27 WHO DO YOU LOVE? BRENDAN'S MOTHER had gone out to Bingo by the time he got home. She left a note: "Chicken in fridge. Glad you're okay. Don't make a habit of it."
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Brendan checked his and Ray's room, but Ray was out, too, and Brendan took a chair from the kitchen and placed it down in front of the butler's pantry. He stepped up on the chair and it sagged to the left where one of the legs was missing a bolt. He looked at the ceiling slat and saw the smudge marks of fingers in the dust, and the air directly in front of his eyes began to swim with tiny dark specks. He pressed his right palm against the slat, lifted it slightly. He brought his hand down, wiped it on his pants, and took several breaths. There were some things you didn't want to know the answers to. Brendan had never wanted to run into his father once he was grown because he didn't want to look in his father's face and see how easy it had been to leave him. He'd never asked Katie about old boyfriends, even Bobby O'Donnell, because he didn't want to picture her lying on top of someone else, kissing him the way she kissed Brendan. Brendan knew about the truth. In most cases, it was just a matter of deciding whether you wanted to look it in the face or live with the comfort of ignorance or lies. And ignorance and lies were often underrated. Most people Brendan knew couldn't make it through the day without a saucerful of ignorance and a side of lies. But this, this truth had to be faced. Because he'd already faced it in the holding cell, and it had sliced through him like a bullet and lodged in his stomach. And it wasn't coming out, which meant he couldn't hide from it, couldn't tell himself it wasn't there. Ignorance was not a possibility. Lying was no longer an accessible part of the equation. "Shit," Brendan said, and pushed the ceiling slat aside and reached back into the darkness, his fingers touching dust and chips of wood and more dust, but no gun. He felt around up there for another full minute, even though he knew it was gone. His father's gun, and it wasn't where it was supposed to be. It was out in the world, and it had killed Katie. He put the slat back in place. He got a dustpan and swept up the dust that had fallen to the floor. He took the chair back to the kitchen. He felt a need to be precise in his movements. He felt it was important that he remain calm. He poured himself a glass of orange juice and placed it on the table. He sat down in the chair with the sagging leg and turned so that he was looking at the door in the center of the apartment. He took a sip of his orange juice and waited for Ray. "LOOK AT THIS," Sean said, pulling the latent prints file from the box and opening it in front of Whitey. "That's the cleanest one they pulled off the door. It's small because it's a kid's." Whitey said, "Old Lady Prior heard two kids playing on the street just before Katie banged her car up. Playing with hockey sticks, she said." "She said she heard Katie say 'Hi.' Maybe it wasn't Katie. A little kid's voice could sound like a woman's. And no footprints? Of course not. What do they weigh?a hundred pounds?" "You recognize that kid's voice?" "Sounded a lot like Johnny O'Shea's."
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Whitey nodded. "The other kid not saying anything at all." "Because he can't fucking speak," Sean said. "HEY, RAY," Brendan said as the two boys entered the apartment. Ray nodded. Johnny O'Shea waved. They started heading back toward the bedroom. "Come on in here a sec, Ray." Ray looked at Johnny. "Just a second, Ray. I got something I want to ask you." Ray turned and Johnny O'Shea dropped the gym bag he'd been carrying and sat on the edge of Mrs. Harris's bed. Ray came down the short hall into the kitchen and held out his hands, looked at his brother like "What?" Brendan hooked a chair with his foot and pulled it out from under the table, nodded at it. Ray's head tilted up as if he smelled something in the air, a scent he wasn't fond of. He looked at the chair. He looked at Brendan. He signed, "What did I do?" "You tell me," Brendan said. "I didn't do anything." "So sit down." "I don't want to." "Why not?" Ray shrugged. Brendan said, "Who do you hate, Ray?" Ray looked at him like he was nuts. "Come on," Brendan said. "Who do you hate?" Ray's sign was brief: "Nobody." Brendan nodded. "Okay. Who do you love?"
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Ray gave him that face again. Brendan leaned forward, his hands on his knees. "Who do you love?" Ray looked down at his shoes, then up at Brendan. He raised his hand and pointed at his brother. "You love me?" Ray nodded, fidgeting. "What about Ma?" Ray shook his head. "You don't love Ma?" Ray signed, "Don't feel one way or the other." "So I'm the only person you love?" Ray thrust his small face out and scowled. His hands flew. "Yes. Can I go now?" "No," Brendan said. "Have a seat." Ray looked down at the chair, his face red and angry. He looked up at Brendan. He raised his hand and extended his middle finger, and then he turned to walk out of the kitchen. Brendan didn't even realize he'd moved until he had most of Ray's hair in his hand and was pulling him up off his feet. He pulled back with his arm as if he were pulling the cord on a rusty lawn mower, and then he opened his fingers and Ray flew backward out of his hand and over the kitchen table. He hit the wall and then dropped onto the table, brought the whole thing crashing to the floor with him. "You love me?" Brendan said, not even looking down at his brother. "You love me so you kill my fucking girlfriend, Ray? Huh?" That got Johnny O'Shea moving, as Brendan had figured it would. Johnny grabbed his gym bag and bolted for the door, but Brendan was all over him. He picked the little prick up by his throat and slammed him against the door. "My brother never does anything without you, O'Shea. Never." He pulled back his fist and Johnny screamed, "No, Bren! Don't!" Brendan punched him so hard in the face he heard the nose break. And then he punched him again. When Johnny hit the floor, he curled into a ball and spit blood on the wood and Brendan said, "I'm coming back. I'm coming back and I just might beat you to death, you piece of fucking garbage."
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Ray was standing on wobbly feet, his sneakers sliding on broken plates when Brendan came back in the kitchen and slapped him so hard across the face he knocked him into the sink. He grabbed his brother by the shirt, Ray looking into his face with tears streaming from his hate-filled eyes and blood smearing his mouth, and Brendan threw him to the floor and spread his arms and knelt on them. "Speak," Brendan said. "I know you can. Speak, you fucking freak, or I swear to God, Ray, I'll kill you. Speak!" Brendan shouted, and brought his fists down into Ray's ears. "Speak! Say her name! Say it! Say 'Katie,' Ray. Say 'Katie'!" Ray's eyes went foggy and dull and he spit some blood up onto his own face. "Speak!" Brendan screamed. "I'll fucking kill you if you don't!" He grabbed his brother by the hair along his temples and pulled his head off the floor, shook it from side to side until Ray's eyes focused again and Brendan held his head still and looked deep into those gray pupils, saw so much love and hate in there that he wanted to rip his brother's head clean off and throw it out the window. He said it again, "Speak," but this time it came out in a hoarse, strangled whisper. "Speak." He heard a loud cough and looked behind him, saw Johnny O'Shea on his feet, spitting blood down onto the floor, Ray senior's gun in his hand. SEAN AND WHITEY were coming up the stairs when they heard the racket, someone screaming in the apartment and the unmistakable snaps of flesh hitting flesh. They heard a man scream, "I'll fucking kill you!" and Sean had his hand on his Glock as he reached for the doorknob. Whitey said, "Wait," but Sean had already turned the knob, and he stepped into the apartment and saw a gun pointed at his chest from six inches away. "Hold it! Don't pull that trigger, kid!" Sean looked into the bloody face of Johnny O'Shea and what he saw there scared the shit out of him. There was nothing there. Probably never had been. The kid wouldn't pull the trigger because he was angry or because he was scared. He'd pull the trigger because Sean was just a six-foot-two video image, and the gun was a joystick. "Johnny, you need to point that gun at the floor." Sean could hear Whitey's breathing from the other side of the threshold. "Johnny." Johnny O'Shea said, "He fucking punched me. Twice. Broke my nose." "Who?"
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"Brendan." Sean looked to his left, saw Brendan standing in the kitchen doorway, hands down by his side, frozen. Johnny O'Shea, he realized, had been about to shoot Brendan when Sean came through the door. He could hear Brendan's breath, shallow and slow. "We'll arrest him for that if you want." "Don't want him fucking arrested. I want him dead." "Dead's a big thing, Johnny. Dead's never coming back, you know?" "I know," the kid said. "I fucking know all about that. You going to use that?" The kid's face was a mess, blood pouring from that broken nose and dripping off his chin. Sean said, "What?" Johnny O'Shea nodded at Sean's hip. "That gun. It's a Glock, right?" "It's a Glock, yeah." "Glocks kick ass, man. I'd like to get me one of those. So you going to use it?" "Now?" "Yeah. You going to draw on me?" Sean smiled. "No, Johnny." Johnny said, "The fuck you smiling for? Draw on me. We'll see what happens. It'll be cool." He thrust the gun out, his arm straight, the muzzle maybe an inch from Sean's chest now. Sean said, "I'd say you got the drop on me, partner. Know what I mean?" "Got the drop, Ray," Johnny called. "On a fucking cop, dude. Me! Check it out." Sean said, "Let's not let this get out?" "Saw this movie once, right? Cop's chasing this black guy on a roof? Nigger threw his ass off. Cop's like all 'Aaagh' and shit the whole way down. Nigger's so bad-ass he don't care the cop got the wife and little shits at home. Nigger's that cool, man." Sean had seen this before. Back when he was in uniform and sent as crowd control on a bank robbery gone bad, the guy inside gradually growing stronger for a two-hour period, feeling the power of the gun in his hand and the effect it had, Sean watching him rant and rave over the monitor hooked up to the bank cameras. At the start, the guy had been terrified, but he'd gotten over that. Fell in love with that gun.
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And for one moment, Sean saw Lauren looking over at him from the pillow, one hand pressed to the side of her head. He saw his dream daughter, smelled her, and thought what a shitty thing it would be to die without meeting her or seeing Lauren again. He focused on the empty face before him. He said, "You see that guy to your left, Johnny? The one in the doorway?" Johnny's eyes darted fast to his left. "Yeah." "He doesn't want to shoot you. He doesn't." "Don't care if he does," Johnny said, but Sean could see it got to the kid, his eyes getting rabbity now, jerking up and down. "But if you shoot me, he has no choice." "Ain't afraid of dying." "I know that. Thing is, though? He won't shoot you in the head or nothing. We don't kill kids, man. But if he shoots you from where he's standing, you know where that bullet's going to go?" Sean kept his eyes on Johnny, even though his head seemed to be magnetized to the gun in the kid's hand, wanting to look down on it, see where the trigger was, if the kid was pulling on it at all, Sean thinking, I don't want to get shot, and I definitely don't want to get shot by a kid. He couldn't think of a more pathetic way to go. He could feel Brendan, ten feet to his left and frozen, probably thinking the same thing. Johnny licked his lips. "It's going to go through your armpit and into your spine, man. It's going to paralyze you. You'll be like those kids on those Jimmy Fund commercials. You know the ones. Sitting in the wheelchair, all frozen up on one side, head hanging off the chair. You'll be a drooler, Johnny. People will have to hold the cup up beside your head so you can suck from the straw." Johnny made up his mind. Sean could see it, as if a light had clicked off in the kid's dark brain, and Sean felt the fear seize him now, knew this kid was going to pull the trigger if only to hear the sound. "My fucking nose, man," Johnny said, and turned toward Brendan. Sean heard his own breath pop out of his mouth in surprise, and he looked down to see that gun sweeping away from his body, as if revolving on top of a tripod. He reached out so fast it was as if someone else was controlling his arms, and closed his hand over the gun as Whitey stepped into the room, Glock pointed at the kid's chest. A sound came out of the kid's mouth?a gasp of defeated surprise as if he'd opened a Christmas present to find a soiled gym sock inside?and Sean pushed the kid's forehead back against the wall and stripped the gun from him. Sean said, "Motherfucker," and blinked at Whitey through the sweat in his eyes.
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Johnny started to cry the way only a thirteen-year-old could, as if the whole world was sitting on his face. Sean turned him to the wall and pulled his hands behind his back, saw Brendan finally take a deep breath, his lips and arms trembling, Ray Harris standing behind him in a kitchen that looked like it had been hit by a cyclone. Whitey stepped up behind Sean, put a hand on his shoulder. "How you doing?" "Kid was going to do it," Sean said, feeling the sweat that drenched every inch of his clothes, even his socks. "No, I wasn't," Johnny wailed. "I was just kidding." "Fuck you," Whitey said, and leaned his face into the kid's. "Nobody cares about your tears but your mommy, little bitch. Get used to it." Sean snapped the cuffs on Johnny O'Shea and took him by the shirt, led him into the kitchen, and dropped him in a chair. Whitey said, "Ray, you look like someone threw you from the back of a truck." Ray looked at his brother. Brendan leaned against the oven and his body was sagging so bad, Sean figured he'd fall over in a light breeze. "We know," Sean said. "What do you know?" Brendan whispered. Sean looked at the kid sniffling in the chair and the other kid, mute, looking up at them like he hoped they'd leave soon so he could get back to playing Doom in the back bedroom. Sean was pretty sure once he got a sign language interpreter and a social worker and questioned them that they'd say they did it "because." Because they had the gun. Because they were there on the street when she drove up it. Maybe because Ray had never really liked her. Because it seemed like a cool idea. Because they'd never killed anyone before. Because when you had your finger curled around a trigger, you just had to pull it or otherwise that finger would itch for weeks. "What do you know?" Brendan repeated, his voice gone hoarse and wet. Sean shrugged. He wished he had an answer for Brendan, but looking at these two kids, nothing came to mind. Nothing at all. JIMMY TOOK A BOTTLE with him to Gannon Street. There was an assisted-living home for the elderly at the end of the street, a chunk of 1960s limestone and granite that was two stories tall and ran half a block down Heller Court, the street that began where Gannon ended. Jimmy sat on the white front steps and looked back down Gannon. He'd heard they were kicking the old people out of here, actually, the Point having grown so popular that the owner of the building was going to sell to a guy who specialized in starter condos for young
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couples. The Point was gone, really. It had always been the snobby sister of the Flats, but now it was like it wasn't even in the same family. Pretty soon, they'd probably draw up a charter, get the name changed, carve it off the Buckingham map. Jimmy took the pint from his jacket and sipped some bourbon, looked at the spot where they'd last seen Dave Boyle that day the men had taken him, his head looking back through the rear window, covered in shadow, gone soft with distance. I wish it hadn't been you, Dave. I really do. He raised the pint to Katie. Daddy got him, honey. Daddy put him down. "Talking to yourself?" Jimmy looked over and saw Sean climbing out of his car. Sean had a roadie beer in his hand and he smiled at Jimmy's pint. "What's your excuse?" "Tough night," Jimmy said. Sean nodded. "Me, too. Saw a bullet with my name on it." Jimmy slid to the side, and Sean sat down beside him. "How'd you know to look for me here?" "Your wife said you might be here." "My wife?" Jimmy had never told her about his trips here. Christ, she was a real piece of work. "Yeah. Jimmy, we made a bust today." Jimmy took a long pull from the bottle, his chest fluttering. "A bust." "Yeah. We got your daughter's killers. Got 'em cold." "Killers?" Jimmy said. "Plural?" Sean nodded. "Kids, actually. Thirteen years old. Ray Harris's son, Ray junior, and a kid named Johnny O'Shea. They confessed half an hour ago." Jimmy felt a knife enter his brain through the ear and push toward the other side. A hot knife, slicing away through his skull. "No question?" he said. "None," Sean said. "Why?"
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"Why'd they do it? They don't even know. They were playing with a gun. They saw a car coming, and one of them lay down in the middle of the street. The car swerves, clutch kicks out, and O'Shea runs up to the car with the gun, says he just meant to scare her. Instead the gun went off. Katie hit him with the door, and the kids say they snapped. They chased her so she wouldn't tell anyone they had a gun." "And the beating they gave her?" Jimmy said, and took another drink. "Ray junior had a hockey stick. He wouldn't answer any questions. He's mute, you know? Just sat there. But O'Shea said that they beat her because she'd made them mad by running." He shrugged as if the utter wastefulness of it surprised even him. "Little fucking kids," he said. "Afraid they'd get grounded or something, so they killed her." Jimmy stood. He opened his mouth to gulp some air and his legs gave way and he found himself right back on the step. Sean put a hand on his elbow. "Go easy, Jim. Take a few breaths." Jimmy saw Dave sitting on the ground, fingering the slice Jimmy had drawn from one end of his abdomen to the other. He heard his voice: Look at me, Jimmy. Look at me. And Sean said, "I got a call from Celeste Boyle. She said Dave's missing. She said she went a little crazy the last few days. She said you, Jim, might know where he is." Jimmy tried to speak. He opened his mouth, but his windpipe filled right up with what felt like damp cotton swabs. Sean said, "No one else knows where Dave could be. And it's important we talk to him, Jim, because he might know something about a guy who got killed outside the Last Drop the other night." "A guy?" Jimmy managed before his windpipe closed up again. "Yeah," Sean said, something hard finding his voice. "A pedophile with three priors. Real piece of shit. The theory at the barracks is that someone caught him in the act with a little kid and canceled his fucking ticket. So anyway," Sean said, "we want to talk to Dave about it. You know where he is, Jim?" Jimmy shook his head, having trouble seeing anything out of his peripheral vision now, a tunnel seeming to have formed in front of his eyes. "No?" Sean said. "Celeste says she told you that Dave killed Katie. Seems to think you believed the same thing. She got the feeling you were going to do something about it." Jimmy stared through the tunnel at a sewer grate. "You going to send five hundred a month to Celeste now, Jimmy?"
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Jimmy looked up and each of them saw it at the same time in the other's face?Sean could see what Jimmy had done, and Jimmy could see that knowledge appear in Sean. "You fucking did it, didn't you?" Sean said. "You killed him." Jimmy stood up, holding on to the banister. "Don't know what you're talking about." "You killed both of them?Ray Harris and Dave Boyle. Jesus, Jimmy, I came down here thinking the whole idea was nuts, but I can see it in your face, man. You crazy, lunatic, fucking psycho piece of shit. You did it. You killed Dave. You killed Dave Boyle. Our friend, Jimmy." Jimmy snorted. "Our friend. Yeah, okay, Point Boy, he was your good buddy. Hung with him all the time, right?" Sean stepped into his face. "He was our friend, Jimmy. Remember?" Jimmy looked into Sean's eyes, wondered if he was going to take a swing at him. "Last time I saw Dave," he said, "was at my house last night." He pushed Sean aside and crossed the street onto Gannon. "That's the last time I saw Dave." "You're full of shit." He turned, arms wide as he looked back at Sean. "Then arrest me, you're so sure." "I'll get the evidence," Sean said. "You know I will." "You'll get shit," Jimmy said. "Thanks for busting my daughter's killers, Sean. Really. Maybe if you'd been a little faster, though?" Jimmy shrugged and turned his back on him, started walking down Gannon Street. Sean watched him until he lost him to the darkness under a broken streetlight right in front of Sean's old house. You did it, Sean thought. You actually did it, you cold, cold-blooded animal. And the worst part of it is that I know how smart you are. You won't have left us anything to go on. That's not in your nature, because you're a detail guy, Jimmy. You damn prick. "You took his life," Sean said aloud. "Didn't you, my man?" He tossed his beer can into the curb and walked to his car, called Lauren from his cell phone. When she answered, he said, "It's Sean." Silence. He knew now what he hadn't said that she'd needed to hear, the thing he'd refused to say in over a year. Anything, he'd told himself, I'll say anything but that.
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He said it now, though. He said it seeing that kid pointing the gun at his chest, the kid reeking of nothing, and seeing, too, poor Dave that day Sean had offered to buy him a beer, the spark of desperate hope he'd seen in Dave's face, the guy probably never believing, truly, that anyone would want to have a beer with him. And he said it because he felt it deep in his marrow, a need to say it, as much for Lauren as for himself. He said, "I'm sorry." And Lauren spoke. "For what?" "For putting it all on you." "Okay? "Hey?" "Hey?" "You go ahead," he said. "I? "What?" "I 卙ell, Sean, I'm sorry, too. I didn't mean to?" "It's okay," he said. "Really." He took a deep breath, sucking in the soiled, stale-sweat stench of his cruiser. "I want to see you. I want to see my daughter." And Lauren answered, "How do you know she's yours?" "She's mine." "But the blood test?" "She's mine," he said. "I don't need a blood test. Will you come home, Lauren? Will you?" Somewhere on the silent street, he could hear the hum of a generator. "Nora," she said. "What?" "That's your daughter's name, Sean." "Nora," he said, the word wet in his throat.
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WHEN JIMMY GOT HOME, Annabeth was waiting up for him in the kitchen. He sat in the chair at the table across from her and she gave him that small, secret smile he loved, the one that seemed to know him so well he'd never have to open his mouth for the rest of his life and she'd still know what he meant to say. Jimmy took her hand and ran his thumb along hers and tried to find strength in the image of himself that he could see in her face. The baby monitor sat on the table between them. They'd used it last month when Nadine had come down with a bad case of strep, listening to her gurgle as she'd slept, Jimmy picturing his baby drowning, waiting for the sound of a cough so ground in glass he'd have to leap from bed and scoop her up, rush her to the emergency room wearing only boxers and a T-shirt. She'd healed quickly, though, but Annabeth didn't return the monitor to its box in the dining room closet. She'd turn it on at night, listen to Nadine and Sara sleep. They weren't sleeping now. Jimmy could hear them through the small speaker, whispering, giggling, and it horrified him to picture them and think of his sins at the same time. I killed a man. The wrong man. It burned in him, that knowledge, that shame. I killed Dave Boyle. It dripped, still burning, down into his belly. It drizzled through him. I murdered. I murdered an innocent man. "Oh, honey," Annabeth said, searching his face. "Oh, baby, what's wrong? Is it Katie? Baby, you look like you're dying." She came around the table, a fearsome mix of worry and love in her eyes. She straddled Jimmy and took his face in her hands and made him look in her eyes. "Tell me. Tell me what's wrong." Jimmy wanted to hide from her. Her love hurt too much right now. He wanted to dissolve from her warm hands and find someplace dark and cavelike where no love or light could reach and he could curl into a ball and moan his grief and self-hatred into the black. "Jimmy," she whispered. She kissed his eyelids. "Jimmy, talk to me. Please." She pressed the heels of her hands against his temples, and her fingers dug through his hair and against his skull and she kissed him. Her tongue slid into his mouth and probed him, searching deep for the source of his pain, sucking at it, capable of turning into a scalpel if necessary and cutting away his cancers, sucking them back out of him. "Tell me. Please, Jimmy. Tell me."
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And he knew, looking into her love, that he had to tell her everything or he'd be lost. He wasn't sure she'd be able to save him, but he was positive that if he didn't open himself to her now, he would definitely die. So he told her. He told her everything. He told her about Just Ray Harris and he told her about the sadness he'd felt anchored inside of him since he was eleven and he told her that loving Katie had been the sole admirable accomplishment of his otherwise useless existence, that Katie at five?that daughter-stranger who'd needed and mistrusted him at the same time?was the scariest thing he'd ever faced and the only chore he'd never run from. He told his wife that loving Katie and protecting Katie were the core of him, and when she had been taken, so had he. "And so," he told her with the kitchen gone small and tight around them, "I killed Dave. "I killed him and buried him in the Mystic and now I've discovered, as if that crime weren't bad enough, that he was innocent. "These are the things I've done, Anna. And I can't undo them. I think I should go to jail. I should confess to Dave's murder and go back into jail, because I think I belong there. No, honey, I do. I'm not fit for out here. I can't be trusted." His voice sounded like someone else's. It sounded so far from the one he usually heard leaving his lips that he wondered if Annabeth saw a stranger before her, a carbon Jimmy, a Jimmy vanishing into the ether. Her face was dry and composed, though, so still she could have been posing for a painting. Chin tilted up, eyes clear and unreadable. Jimmy could hear the girls on the monitor again, whispering, the sound like a soft rustle of wind. Annabeth reached down and began unbuttoning his shirt, and Jimmy watched her deft fingers, his body numb. She opened the shirt and pushed it halfway off his shoulders and then she placed her cheek to it, her ear over the center of his chest. He said, "I just?" "Ssshh," she whispered. "I want to hear your heart." Her hands slid along his rib cage and then up his back, and she pressed the side of her head tighter against his chest. She closed her eyes, and a tiny smile curled up her lips. They sat that way for a while. The whispering on the monitor had changed to the hushed rumble of his daughters' sleeping. When she pulled away, Jimmy could still feel her cheek on his chest like a permanent mark. She climbed off him and sat on the floor in front of him and looked into his face. She tilted her head toward the baby monitor and, for a moment, they listened to their daughters sleep.
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"You know what I told them when I put them to bed tonight?" Jimmy shook his head. Annabeth said, "I told them they had to be extra-special nice to you for a while because as much as we loved Katie? You loved her even more. You loved her so much because you'd created her and held her when she was tiny and sometimes your love for her was so big that your heart filled like a balloon and felt like it was going to pop from loving her." "Jesus," Jimmy said. "I told them that their Daddy loved them that much, too. That he had four hearts and they were all balloons and they were all filled up and aching. And your love meant we'd never have to worry. And Nadine said, 'Never?'" "Please." Jimmy felt like he was crushed under blocks of granite. "Stop." She shook her head once, holding him in her calm eyes. "I told Nadine, 'That's right. Never. Because Daddy is a king, not a prince. And kings know what must be done?even if it's hard?to make things right. Daddy is a king, and he will do?" "Anna?" "?he will do whatever he has to do for those he loves. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. Great men try to make things right. And that's all that matters. That's what great love is. That's why Daddy is a great man." Jimmy felt blinded. He said, "No." "Celeste called," Annabeth said, her words like darts now. "Don't?" "She wanted to know where you were. She told me how she'd mentioned her own suspicions about Dave to you." Jimmy wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, watched his wife as if he'd never seen her before. "She told me that, Jimmy, and I thought what kind of wife says those things about her husband? How fucking gutless do you have to be to tell those kinds of tales out of school? And why would she tell you? Huh, Jim? Why would she run to you?" Jimmy had an idea?he'd always had an idea about Celeste and the way she looked at him sometimes?but he didn't say anything. Annabeth smiled, as if she could see the answer in his face. "I could have called you on your cell. I could have. Once she told me what you knew, and I remembered seeing you leave with Val, I could guess what you were doing, Jimmy. I'm not stupid."
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She was never that. "But I didn't call you. I didn't stop it." Jimmy's voice cracked around the words: "Why not?" Annabeth cocked her head at him as if the answer should have been obvious. She stood, looking down at him with that curious glare, and she kicked off her shoes. She unzipped her jeans and pulled them down her thighs, bent at the waist and pushed them to her ankles. She stepped out of them as she removed her shirt and bra. She pulled Jimmy out of his chair. She pressed him to her body, and she kissed his damp cheekbones. "They," she said, "are weak." "Who's they?" "Everyone," she said. "Everyone but us." She pushed Jimmy's shirt off his shoulders and Jimmy could see her face down at the Pen Channel the first night they'd ever gone out. She'd asked him if crime was in his blood, and Jimmy had convinced her that it wasn't, because he'd thought that was the answer she was looking for. Only now, twelve and a half years later, did he understand that all she'd wanted from him was the truth. Whatever his answer had been, she would have adapted to it. She would have supported it. She would have built their lives accordingly. "We are not weak," she said, and Jimmy felt the desire take hold in him as if it had been building since birth. If he could've eaten her alive without causing her pain, he would have devoured her organs, sunk his teeth into her throat. "We will never be weak." She sat on the kitchen table, her legs dangling off the side. Jimmy looked at his wife as he stepped out of his pants, aware that this was temporary, that he was merely blocking the pain of Dave's murder, ducking from it into his wife's strength and flesh. But that would do for tonight. Maybe not tomorrow or in the days to come. But definitely for tonight, it would provide. And wasn't that how all recoveries started? With small steps? Annabeth placed her hands on his hips, her nails digging into the flesh near his spine. "When we're done, Jim?" "Yeah?" Jimmy felt drunk with her. "Make sure you kiss the girls good night." Epilogue
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JIMMY FLATS Sunday