale his relief into the phone. “I thought you’d never ask.”