42. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
IPARKED IN THE DRIVEWAY of the massive cabin-style home that sat on a more remote property than mine.
Concealed by black gums and tulip poplars I knew had been replanted for their stunning fall appearance, it was the ultimate optical illusion because though there were no gates, I knew that the glass that nearly seventy-percent of the house was paneled in, was missile proof and the stone walking path that led to the house itself had sensors underneath.
One of the owners of the home was waiting for me at the porch before I’d even gotten out of my vehicle. Holding a black kitten that matched her long, jet black hair, Mavis Baker smiled. “Haven’t seen you in a minute.”
“Not since Carletti’s wedding,” I confirmed, greeting Matthias’s wife with a nod. “Where’s Mya today?”
“Hair appointment.”
She stepped aside to let me into the foyer where she opened the closet and pulled out a pair of gloves. She handed them to me. “He’s in the greenhouse.”
Accepting the gardening gloves, I followed her through the biggest home I’d ever seen in person that wasn’t a client’s and out of the back door that fed onto the covered patio. Mavis nuzzled the kitten, her skirt floating around her ankles as she padded into the grass barefoot. “Through there.”
I followed her direction, taking the worn path toward the large shed that looked more like a pool house than a greenhouse and rounded the side. Matthias didn’t so much as glance up from whatever he’d just finished planting. “Hand me the pruning shears, please.”
I pulled on the gloves and reached for the shears that sat in an organizer on his workstation, then handed them to him.
Matthias accepted the gardening tool, returned to an older plant that sat beside the newer one and began to clip its dead leaves.
“Must be serious if you drove all the way out here. You want a raise or something?”
I didn’t respond.
After a full minute, Matthias gave up and finally faced me. Favoring his right side from a labrum injury I knew had never quite healed, he stood and ripped off his gloves.
“I’m tendering my resignation effective two months from today’s date,” I said at the same time Matthias shook his head and said, “No.”
“No,” I repeated.
“Take your leave—God knows you have it. I decline your request for resignation,” he said like I’d asked him for a fucking corner office with a view and an assistant.
I stared at him.
“You think I don’t know why you’re here?” he asked, grabbing a heavy, insulated bottle he poured over his face, then hands. “You reek of rage.”
“If this is about the non-compete, you should know I won’t be looking for another position. I’ve decided to retire.”
He snorted. “Okay. Let’s pretend I’m humoring this conversation. What are you going to do?”
Pick the furthest location on a map I could find and buy a one-way ticket there.
“Travel,” I answered. “And document said travel.”
“A professional tourist.” He pretended to consider that. “How does Nineah feel about that?”
The mention of my wife was a direct shot, but I didn’t hold the target for him nor did I absorb the hit. “We’re divorcing.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, sincerely. “Though, I can’t imagine that will last long.”
Checking my fury because I didn’t believe in confrontation as a first resort or impulsivity for that matter, I stopped entertaining his mind games and got straight to why I’d come here. “Why didn’t you tell me? About J-Bad?”
“Because she asked me not to and I owed her,” he said, simply.
“You lied to me. For years.”
My boss frowned. “Let me ask you something. If I had told you the truth, are you telling me you wouldn’t have spent the next decade of your life making every decision out of spite?
Turning down jobs you’re overqualified for?
Rejecting women who’d rake themselves across coals to make you happy?
Living in abject isolation and misery because at least you can tell yourself it makes sense? ”
“I didn’t come here for a psychoanalysis.”
“No, because that’s more your thing isn’t it?
” he said. “Observing, assessing, processing, sifting, selecting. Making every daily decision a fucking study in your insecurity. You think you’re special ‘cause someone somewhere holding the better hand played a card and you got your deck shuffled? Congratulations. That’s war.
And in war there’s an endless supply of two things only—casualty and blame.
You blame yourself for them. She blames herself for you.
And so on and so on and so on until they pack your eight-by-eight-foot hole and rifles aim fire. And that’s life.”
“You think this is about blame?” I demanded.
“No. I think this is about the fact that for the first time in your uptight, rigid-ass life you wanted something you couldn’t measure against your impossible criterion, so in order to silence that voice, you told yourself that as long as you could anticipate every need of hers you could predict her. But that’s not how they work.”
“They?”
“Women,” he answered. “You tell them to go left, they go right. You ask them what’s wrong, they say nothing.
One week, they eat for a family of six, the next they barely drink water.
And the only thing they do consistently is make everything better.
You want to be mad at your beautiful wife because she cares too much about disappointing you, that’s your prerogative.
But stop pretending from atop your moral high-ground that you’re more considerate than she is just because you beat every potential decision to death until there’s one left standing. You want to know what I think?”
I didn’t.
“There’s a reason the realist wants the dreamer,” he continued.
“Without the realist, the dreamer flies too close to the sun. But without the dreamer, the realist never gets off the ground at all. You were stuck long before time took you out because there’s only so many times you can spin on the wheel before you look up and realize you’re living in a cage.
I know because I lived it. And if you’d have asked instead of insulting my intelligence at every point of this conversation, I’d have told you that when I started this company, Nineah might’ve been my first choice but she wasn’t the only name on the short list.”
That made me pause. “You never told me that.”
“I didn’t have to. She accepted the position.”
Matthias leaned against his work station, sighing heavily, an unfamiliar display of exhaustion he didn’t move to hide.
I was instantly reminded of the first time we’d met.
We’d been right in the thick of it in Kandahar.
I’d packed his shoulder with gauze while he’d cussed in every damn language he knew.
Then he’d picked up his rifle and aimed cover fire with one arm while I dragged him across the desert.
Back then, I was an untraveled Georgia boy with an unhealthy affinity for poker games and Matthias was a cocky black-haired New Yorker with a thick Brooklyn accent.
We didn’t know shit about one another save for the patches we’d bought in blood.
But there was something about nearly dying with someone that didn’t bond you, necessarily, but it never left you either.
“You know why I need you?” he said, interrupting my run-on reverie.
“I didn’t realize this was confession hour.”
“You’re a grounder. You’re honest with people, but you never criticize. You only offer solutions, not problems, and you’re level-headed. I don’t have to watch you or worry about you popping off or putting your dick on the table.”
“It’d break your table.”
Matthias snorted. “The fact is, I can’t be in two places at once. The girls want kids and I’ve already held them off as long as I can to get this expansion underway. I need you. And I need her. Even if that means you go back to stalking each other on company time.”
Frowning, I thought of Nineah’s distant expression while she’d recounted what she believed were her sins to own.
Her haunting grief. Her guilt… Now that some days had passed, I could admit to myself that I understood her because I did.
I knew her, probably better than anyone ever had.
I refused to believe that wasn’t true solely because like every other human being, she’d cherry picked which secrets to divulge and which to withhold.
Even still, the reasons for my hesitation were more complex than mere betrayal.
When I really broke it all down, I wasn’t as angry at the deception as I was at the fact that she’d played fast and loose with her life and thought nothing of it.
Mistakes, I could account for. People fucked up. They chose wrong. They relapsed. But someone with no regard for their own safety and how that affected those around them was another beast entirely.
It’d taken me longer than I cared to admit to finally see what Matthias had been talking about when he’d said he was afraid for me because I didn’t know when to let go.
I’d assumed I was doing my duty as a man, a husband.
Now, I wasn’t sure if I was merely enabling a dopamine junky and the impulses she chose over me.
“Take the week,” Matthias said. “If you still want to retire, I’ll accept.”
I nodded. “I’ll consider it.”
“Thank you.”
I turned for the exit and had the door to the greenhouse open when Matthias stopped me.
“Oh. Before you go, I thought you’d want to know Ottilie Wilcott has been moved to a secure location pending our inquiry into Wendell Reid.”
I stilled. “That the band manager?”
“Turns out, this is a bit more complicated than you probably expected. The girl’s background doesn’t hold up and neither does her story.”
“You speak to Acevedo?”
“He’s the one who called me.”
I wasn’t up to date on the nuances of the music industry as I never took celebrity assignments, but I did know that that a young woman with bruising on the inside of her wrists wasn’t complicated at all and if Agosto was right and the manager wanted to press this legally, he’d be fighting with the court of public opinion first because no fucking way was she going back there.
“Thank you for telling me.”
Matthias nodded.
I didn’t know where my future went from here. If I’d decide to stay in DC or leave the country altogether, but it was almost comforting knowing that I was finally in a place to make a choice at all. I just had one more job and then maybe I could be done for good. With all of this.
“Bishop home?” I asked.
“On assignment. Though, Carletti might be available. You want to pick him up or should I have him meet you at FRA?”
I released a long ass breath. “So that’s where they are, then. Germany.”
“I’ve always had my suspicions, but you confirmed them.”
Turning to face him, I frowned.
“The crewman you hired to find the watercraft designer was discreet, but only after he tried to look you up, first,” he answered. “Don’t worry, I erased the search, so as far as the family knows, Nineah’s the only one who’s made contact with the daughter who apprentices there.”
“And the family is…?”
He stared and for a brief moment, I recognized myself in the older version of him.
Stuck on the same wheel in a different cage, we were bound to this life, to the next mission.
That was as far as our relationship went.
But before today, I wasn’t sure I’d ever truly appreciated what he’d done for my wife.
Unlike me, he’d never broken a promise to her.
“Us,” he answered.