Chapter 9 Brady
The house was mine that afternoon. Thomas was at the firm and Damian was somewhere being suspicious of a delivery van. That left me with the kitchen, a chicken I had been thinking about since morning, and a dog who believed, with his whole heart, that he was helping.
"You're not helping," I told Keith.
He wagged.
"You're standing in the one spot a person has to stand. That's not help, buddy. That's sabotage with good intentions."
He wagged harder, deeply pleased with himself, and lay down in a slightly worse spot.
I had the kitchen monitor up on the counter the way I always did, the front gate sensor live in the corner of it.
By the book, I did everything right. But I was not watching the back gate, which is where she went.
I noticed because the house was too quiet, and a house with Maren in it was never quiet for long. She liked to hum or talk to the dog.
I called out. Nothing.
I checked the back-gate sensor log and my stomach dropped. Open and shut. Ten minutes ago. I had not heard it.
I ran the footage back. There she was, going through the back gate, easy, hands loose, the body language of a woman taking a walk on a nice afternoon. Not dragged, not forced.
I called her phone.
It buzzed against the cutting board, two feet from me. It had been there the whole time, while I cooked, while she walked out of the only thing I was there to do.
I went out the back gate at a dead run. It was the longest three blocks of my life.
I found her on the corner of a side street, standing with her hands in her pockets, looking down at the ground.
There were flower blossoms on the asphalt, the little ones that fall off the trees this time of year and get walked into the sidewalk. She was looking at them like they were interesting. She was completely fine.
She turned, and she saw me, and the first thing she saw was my face. I watched her read it.
"Hey," she said carefully. "Brady. I'm okay. I just wanted some air."
I could not talk yet. I did not have the right words.
So I just walked her back. I did not say anything the whole way. She did not either, after a few tries. She kept looking at me sideways like she was trying to find the version of me she knew and could not, and that was fair, because I could not find him either.
I closed the back gate behind us. I stood at the counter, where the chicken was somehow still cooking like the world had not tilted, and I put both hands flat on the counter and made myself slow down.
"I lost you," I said. "For ten minutes, I had no idea where you were."
"Brady, I went for a walk. I was three blocks away."
"I know where you were. Now. I didn't know then." I looked at her. "That's the part. The not knowing. The ten minutes I can't get back."
"I walked out because of you," she said.
"That doesn't make it better."
"Let me finish." She came around the counter and stood close, but she did not touch me, like she could tell I would come apart if she did.
"I haven't taken a walk by myself in months.
Not since the flower. I haven't gone out a door without checking it twice and standing there with my heart going.
And today I just, went. Because some part of me has finally decided the house is safe.
And it decided that because you three were in it. "
"Maren."
"It wasn't me running from you. It was me trusting you. It's the most I've trusted anybody since this started." She searched my face. "Why is that landing on you like a punishment?"
My voice usually made people feel good, and I’ve used it my whole life to walk into rooms and make them lighter, because somebody has to, and I am built for it.
I did not use that voice for what I said next.
"I had a sister," I said. "Niamh. She was nineteen."
Maren went very still.
"She had a boyfriend I didn't like. I didn't like him from the first dinner, and I couldn't tell you why exactly, just that something in him was wrong, the way you can smell weather coming.
" I kept my hands flat on the counter because if I lifted them they would shake.
"And I was deployed. I was on the other side of the world being useful to strangers when he killed her.
I wasn't there. I was nowhere near there. I found out on a phone."
"Brady," she said softly. "I'm so sorry."
"So I made myself a promise at her funeral.
That I would never again be one corridor away from someone I love when it mattered.
That I would always know where they were.
" My throat did something I did not let it finish.
"And for ten minutes today I broke it. I don't care what the binder says.
I don't care that you went on your own. The not-knowing, the running, the way my face looked when you turned around.
That, exactly that, is the thing that ends men in my line of work. I'd rather quit than feel it again."
"You're not quitting."
"I can't lose you," I said. It came out plain. No joke on it. Nothing to soften it. "I've only known you a little while and I already can't lose you, and I don't know what to do with that, because it's too fast and it's too much."
She did not say anything clever back. That is how I knew she had really heard me.
She closed the last bit of distance and she hugged me, hard, her arms all the way around, her face against my chest, and I stood there in my own ruin and let her.
"I'm sorry I scared you," she said into my shirt. "I am. I didn't think about the back gate. I didn't think about any of it. I just wanted to feel like a person for ten minutes and I didn't think about what it would cost you." She pulled back enough to look up at me. "I'm sorry, Brady."
"You don't have to be sorry for taking a walk."
"I'm not sorry for the walk. I'm sorry for your face." She reached up and put her hand on my jaw, light. "Nobody should have to make that face twice in one life."
The back door opened, and Thomas came in from the direction of the surveillance hub, and I knew from the way he moved that he had already watched all of it.
The camera audit. He had seen the gate log and the run and probably my face on the footage too, and he had put the whole thing together in the time it took to walk across the yard, because that is what he does. He reads a room before he is in it.
"It was ten minutes," Thomas said. "Nobody got hurt. The protocol gets adjusted." He looked at me. "Back gate gets a sensor that pings all three phones. We should've had it a week ago. That's on me, not you."
"It's on me," I said.
"It's on the protocol," Thomas said. "That's what a protocol is for. So it carries the weight, and you don't have to."