Chapter 41 Old Friends
Old Friends
“Did you have to shoot me?” Nicholas asks.
They are sitting at the corner table, a first aid kit between them. Frank is working on Nicholas’s shoulder. He is tending carefully to the wound, applying alcohol and cream, a sterilized bandage.
“It felt like the moment called for it,” Frank says.
“Did it?”
“You’ll be fine. I barely grazed you.”
“Oh good. So nothing to worry about.”
Frank lets out a small laugh, meeting Nicholas’s gaze. Then he turns back to the wound, taking a final look at how he’s sealed it.
“That dressing should hold until tomorrow. Maybe forty-eight hours. Maybe. But you’ll need a real doctor at some point.”
“No kidding.”
Nicholas puts his jacket back on, gingerly, taking a deep breath—his arm heavy and leaden. His phone starting to buzz in his pocket, against his skin. His phone, which has probably been buzzing.
Nicholas is running late. They’re well over the twenty-minute mark. Nicholas and Hannah both are out of time here.
“Is that him?” Frank asks.
“Probably.”
Nicholas doesn’t have to ask who Frank is talking about. He knows that Frank thinks it’s Owen.
And he sees Frank turn that over in his head—Frank who is still so uncomfortable with this.
Owen, for so long, on the other side of the line from them.
Owen, who could end up on the other side of the line again if he calls in the police, which may just happen if Nicholas doesn’t leave here now. If Nicholas doesn’t end this himself.
Nicholas understands that. He feels it in his own skin.
How, despite all the planning, this won’t begin to feel better, not until he and Hannah are gone from here.
Not when Frank could still change his mind about his part.
They need him for his part. For the insurance of it all.
That, after tonight, Hannah will be safe moving forward, with Bailey. And with Owen.
“I should go,” Nicholas says. “He’s not going to wait much longer.”
“Well, he’s going to have to wait just a little longer, isn’t he?”
“Frank, come on.”
“Look, I know you don’t want to go through this again, but…”
“You’re going to go through it again?”
“They’re going to demand a sacrifice on some level, Nick,” Frank says. “They’ll be suspicious if I don’t demand a sacrifice on some level.”
“We’ve gone through this.”
Frank ignores this, keeps talking through, as much for himself as for Nicholas. “Then you know as well as I do that this won’t end here, not for you. It can’t. You must know that. I can’t protect you from it. You knew that, showing up here today.”
“I’m aware.”
And Nicholas was aware, of course. Tonight’s delivery has sealed it.
It has sealed what Owen and Nicholas most needed sealed.
Quinn and Teddy won’t ever go after the kids again.
No one in the organization will. They can’t.
There will be no bomb under a car one day.
No men around every corner, not anymore.
Because it will seal their fates too. And they are nothing, Quinn and Teddy, if not self-interested.
They are interested in protecting themselves first and foremost.
But they’re also interested in punishing someone for putting them in that position. That someone, this time, will be Nicholas.
“I don’t understand you doing this, Nicky…” Frank pauses. “Not for him.”
“It’s not for him.”
“You sure about that?”
Nicholas starts to answer, but then he thinks better of it.
Because it’s beside the point. The point is what’s best for Bailey.
Bailey and Hannah. That’s his primary concern—and Owen coming home is good for them.
Bailey needs a father again. Hannah deserves her husband.
And, if Nicholas is being honest, Owen has earned some relief.
For the last five years, Owen did everything to keep Bailey safe.
He did everything to ensure Hannah’s and Bailey’s safety long-term.
But even if he hadn’t, if none of those things were true, would it matter? Wouldn’t Nicholas be here anyway? We do what we need to do for our children—and they are all his children. Owen belongs to him too, after all.
Which brings Nicholas to it. What this is all really about—what he should tell Frank and what he can’t tell him, what he can’t say out loud, not to anyone.
That Nicholas still dreams of his daughter every night—every single night. He still dreams of that day he found Kate on the side of the road. He plays it over and over again, on a relentless loop, that moment when he found her.
He and Bailey had just left the park and Bailey was asleep in the stroller—the only blessing of this was that Bailey was asleep in that stroller.
Nicholas assumed Kate was running late and so he’d just left her a voicemail that they were leaving the park and they would meet her at her house.
That she should take her time. That they were doing great.
Then he turned the corner, and he saw Kate splayed out, halfway down the block. Her body, his daughter’s body, was half on the curb, half off it—her head and shoulders in the street, her legs twisted out in an unnatural direction.
And, still, before he got to her—before Nicholas bent down beside her and turned her over—he got to believe it. He got to believe his daughter was okay. That she had been in some sort of accident. That she was hurt, but she was okay.
He was her father. He raced down the street toward his kid with that one, unshakable thought: He was her father and he would do all the things that needed to be done so his daughter was okay again.
Then he touched her.
And there was no story he could tell himself to make anything better, not anymore, not ever again.
Nicholas never really left her there. He never left the side of that road. The rest of his life—the glorious and miserable rest of it all—has all been details.
Nicholas offers Frank a small smile, a sad smile. “Didn’t think you’d make it to eighty, Frank.”
“Who did?”
Nicholas stands up, taps Frank on the shoulder, like Morse code. Like a reminder that he needs to go now. Right now. Or Owen will have the police in here. He’ll have them in here, escorting them all out.
“It was smart of you to bring her with you tonight,” Frank says. “It was smart to bring Hannah.”
“No, that wasn’t me. She insisted on coming. I tried to stop her.”
“Either way, it helps,” he says. “I don’t have to find a reason to argue the point with my kids that tonight is not the moment to settle up on all of this. Even my kids aren’t dumb enough to want a witness…”
Nicholas nods. He knows that what Frank is saying is true.
Quinn and Teddy can’t touch Hannah—that’s the deal now.
She gets to be safe, just like Frank’s children are safe.
They can’t keep her from walking out of here tonight, even if they want to.
And by extension, because Hannah was brave enough to come with Nicholas, they won’t stop him from walking out of here either.
No one, especially in this family, wants a witness.
Still, Nicholas wishes she hadn’t made that choice. Nicholas is not particularly invested in his own safety, not at this point. He’s invested in Bailey, only in Bailey, and her having a future with both of her parents, safe and together.
Bailey having exactly the life she deserves—that’s really all that Nicholas is interested in.
“Just do me a favor, Nick,” Frank says. “Go somewhere I don’t know about.”
“There’s nowhere you don’t know about.”
“I hope that’s not true.”
Nicholas can only shrug, straighten his back.
It’s true and it’s not that Frank doesn’t know about the place where Nicholas is going.
After all, he’s sure that Meredith mentioned the farm in Tuscany to Jenny at some point—the farm where Meredith’s grandmother grew up.
Did Meredith also mention it to Frank? Nicholas can’t be sure.
But it would’ve been fifteen years ago now. Longer.
Frank doesn’t know that Nick’s wife was buried there, Kate beside her. One way or another, now, Nicholas will be buried there too.
Frank stands up. He stands up and moves close to Nicholas. And they take each other in for the last time. One of them at eighty, the other not too far behind, but knowing he won’t reach that same fate.
That’s not in the cards now. If he gets this one miracle, it’s too much to also hope for the other.
Nicholas knows this is probably why Frank can’t seem to let it go—why Frank feels the need to take one more shot at convincing him.
As if Frank doesn’t already know that it’s a fool’s errand—as if there is anything he can do to change anything about what’s going to happen now.
As if what Frank is doing (what they’re both doing here, together) isn’t actually something else. Something closer to saying goodbye.
“It’s not too late, Nick,” he says. “Don’t trade your life for his.”
Nicholas puts out his hand and reaches toward his oldest friend, their lives, their fates linked—the way you are linked to the people who know you best, whatever time and distance you put between you, whatever break you try to make.
“Didn’t you hear, Frank?” he says. “I’m already dead.”
And, forty-three years too late, Nicholas walks away.