Chapter Nineteen The Decision
Rome didn’t sleep that night, not really — a few stretches of gray, dreamless half-consciousness broken every time a car passed too slow outside, every time the old rowhouse settled and creaked in a way that sounded, for one gut-lurching second, like a door being tested.
By four in the morning he gave up trying entirely and sat at the small kitchen table with the notebook open in front of him, a legal pad beside it that Moss had left, and the city’s overnight body count — seven now, according to the last scanner update — sitting in his chest like a stone he couldn’t put down.
Tookie found him there a little after six, padding into the kitchen in socked feet, hair sticking up on one side, and climbed into the chair across from him without a word, the particular quiet solidarity of a kid who’d learned, this past week, exactly when not to ask questions.
“You didn’t sleep,” Tookie said finally.
“Not much.” Rome closed the notebook, not wanting his little brother’s eyes on those pages any longer than they already had been. “Bad week for sleeping.”
“Mama used to say you think better after you sleep.” Tookie picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, not quite looking up. “She used to make you go to bed even when you said you had homework left. Said tired brains make bad decisions.”
Rome felt something catch in his throat, the particular ambush of grief that still came sideways at him some mornings, a memory small enough to seem harmless right up until it wasn’t. “She was right about that. She was right about a lot of things.”
“What are you gonna do with it?” Tookie nodded at the notebook, no pretense left between them at this point about what it was or what it meant. “The book. Everybody keeps saying it like it’s the only thing that matters, but I don’t get why a notebook’s worth all this.”
Rome sat with the question a long moment, turning it over the way he’d turned over a hundred smaller questions this past week, and found, for the first time, that he actually had an answer instead of just more uncertainty.
“It’s not the notebook,” Rome said slowly, working it out loud as he said it.
“Not really. It’s what’s written in it. Two decades of people with badges and robes and campaign signs deciding the rules didn’t apply to them, long as nobody ever wrote it down where somebody could prove it.
” He looked at his brother, nine years old and already understanding more about how this city actually worked than most adults let themselves admit.
“Somebody’s been keeping score this whole time.
Every dirty deal, every bought case, every corner they let run because the right envelope changed hands.
I’ve been carrying that around for four days trying to figure out how to make it disappear, how to give it back, how to trade it for enough money that we never have to think about any of it again. ”
“And now?”
Rome looked down at the composition notebook, marbled cover soft at the corners from twenty years of hands that weren’t his, and thought about Denise Deluca standing in her kitchen doorway, about Marcus writing that first careful line to protect his own mother’s block and dying six months later anyway, about a whole city tearing itself apart overnight because the only thing holding its worst impulses in check had been one man’s silence.
“Now I think hiding it was never actually an option,” Rome said.
“I think I’ve been telling myself it was, because hiding felt safer than the alternative, but people are dying out there right now, Tookie, over corners that used to be quiet, because nobody knows the rules still apply.
And the only way anybody’s ever gonna believe the rules still apply is if I show this whole city exactly what those rules actually are, and exactly who’s been living by them for free this whole time. ”
“That’s scary.”
“Yeah.” Rome reached across the table, put his hand over his brother’s the way their mother used to.
“It’s real scary. Scarier than anything that’s happened yet, probably, because right now I’m just a guy running from people who want something from me.
The second I hand this to Shay, the second it goes public, I’m not running from people who want it anymore.
I’m the man who took it from all of them at once. ”
Tookie was quiet a long moment, his small hand still under Rome’s, and when he finally spoke his voice had none of the fear Rome expected, only a steadiness that reminded Rome, painfully, of their mother on her hardest days.
“Mama always said the corner never asks permission before it takes something from you,” Tookie said slowly, reciting it the way he’d clearly heard it a hundred times growing up, “but she also said you don’t let it keep taking just ’cause you’re scared to fight back.
She used to say that about the landlord.
About the man at her second job who never paid her right.
She fought back every time, even when it cost her. ”
Rome sat with that, something settling into place in his chest that felt, for the first time in four days, less like fear and more like resolve.
“She did,” he said quietly. “She really did.”
Moss came into the kitchen a few minutes later, moving with the particular alertness of someone who hadn’t slept much better than Rome had, and took one look at his face before she’d even poured her coffee.
“You’ve decided something,” she said. Not a question.
“I need you to get Shay Brooks here,” Rome said.
“Today. And I need you to help me figure out how to do this in a way that doesn’t get everybody in this room killed the second it’s done.
” He looked down at the notebook one last time, then closed it fully, pushing it toward the center of the table like a decision made real by the physical act of releasing his grip on it.
“I’m done running from what this is. I’m done pretending there’s a version of my life where I just hand it over and disappear back into being nobody.
Whoever’s been running this city off the back of twenty years of buried secrets — they’re about to find out exactly what happens when the person holding the receipts decides he’s got nothing left to lose. ”
Moss studied him a long moment, coffee forgotten in her hand, and something that looked almost like respect moved across her tired face.
“You understand what you’re about to set in motion.
Not just for you. For me, for Brooks, for every name in that book who’s spent decades making sure this exact moment never happened. ”
“I understand it’s already in motion,” Rome said.
“Seven people dead last night who never touched this book, never asked for any of it, just happened to be standing on the wrong corner when the rules stopped applying. I can’t undo that.
But I can decide whether it keeps happening in the dark, one corner at a time, forever — or whether it finally happens in the light, once, and maybe means something when it’s done. ”
He looked at Tookie, who was watching him with the same fierce, steady pride Rome remembered seeing on their mother’s face more times than he could count, and felt, despite everything still ahead of them, something settle finally into place.
“Call Shay,” Rome said again, quieter now, certain. “Tell her it’s time.”