Chapter 37
NORA
Sol Reyes calls at seven in the morning, which is how I know it's good news, because Sol only calls early when he's beaten somebody to the punch and wants to enjoy it.
"Mrs. Radulov." He's got the level voice of a man holding a full glass he doesn't want to spill. "Are you sitting down? Sit down. Are the dogs with you?"
"Borscht's on my feet and Pelmeni's eating a shoe. Sol, what."
"The assault charge is dead." He lets that hang one second, the showman in him.
"The DA pulled it last night. The arresting officer on the jail incident was Hutchins's man, and once the package we filed reached her desk, an assault case built by a deputy who was taking cash from your father's killer became a case she couldn't put in front of a jury without it blowing up in her face. So she didn't. It's gone."
I'm standing in the rental kitchen in one of Isaak's shirts and I have to put a hand flat on the counter to keep the floor where it belongs.
"Say the part I want to hear, Sol."
"He's processing out today." Sol's voice cracks the careful surface, just a hairline. "Could be noon, could be four, the county does it on its own clock. But he walks. Today. He's coming home."
I don't say anything for a second because my throat's gone useless.
"Nora? You still upright?"
"I'm upright." It comes out wet. "Sol. Thank you. For all of it."
"Thank Dima, he did the digging. Thank your husband for retaining the best lawyer in the county, which is me.
" A dry beat. "I'll send a car for him. You stay put and let me handle the logistics.
Don't drive to that jail and sit in the lot.
I know you. You'll be in the lot at dawn with a thermos, and a pregnant woman parked outside a county facility makes everyone nervous. Stay home. He'll come to you."
He hangs up the way they all hang up, no goodbye.
I stand in the kitchen with the phone in my hand and the dogs looking up at me.
I slide down the cabinet to the floor, and I cry.
Finally. The ugly kind I've been holding since the gate first closed on him.
Pelmeni abandons the shoe to come lick my face like I'm dying, and I let her.
By nine the house knows.
Dima's been staying in the rental's spare room since the fire. He comes down in yesterday's shirt with his phone already lit up and his eyes red-rimmed in a way he'll deny.
"Marisol's bringing food," he announces, which is how Dima processes feeling, by feeding people. "She says, and I'm quoting, tell Nora I'm making enough for an army because that man is going to come home looking like a coat rack."
"She's not wrong."
"She's never wrong, it's insufferable." He drops into the chair across from me and scrubs both hands down his face.
"Twenty-six days. I counted. I had a whole plan if it went the other way, you know.
Lawyers in three states, a thing with a judge I'm keeping to myself.
" He looks at me. "Didn't need it. My idiot brother walked out on a sandwich and a foul-mouthed ranch girl who wouldn't stop showing up. "
"Watch the foul-mouthed."
"It's a compliment in this family." He almost smiles. "He's never had that, Nora. Somebody who just keeps coming. You should know what you did."
I don't have anywhere to put that, so I put my hand over his on the table. The brother of the man I love squeezes it once and lets me see his face do the thing it's been refusing to do for twenty-six days. Then he gets up fast and puts the kettle on so neither of us has to look at it.
The news breaks a little after eleven.
I'm not even looking for it. Maggie's got the local station on at Halo and texts me a link. The dogs are asleep, Dima's in the shower, and I'm at the table when the headline loads on my phone.
LASD captain found dead. Wade Hutchins, suspended Lost Hills station commander, recovered from his boat off the Malibu coast. Investigation ongoing.
I read it three times.
The story underneath is thin the way these stories are thin.
A suspended captain. Out on his boat alone.
Found this morning. No cause given, no foul play confirmed or ruled out, a sheriff's department spokesman saying the words departments say when they want a thing to be quiet.
The kind of story that's a wall with nothing behind it you're allowed to see.
But I know things now I didn't know a month ago.
I know Hutchins was on Brandon's payroll, paid in cash that started its life as cartel money.
Dima and Marisol pulled the wires to show me.
I know that money belongs to people who don't write things down, don't leave loose ends, don't forgive a man who lost their property.
And I know Hutchins was a loose end with a badge, a man who could trade what he knew for his own skin the second the law squeezed him.
So I sit at the table with the tea going cold, putting it together myself, the way nobody's going to put it together out loud for me, and only one shape fits.
The cartel reached him before the DA could.
They tied off the thread that led back to their money, and they did it the week the case against my husband fell apart, when the whole rotten structure started coming down, a frightened sheriff turned liability instead of asset.
I can't prove a word of it. I will never prove a word of it. It's a guess, the kind you make standing in your kitchen with a dead man's name on your screen. I have learned this year to know the difference between what I can prove and what I only know.
I put the phone face-down.
Hutchins held my vitamins up in the light on Las Virgenes and told me a lot of things can go wrong for a woman alone.
I should feel something cleaner than I do, hearing he's gone.
I should feel safe. Mostly I feel the cold of the world Isaak lives in brushing past me close, the machine of it, the way it solves a problem, leaves a quiet headline, moves on.
I put my hand on the bump where three hearts are beating and I think, not you.
Not ever you three. Whatever it costs, you're going to grow up not knowing this cold exists.
Dima comes down with wet hair and reads it over my shoulder without me showing him.
"Huh," he says.
"You're not surprised."
"I'm not anything. I don't know anything." He says it lightly, his eyes saying the rest, that he knows exactly as much as I do, that we are both going to leave it in this kitchen and never carry it out. "A suspended cop had a bad day on a boat. Tragic. Boats are dangerous."
He picks up my cold tea, dumps it, starts a fresh one. "I'd put it out of your head before Isaak's home. He'll have feelings about you having feelings about it, and the man's been in a cage for a month. Let him walk in the door before he starts solving things."
"Is that what he'll do when he's home?" I ask. "Solve things?"
"He's already solving things. He solved them from inside a cell, which, frankly, was rude of him, I was supposed to be the one who fixed it." Dima sets the new tea down in front of me. "Drink that. You look like a ghost story."
Marisol arrives that afternoon with two grocery bags, a foil tray, and the specific energy of a woman who has decided to feel her feelings through carbohydrates.
"Where do you want the lasagna?" she says, instead of hello, and then she sees my face. She puts everything down on the counter, crosses the kitchen, holds me hard, the bump between us. "He's out. Maggie told me. He's actually out."
"This afternoon."
"This afternoon." She pulls back, grips my shoulders, and looks me over the way she's looked me over since the day Hutchins pulled me on Las Virgenes, checking for damage I might be hiding. "You okay? You look like you've seen something."
I think about the headline face-down on the table six inches from her hand. Dima catches my eye over her shoulder and gives the smallest shake of his head. He's right, this isn't a thing I carry to Marisol, who would worry it like a sore tooth for a month.
"I'm okay," I tell her, and it's even mostly true. "I'm just wrung out. It's been a long twenty-six days."
"Twenty-six. He counted too." She jerks a thumb at Dima.
"You two are a matched set of disasters.
" She starts unpacking the bags, slamming a colander onto the stove with more force than a colander needs.
"I made enough for nine people because that man is going to walk in here looking like somebody folded him in half and forgot about him.
I am not having it. He's going to eat. You're going to eat.
The little ones are going to eat." She points the colander at my belly. "Three of them. God help us all."
"You're going to be the worst aunt," Dima says, fondly. "You'll feed them until they roll."
"I'm going to be the best aunt, you mean. I'm going to be their favorite and you're going to be the one who teaches them card games for money." She fills a pot at the tap. "Sit down, Nora, you're hovering. Pregnant women shouldn't hover, it's bad for the soup."
"You're making soup too?"
"I'm making everything. Sit." And I sit, because there's a particular comfort in being bossed around your own kitchen by a woman who loves you.
For an hour the rental fills up with garlic and steam.
Dima and Marisol bicker about whether you salt the water before it boils or after.
I let it hold me, this loud warm thing, while the clock crawls toward three.
The car comes at twenty past three.
I hear it on the gravel before I see it.
The dogs go off. I'm at the window with my heart doing something violent.
Lev's black SUV rolls up to the rental and stops.
The back door opens, and a man I married gets out of it in the clothes he was arrested in, a month thinner, a fading scar through his brow, moving careful the way you move when you've been somewhere your body had to stay ready.
He stops in the yard. He looks at the house. He looks at me in the window with my hands flat on the glass like the worst day of visitation, except there's no guard, there's a door, and I am already moving for it.
He looks rough close up, when I make it onto the porch.
A month of county food has taken the heaviness out of his shoulders.
There's a gray cast under his eyes that wasn't there in February, the brow scar gone from pink to a thin pale line, a flatness in how he holds himself that I know now is what his body does when it's spent thirty days braced for a wet floor.
He's still the biggest thing in any yard he stands in.
But somebody planed him down, and I can see exactly where.
I want to put my hands on every inch of it.
I get the door open and the spring air hits me.
The dogs pour past my legs and reach him first, both of them losing their minds.
He goes down on one knee in the gravel to take it, this terrifying man, letting two dogs knock him sideways because they're hers and that's enough.
Over their heads he finds me coming down the steps with both hands under the bump, twenty-five weeks of his children, and he stands up slow.
We stop a foot apart in the yard. Nobody's clock is running.
For a month the only way I could reach him was a hand flattened on cold plexiglass, a guard timing us, a steel bench bolted to the floor.
Now there's just him and me, the dogs, the canyon greening up behind us, the whole free open air to do this in.
"You came out on your feet," I say. My voice barely works. "Like you said."
"Like I said." His eyes go to the bump, then back up, and they're wet, this man whose eyes I've seen do almost nothing.
He lifts one hand and lays it flat over the curve of me, careful, over all three of them, the first time he's touched them without a guard deciding how long.
"Three," he says, low, voice catching on the word. "I keep having to learn it. Three."
"Three. They've been waiting on you." I cover his hand with both of mine. "We all have."
He looks at me then, really looks, the same look he had through the glass with the words still locked behind his teeth, and I see him reach for them again. This time there's no horn, no deputy, no schedule, nothing in the world to stop him.
I put two fingers against his mouth before he can.
"In the house," I tell him, soft, my eyes spilling. "Not in the yard with Dima watching from the window, which he for sure is doing right now. You waited this long to say it right. Come inside and say it right."
His mouth curves under my fingers. He turns his head and presses his lips to them, the same as the wrist in visitation, the same vow.
"In the house," he agrees.
And he takes my hand, the one that's been pressed to cold glass for a month, holding it in the warm air with nothing between us at all. We go up the steps together toward the open door and everything I'm finally about to get to hear.