Chapter 24
CALLEN
ONE WEEK. THAT’S how long a man can sit in a private hospital suite before the sounds of rhythmic beeping, stale cafeteria coffee, and the freezing air conditioning drive him straight toward insanity.
There’s a woman on the fourth floor who’s been in hers for eleven days, and I’ve started nodding to her in the corridor at four in the morning when we’re both out there stretching our legs.
Belai’s room has no number.
That’s Vesper’s doing. There’s a plate on every door on this hall and his is blank.
The nurses who come in wear the same badge as the rest of them but they answer to Eden while Vesper’s away.
Linc and Lance switch off as the man in a polo shirt at the end of the corridor who has been reading the same page of the same paperback since Tuesday.
My family is here guarding the door so I can simply be a companion to my friend.
Cricket and Vesper are off somewhere, in another country. Vesper wanted to go on the mission alone, but Cricket volunteered. She doesn’t want to be around me right now. I understand. We have a long road of healing ahead of us—both blaming each other for something we didn’t do.
I’ve got a coffee going cold in my hands. My fourth today. It’s disgusting and I keep buying it because the walk to the cafeteria is the routine exercise my legs need. Otherwise, I just sit in this chair, trying to be the constant thing in the world every time Belai opens his eyes.
The monitor beeps endless it seems until his eyelids finally move.
They flutter. Stop. Flutter again. Then Belai opens his eyes and looks at the ceiling for a long moment, working out where he is. He does this each time, the hospital, still a disorienting place.
His head turns and he finds me. I set the coffee on the ground beside my feet.
“That was a long nap, my friend.”
Belai’s mouth moves. Something happens at the corners of it, slow, like the whole apparatus needs oiling, and then he laughs. It’s barely there. It’s a scrape of air.
“I suppose I must get used to this,” he rasps. “You. Watching me sleep.”
“Returning a favor.” I lean in. “From about a decade ago when you watched me sleep for a week. Consider the debt settled.”
His eyebrows go up.
“Settled?” He shakes his head, one degree in each direction, which is all he’s got right now.
“You are joking with me. I saved your life with a salve Nuria made from the ground and prayers, in a house with no electricity. I didn’t have all this money and medical equipment to do my job for me.
” His hand lifts an inch off the sheet, indicating all of it.
“You have cheated, my friend. The debt is not settled.”
I laugh wholeheartedly.
It’s the first genuine one in a week. A nurse looks in through the glass. Belai wheezes along with me, then winces, and puts his hand flat on his own chest.
“Don’t,” I tell him. “Don’t laugh too hard. You’re still healing.”
“You started it.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“Belai.”
“I am fine.” He waves his hand that has more motion. “Do not fuss over me, old man.”
“Old? I’m thirty-seven.”
“But you look a decade older from caring for me,” he says. “Go home. Sleep.”
I look at my hands.
Home.
I go back here and there. To shower and for clean clothes. But I avoid as much as I can.
I opened every window in the place for hours in the thick, August heat, roasting my apartment alive. It did not help even slightly.
It still smells like her.
Not perfume. She never wore any. It’s something else. It’s in the sheets and the towels and the left side of the couch. It is a good smell, but I can’t name it. It’s the smell of something I want…something I miss.
The anger is easy. I’ve earned the anger. It’s the only part of this that makes sense. The other part of my emotions is what’s killing me: guilt.
She asked me point blank if I ever loved her.
I did. I do.
I stood over her with the truth in my mouth and instead, I looked at my boots and told her to disappear. I’ve replayed our final words in my head over and over, and the logistics make sense. What Sylvie did is unforgivable—but my heart doesn’t seem to agree. Because…
Fuck, I miss her.
And all I can do now is pray that it fades.
“I’ll be here every day, until you go home to Nuria,” I tell Belai.
Nuria and Sameen are three thousand miles from this room in a house with two guards posted at each door. They have to stay there, because putting all three of them in one building is the single stupidest thing we could do right now.
Salisbrie went into the wind. We checked. Her house is empty. Her phones are dead. Her lawyer says she’s traveling.
There’s nothing. Not even a whisper.
So Belai lies in a bed with no number on the door and his wife is a voice on a call once a day. That’s why I’m here. Why I’m sat in this chair trying to be the one constant my friend has.
I get my phone out. “I want to show you something.”
“What is this?”
“Here. Scroll through.” I hand over my phone.
He has to hold it up close, because his glasses are in an evidence bag somewhere with one lens cracked. A nurse is coming in on Thursday to fit him for new ones.
He squints at the screen.
“These are covers,” he says slowly.
“Mockups. Loose ideas, nothing final. They’ll do a dozen more.” I clear my throat. “From your new publisher.”
He straightens like an arrow.
“My—”
“Only if you want one, that is.” I can’t sit down. I get up and go to the window and come back.
“Callen.” His voice has gone timid. “What do you mean?”
“It means you’re going to tell your story to the world.” I sit down on the edge of the bed, like the nurse told me not to. I do it anyway.
“It’ll be a long process, with a lot of press, but PALADIN is putting a detail on you, Nuria, and Sameen, twenty-four hours, indefinitely, until Salisbrie is in a box.”
“No more hiding?” he asks.
“No more hiding.” God, I wish I could rewind and tell him that for the first time again. The look on his face right now…
“Finally,” he breathes.
“Belai, I want to warn you, it’s our word against hers and the investigation is going to take years. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. It could take a decade. But it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter?”
“She wanted to be Secretary of Defense.” I raise my brows at his shocked expression. “She is never going to survive this book. Not one with names in it. She doesn’t need to be convicted. She just needs to be unpalatable. This story does that.”
He’s looking at the phone.
He swipes back. Then forward. Then back again.
“That one.” He points.
I lean over.
It’s the plainest of the six. No aircraft. No fire, no flag, no cracked earth. It’s a photograph of a hillside at dusk with a low stone wall running along it, and the title is small and set down in the corner like a meager apology.
“You like that one?”
“It reminds me of Kesara,” Belai says. “That is not the road to the school. But it is close enough. I like it.”
He hands the phone back, mind made up, and asks, “Would the black box speed it up?”
I hold his gaze. “Hm? What do you mean?”
“The investigation.” There’s a lightness in his tone that seems mismatched for the moment. “Would it help?”
“Yeah.” No point in lying. “It’s the flight data.
It’d show the aircraft came down deliberately.
It’d show a pilot flew six men into a mountain on purpose.
It would take everything we have from a claim to a fact, and it would cut years off this.
” I put the phone away. “But don’t think about it.
It’s gone. Don’t worry. You just lie there and heal. Let me worry about it.”
Belai is quiet for a while.
The monitor beeps in protest at something running low in his IV.
“When you emailed me the second time—or when Sylvie emailed me, I suppose—I was suspicious.” He’s watching the ceiling. “And I am sorry.”
I plop back down into my hospital chair, seated closer to his head. “Sorry for what?”
“Living the way I have lived teaches a man things.” His fingers move on the blanket, tugs at a loose thread. “Paranoia is one of them. Ten years, Callen. Ten years of looking behind me in a market. Ten years of not using my own name.” He shakes his head. “The email did not sound like you.”
Something drops in my stomach. “It didn’t?”
“It sounded like a man in a hurry.” A small shrug. He winces through it. “Not like you.”
He’s not wrong. I have taken my time, haven’t I? To heal. To love. I’ve dragged that out over years.
“We had not spoken in so long,” he continues, very calm with soft eyes. “Who is to say what you had become in that time? Who is to say what they had done to you? I did not doubt your heart, my friend. I doubted the world.”
“I understand. And your intuition was right, wasn’t it? It wasn’t me.”
He takes a breath, and it catches, and he lets it go carefully. “Which is why I brought a shell of the truth.”
“What?”
“That is why I was so slow to answer her.” Belai closes his eyes.
“It took eleven days to have it made. A man in California. It cost me a great deal, but it was spectacularly identical. The casing is correct in every way. He even stamped the serial number to match.” His mouth twitches.
“I only wanted to see what you would do.”
I lean back in my chair, blowing out a deep breath of shock, relief—some entanglement of the two.
“A duplicate. You’re telling me you made a duplicate. Which means—”
“Yes. The man who cut me ran off with a decoy,” he says. “The real one is safe. It is where I have always kept it. It is—”
“Don’t.”
I have his hand in mine.
I don’t know when I took it. But I’m holding it too tightly, like I’m trying to press the caution into his palms. He winces when I grip too hard so I make myself let go.
“Don’t say it.” I’m looking at the door. At the glass. At the vent in the ceiling. “Don’t say it out loud in this room.” My heart is going like a hammer. “Not until Salisbrie is in the ground or in a cell. Do you understand? Don’t even tell it to the walls, Belai. I mean that.”
He looks up at me and the old man smiles.
“Now who is paranoid?” he asks with a cackle.