Chapter 36
ROGUE
The door at the top of the stairs is open a crack when we reach it.
That tells me he heard us coming. Good. It means whatever hiding did to him, it didn't dull him or his survival skills. The careful man Vi's been chasing should be in there, still listening.
She stops in front of the door, her hand flat against the wood, and I watch her take one breath, and then hold it.
Then she pushes the door open and steps through, and Armen and I go in behind her, fanning automatically with him to the left, me to the right, and we’ve pretty much read the room before we’ve even fully seen it.
It's small. Lived-in. There’s a cot, a table buried under paper, a hot plate with a steaming pot on it.
Years of someone making do, making a life out of nothing.
There are documents everywhere, stacked and sorted in a system I'd bet money looks a lot like the one Vi keeps on her own floor. Apple doesn't fall far and all that.
And there, standing beside the table, is the man from the photograph.
Renner. Mayor Renner.
He's older in person than the picture let on. Thinner, the gray gone all the way through his hair, the skin at his throat loose where a heavier man used to be. But it's him. The shoulders Vi would know in the dark. The man who tried.
He isn't looking at Vi.
He's looking at me.
And at Armen. Back and forth, fast and cold, taking the measure of the two strangers who just walked into his hideout.
I know that look, I've worn that look, because it's the look of a man calculating exits and weapons and odds in split seconds.
His weight's already shifted toward the far end of the table, where I'd lay odds there's something within his reach.
He doesn't know us. He doesn't know if the daughter walking through his door is the real thing or bait on a hook, doesn't know if the men flanking her are here to reunite him with his kid or to finally finish the job somebody started years ago.
He's been waiting for both. You can see it on him. He's been bracing for both every single day for years, and the bracing has worn grooves in him.
I keep my hands where he can see them. I don't smile. A smile from a stranger would read as the wrong thing to a man this wound up. I just let him look, and I let him conclude what he wants, because there's nothing I can say that he'll believe coming from me.
Then Vi says, "Dad."
One word. It comes out cracked down the middle.
And his eyes finally leave me.
They go to her, and for a second, one long, terrible second, nothing happens.
He looks at his daughter like he's looking at something that’s not real, something he wants so badly he's afraid to believe in it because somebody might take it away.
The wariness doesn't fall. It just gets joined by something underneath it, something raw and disbelieving and scared, and the two things fight on his face while he stands frozen.
He doesn't move toward her.
That's the part that gets me, watching from the edge of the room.
He doesn't move. This man has wanted nothing in the world more than this.
Hell, he created a paper boat for a photograph on the off chance he'd reach this moment, and now that it's here, he's rooted to the floor because some part of him doesn't think he's earned the right to cross it.
He let her grieve him. He made her bury him.
And now, she's standing in his doorway alive and grown and harder than he left her, and he has no idea if she's come to forgive him or to spit in his face.
He's bracing for either. Or both.
So he just says it. Quiet. Like a question he's terrified of the answer to.
"Vi?"
And there it is, the hairline crack. His voice doesn't hold. It breaks clean across the single syllable of her name, and one of his hands lifts off the table an inch, shaking, before he catches it and presses it flat again like he can will himself back under control.
He can't. I can see he can't. The armor I registered the second we walked in, the same armor I've been wearing myself for so long I forget I've got it on, is splitting right down the seam.
The man underneath it is just a father looking at his daughter.
Vi crosses the room.
She doesn't run. She walks, the same steady, deliberate, chin-up walk she's used all morning, right up to him, and she stops, inches away, and the two of them stand there not touching, both of them shaking now, both of them holding back the same flood for reasons that are mirror images of each other.
She's got a lifetime of why sagging on her shoulders.
He's got a lifetime of I'm sorry bearing down on his shoulders.
Neither of them says any of it.
Then he lifts that unsteady hand the rest of the way and lays it against the side of his daughter's face, careful, like she might break or bolt. Her eyes close, and she leans into it about a quarter of an inch. That's the thing that undoes them both.
He pulls her in and she lets him. His arms wrap around her, and she grabs the back of his worn jacket.
It’s not gentle or soft. It's two people gripping each other like the floor's tilting and the other one is the only fixed point.
He says something into her hair I can't hear.
I don't try to. His shoulders are shaking. Hers are too.
But even now, even buried in his chest with years collapsing between them, Vi's spine is rigid. I can see it from here. She's holding on to him with everything she's got and holding back with everything else, because she came here for answers as much as for this, and the answers are yet to come.
I spot Armen at the far wall, gone still and watchful, giving them the room without leaving it. Outside and below, Sting's got the street, the morning, the rest of the world held off at arm's length so Vi and her dad can have their moment.
As for me, I stand at the edge of this story that’s both a beginning and an end, with my back to the wall, watching a father and a daughter find each other across a table full of paper in a dead city at dawn.
Something's coming loose in my chest. I tell it to wait.
It doesn't listen.