Chapter 32 Maren
Detective Chen came by two days later with a folder and good news she didn't want to oversell.
"It aggregates," she said, sitting at my kitchen table, where she had sat to deliver every piece of bad news for months.
"Four jurisdictions. Five names. The spoofed emails, the men he hired, the corridor.
It all stacks now, because we have him, and we have the handwriting, and we have a storage unit. "
"A storage unit?" I said.
"You don't need the contents," Chen said, and across the island Damian closed a folder on his laptop very quietly and very completely. I understood that whatever was in the storage unit, I was never going to see it, and that this was a gift.
"Okay," I said.
"The bail hearing went the only way it could," Chen said. "A man with five identities is a flight risk in every language. He's remanded. He's not getting out to mail you anything."
I signed what needed signing. I asked my questions in the order they came, and I noticed, somewhere between the second page and the third, that the thing in my chest had gone quiet.
There’d been a sound in there since Zack’s first letter. It was a hum, the high thin note of a body that had not fully exhaled in months.
Chen stood to go. She paused at the door with her folder under her arm.
"Eleven years I've worked these," she said. "Stalking cases. You want to know how many I've closed with the victim finishing it herself, on her feet, mid-sentence, in a gown?"
"How many?"
"You're the first." She crouched and held out a strip of bacon she'd palmed from Brady's plate. Keith took it from her with the dignity of a knight accepting a sword. "Take care, Ms. Calloway. Don't call me. I mean that nicely."
That afternoon I took the three of them into the back garden, among my father's roses, and I told them the part I had only ever given in pieces.
"My mother was in the hospital for a year before she died," I said. "And every week, my father brought her a white orchid. Not roses. Roses were for the garden, for the living. The orchid was the hospital flower. It meant he wasn't giving up on her."
Brady listened with his stitched arm crossed over his chest. Thomas listened the way he listens, with his whole body pointed at me.
"After she died he kept doing it," I said. "One white orchid on the kitchen table every week, for years, until he got sick too. So in my family, that flower means the one thing. It means somebody is staying. It means devotion."
"And then a stranger taught your hands to shake at it," Damian said.
"Yeah." I looked at the roses. "He took the flower. He's been giving me orchids for months to mean the opposite. To mean I'm watching you and you can't get away."
The garden was quiet for a moment.
"So what do you want to do about it?" Damian said.
It was the right question. It was a thing about Damian, that he reached past the feeling and handed you the practical version of it, which was somehow more tender than sympathy.
"I want it back," I said.
It was how the four of us ended up at a nursery in the Valley, and how I spent half an hour walking the orchid tables while three large men trailed behind me with their hands clasped, looking for all the world like a security detail assigned to houseplants.
"This one's nice," Brady said, pointing at a yellow one.
"It needs to be white."
"This white one, then."
"That one's dying, Brady."
"It's resting."
"It's the same color as you when you skip lunch," Damian said.
"I never skip lunch. I am the reason this household eats lunch."
Thomas didn't say anything. He stood at the end of the table with his hands behind his back and watched me look.
When I finally stopped in front of a white one with two unopened buds and a stem that arched like it had decided something, he stepped closer.
He read my face and nodded once, as if confirming a choice I'd already made.
"That one," he said.
I carried it to the register myself. None of them offered to take it, because they understood that this was a flower I needed to be holding when I bought it.
It went on the kitchen windowsill, where the morning light lands. Nobody said anything about what it meant. Brady just looked it over, decided it required a watering schedule. Damian, naturally, had already written one down on an index card before we got home.
The war room got decommissioned by committee.
"I formally propose," Damian said, standing in the doorway of the room that used to be a wine cellar and then became three monitors and a map of a man's movements, "that this space be returned to its original function."
"Wine," Thomas said.
"Counter-proposal." Brady produced an actual printout, which meant he had prepared, which meant we were all in trouble. "Pantry annex. I've drawn up plans. We're out of shelf space for the dry goods, and frankly, a wine cellar is a rich-person affectation."
"You drink wine."
"I drink it ironically."
"Counter-counter-proposal," I said. "Film room."
The room went silent.
"That's cheating," Brady said immediately.
"How is that cheating?"
"Because it wins. You can't just say the thing that wins. There's supposed to be a debate."
"There was a debate. It lasted four seconds and the film room won."
"Damian," Brady appealed. "Back me on the pantry."
"I can't," Damian said. "The film room is the correct answer. I'm sorry. There's a projector wall and the acoustics are already isolated because it was a cellar." He looked almost mournful. "It's the right call. I hate it."
"The dog votes film room," I said.
"The dog can't vote."
"He votes with his feet, and his feet are already in here, which is a yes."
The monitors came down that week. Damian took them apart himself, with the same care he'd built them. The photographs the man had taken, the ones of my gate and my car and Brady in a checkout line, went into an evidence box and out of my house.
That night there was no perimeter alert possible. There was no compromised camera loop, no forum to monitor, no man across any street. There was the four of us and a sleeping dog and a house that, for the first time in months, was only a house.
I took all three of them to bed, and for the first time there was nothing underneath it. No schedule. No fear waiting in the corner. Nothing between the four of us but the fact that I had chosen this and they had chosen me back.
Afterward I lay in the architecture of them, somebody's arm under my neck and somebody's hand loose at my hip and Thomas's heartbeat doing its steady work under my ear. I listened to Brady and Damian argue in whispers about blanket distribution.
"You have all of it!"
"That's because you radiate heat like a brick oven. You don't need a blanket. You're a hazard."
"Go to sleep," Thomas murmured, without opening his eyes, and they went to sleep, eventually, and so did I.
In the morning there was a mug of tea outside the bedroom door, even though the door had been open all night and Damian had been inside it, because tradition in this house outranked logic.
On the windowsill, in the morning light, the white orchid had opened its second bloom overnight, which Brady discovered while making eggs and announced to the entire household like a man reporting a birth.
"It bloomed," he said, holding it up. "Look at it. Look what we made."
"You watered it once," Damian said. "We didn't make anything."
"We made a home for it," Brady said, "where it felt safe enough to bloom," and the kitchen got quiet for a second, because every once in a while Brady says the true thing inside the joke, and then he ruined it by adding, "much like myself," and the morning went on.