Chapter 14 #3
"I'm giving you a minute to sit with what I said without deflecting into strategy." A beat. "Go to the courthouse tomorrow. Sit in the gallery. Let her see you. Don't plan what happens after that. Just show up."
"Nicole."
"Yeah?"
"How did you get so much smarter than me?"
"Therapy, time, and a basil plant that keeps me humble." Her voice went warm. "I love you. Go to sleep. And Will?"
"Yeah?"
"She's worth the scary part. You know that, right?"
I didn't answer. She didn't need me to.
"Goodnight," she said, and the line went quiet.
I set the phone down. The scotch was still on the counter, still untouched. I poured it down the sink and watched it spiral away.
Then I stood in the dark penthouse and did nothing. Didn't plan. Didn't strategize. Didn't run scenarios or calculate exposure or map contingencies. Just stood there with the fear, the guilt, the image of an empty chair, and the taste of a word I kept circling but couldn't land on.
Not love. I knew it was love. That wasn't the hard part.
The hard part was that love, for me, had always been a thing I did, not a thing I felt.
I loved Nicole by hunting the man who hurt her.
I loved my mother by cooking breakfast for my sister every morning after she died.
I loved by action, by protection, by control.
The feeling part, the part that was just standing still and being terrified and letting someone matter to you without building a perimeter around it, that part was a language I'd never learned.
Lindsey was fluent in it. Even with all her walls, all her trust issues, all the damage her father had done, she still knew how to stand in front of someone and say this matters to me and not turn it into a tactical operation.
She'd done it on the balcony. She'd done it with scrambled eggs.
She'd done it by reaching for my bloody hands in a hallway and saying I'm still here, which was three words and the bravest thing anyone had ever said to me.
I was going to show up tomorrow. Not the courtroom version. Not the version with the tailored suit and the controlled answers and the mask that fit so well most people didn't know it was a mask.
Just me. In a chair. Where she could see me.
Nicole was right. It was terrifyingly simple.
I went to bed. Didn't sleep. Stared at the ceiling the way Lindsey probably stared at hers, two people in separate rooms in separate buildings, lying awake in the dark, which was a stupid waste of insomnia when we could have been lying awake together, but that was a thought for another time.
Morning came without instructions, the way it always did.
I showered. Dressed with more care than was probably necessary, charcoal suit, white shirt, no tie, because a tie felt like armor and I was trying to show up without it.
The face in the mirror looked like mine but also looked different, and I couldn't pinpoint why until I realized it was the absence of the thing I usually saw there.
Not confidence. Not control. Just the particular blankness that came from knowing exactly who you were performing as.
Today I didn't know who I was performing as. Which might have meant I wasn't performing.
That was either progress or a disaster. I'd find out in approximately ninety minutes.
The courthouse was thirty minutes away. I drove through streets waking up around me, delivery trucks, early commuters, a man walking a dog that was clearly in charge of the relationship.
Normal life. The kind of life I'd been observing from outside for seven years like a man pressing his face against restaurant glass.
I parked two blocks away. Sat in the car.
My hands were on the steering wheel and they were steady, which was annoying because I wanted them to shake.
Shaking would have been honest. Shaking would have meant my body was catching up to what my mind already knew, which was that I was about to do something I couldn't take back and couldn't plan for and couldn't control.
I got out of the car.
The morning air was cold and tasted like exhaust and coffee from the cart on the corner.
I walked toward the federal building, and each step felt like it carried more weight than a step should, not because I was afraid of what came next, though I was, badly, but because I was walking toward something instead of around it for the first time in longer than I could remember.
The lobby was the usual organized chaos: lawyers with briefcases looking important, clerks with file carts looking harried, the machinery of justice grinding forward with its particular combination of urgency and tedium.
I scanned the crowd the way I always scanned crowds, automatically, looking for threats, for angles, for the nearest exit.
Then I stopped scanning for threats and started scanning for dark hair in a practical bun.
I didn't find her. Not yet. She'd be in the prep room with Chen, running through the forensic timeline one more time, making sure every number was bulletproof. She wouldn't know I was here until she walked into the courtroom and looked at the gallery.
I found the courtroom. Found the gallery. Found a seat.
Not in the front row. Not positioned strategically. Just a seat. Near the back, where she'd see me when she looked, and she would look, because she looked at everything, because that was who she was.
I sat down. Put my hands on my knees. And waited.
Not for the testimony. Not for the verdict. Not for any outcome I could engineer or predict or control.
Just for her to walk in and find me here.
It was the hardest thing I'd ever done. Harder than the fights.
Harder than the hunting. Harder than watching her car spin toward a guardrail while I screamed her name.
Because those things had required action, and action was what I knew.
This required stillness. This required trust. This required sitting in a chair and believing that showing up was enough.
Nicole's voice echoed in my head: Just because she's there and you want to be where she is.
I sat still. I waited. The courtroom filled slowly around me, and I let it, and I didn't calculate anything, and the fear was enormous, yet I kept still.