Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
She had been praying since she left her desk.
Not a formed prayer, not the kind her grandmother had taught her with folded hands and careful words—this was the other kind, the desperate kind, the kind that was more like bleeding than speaking.
Lord. Lord. Lord. Just the name, repeated with each step down the corridor, because that was all she had left—and she knew it—and she said it anyway, because stopping felt like the last thing she had to hold onto—and she couldn’t let go yet.
The syringe was in her jacket pocket. She could feel it through the fabric.
She’d felt it since that morning when she’d found it in her mailbox before work—a small padded envelope, no return address, a case inside it and a folded note that said nothing except cardiac event.
fast. clean. She had read those four words at the end of her driveway in the cold, keys still in her hand.
She had put the note back in the envelope, the envelope in her bag, and gone to work.
She had sat at her desk and smiled when someone asked if she was okay.
Fine, she’d said. Just tired.
Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs as she walked and willed them still, but they shook anyway—the small uncontrollable tremor of a body that understood what was being asked of it even while the mind was still trying to negotiate.
Kyle’s face came into focus in her mind.
The way it had looked at his last game—a cheerful young man who had found the thing he was made for, who moved through the world as if he had a right to be in it.
She had sat in those bleachers and felt the specific pride of a mother watching her child become himself, and knowing even then that the foundation beneath it was rotten.
She had chosen to let him have it anyway, because what was the alternative?
Pete had made sure she understood the alternative.
The office was focused entirely on the glass-paned walls at the far end of the room.
She could see them from there—Miguel and Angus, the shape of something serious moving between them—and she understood that this was the window, precise and narrow, and that it would not stay open.
She had to move through it now while it was still there.
Lord. The name again. Flowing upward. I cannot do this. I cannot do this, and you know I cannot do this.
She reached the interview room door.
Her hand touched the handle and she stood there for one moment.
Just one, she allowed herself one. Her eyes were closed, the shaking in her hands moving up through her wrists and into her forearms. Her grandmother’s voice was somewhere beneath the noise of everything, saying, “When darkness comes, child, be ready to stand in the light.” The cruelty of those words right now, in this corridor, with what was in her pocket, teased her soul.
She opened the door.
He looked up immediately. He saw her face, and something shifted within him. She watched it happen and hated herself for being the cause of it—hated that her face had made him feel, even for a moment, that it was going to be all right.
“Hey.” His voice was low and urgent. He lifted his cuffed hands as far as the bracket allowed. “Finally. Get these off. We need to move before—”
He stopped.
She watched him read her face and understand it, and she watched the understanding arrive in his eyes. She could not look away, because looking away felt like the last cowardice she had left, and she had already done everything else.
His hands were still raised when he pulled against the cuffs. One sharp movement. Both wrists. The sound of the metal against the bracket was very loud in the small room.
Then it was done.
She stood in the room for a moment that seemed to last much longer than a moment, her hand still at her side as she looked at what she had done—what she could not undo.
Her grandmother’s voice had vanished and the praying was done.
There was nothing left in the space where they had been except the specific silence of a room that held something that would never be otherwise again.
She walked out.
She closed the door behind her.
She walked back down the corridor, past the front desk without looking up, to her chair where she sat down, pressed both hands to the desk, looked at the glass-paned office where Miguel and Angus were still talking, and made her face do what it needed to do.
Kyle, she thought. Just his name. The way she’d thought, Lord, in the corridor—except this time there was no one on the other end.