Chapter 59
STING
I stand outside Vi’s door for three minutes before I knock.
Three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds. I count them because counting is what I do when my brain is short-circuiting. Operational habit. When everything else fails, count something.
I don’t have a speech. I tried to write one in my head on the walk over but couldn’t get past the first sentence. Every version sounded wrong, too formal, too rehearsed. Too much like a man performing an apology rather than meaning one.
So I’m going in empty with no plan. Just me and whatever comes out of my mouth when I open it.
Terrifying.
I knock. Once. Hard.
There’s shuffling inside, a pause. She’s deciding whether to open the door. I know the sound of Vi deciding things and weighing options.
The door opens.
She’s in a T-shirt, hair down, no shoes. Her face is composed and guarded. The openness from the Skylight Room confrontation is gone and what’s left is the harder version, the one that said, “that’s what I thought,” and closed the door.
She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t invite me in. Just stands there in the doorway looking at me with an expression that says this better be good.
“Can I come in?”
“Depends on why you’re here.”
“To talk.”
“You don’t talk. That’s kind of the whole problem.”
Deserved. I take it.
“I know. That’s why I’m here.”
She studies me for five seconds. Then she steps back, walks to her bed, and sits on the edge, cross-legged, not making room for me and not making it easy.
I walk in, close the door, and stand there. The room is small. Mara’s blanket is folded at the foot of the bed. The bag of papers is under Vi’s side, same as always. The room smells like her.
I don’t sit. She didn’t offer. I stand near the door like a man who knows he might get thrown out and wants a short walk to the exit.
“You were right,” I say. Nothing else. Just that. Three words I’ve been carrying for too long. They come out flat, graceless, dropped into the room without ceremony.
Vi doesn’t react, but waits.
“About the papers. About your father.” I stop.
Breathe. This is hard. Harder than running the Rot.
Harder than contested territory. Harder than trade negotiations or threat assessments or tactical operations.
Speaking honestly to a woman I care about is the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted, and I’m doing it badly.
“Your dad was clean. The money never touched him. I followed it. Every line. Every account. He wasn’t part of it. ”
Vi’s face changes. Something that was braced loosens, just slightly.
“How long have you known?” she asks.
Here it is. The part that’s going to cost me. “Since I read the papers.”
She absorbs that and I watch it hit. The timeline computes behind her eyes. Since he read the papers. He knew my father was clean and he didn’t tell me.
“Well,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“You’ve known my father was innocent. While I was lying awake wondering if you’d even looked at the evidence, while I was going to Armen asking what was wrong with you, while I stood in the Skylight Room and begged you to hear me. You already knew.”
“Yes.”
She stares at me and I let her. I don’t explain. I don’t justify. There’s no version of this that looks good, and I’m not going to insult her by pretending there is.
“Why,” she says.
Not angry. Not yet. Genuinely asking.
“Because I’m a stubborn asshole who doesn’t know how to say he was wrong.”
It comes out before I can shape it, raw and unedited, the truest thing I’ve said in months. There’s no operational logic behind it, no tactical framing, just the flat, ugly truth that I couldn’t admit I was wrong to a woman I’ve been wrong about since the day she showed up.
Vi looks at me a long time. “Yeah,” she says. “You are.”
“I know.”
“And me not listening to you?” she asks.
“You were right about that too. I made decisions about your father, about the evidence, about what to do with it, without including you. I treated you like someone to be managed instead of someone to be heard. That’s on me.”
The words are coming out ugly. Choppy. None of this sounds the way I wanted it to. I’m not eloquent. I’m not smooth. I’m a man standing in a woman’s bedroom saying true things in the worst possible way.
But I’m saying them, finally, saying them.
Vi uncrosses her legs and plants her feet on the floor. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up at me. Her eyes are wet, and I can see her fighting between the anger she’s earned and the thing underneath it that wants to forgive me.
“That’s not enough,” she says. “You know that, right? Saying you were wrong after all that doesn’t fix it. It’s a start but it’s not enough.”
“You’re right.”
“I need more than words, Sting. I need you to actually change. To include me, talk to me and not just when you’ve run out of options.”
I think about Tommy and about the trap we just set and about the operation running right now that she doesn’t know about. The hypocrisy is right there, sitting on me next to the honesty, and I can feel both of them and they are seriously fucking me up.
“I’m trying,” I say. It’s inadequate. But true.
Vi stands and she’s close now, just a foot away, looking up at me. The anger is still there but so is something else, the thing that keeps her in this building, in this relationship, coming back to a man who keeps failing her over and over.
“You’re trying,” she repeats, testing it.
“Yeah. I’m trying.”
She reaches up, grabs the front of my shirt, pulls me down, and kisses me. It’s not gentle or forgiving, but hard, and angry, her teeth on my lip. A kiss that says I’m still furious and I still want you and it’s fucked up that those things exist at the same time.
“This doesn’t mean you’re forgiven,” she says.
“I know.”
“It means I’m still here. That’s all it means.”
“That’s enough.”
She pulls my shirt over my head, then I pull hers off.
Skin to skin. Her legs wrap around me and my mouth goes to her neck, her collarbone, and the hollow of her throat where I can feel her pulse hammering.
She’s alive, angry, and underneath me. I said the words.
They were ugly, insufficient, and for some reason, she’s still here.
That’s more than I deserve. She knows it. I know it.
Especially since I’m already planning something she knows nothing about.