Page 60 of Sawyer
“Camille—”
“Get. Out.” I point at the curtain because I have to point at something that isn’t his face. “I can’t—” My throat closes around how much I can’t. “Hartley can take your statement in the hallway or in hell; I don’t care where. I will talk to you when I can hear myself think without hearing the van doors.”
Hartley moves him gently by the elbow. Gregory lets himself be steered, stunned and gray. At the curtain he turns back. “I love you,” he says, and I want to throw the heart monitor at him because that word feels like counterfeit currency he used in a place that only takes cash.
They’re gone. The room fills with fluorescent and beeping and that lemon-bleach again like a stupid hymn.
I fold in on myself. Not a ball, because my hip aches and the IV tubing tethers me, but some smaller shape. I drag the warm blanket up and it smells like a hundred other people who were scared here before me. It doesn’t help. I bury my face in it and breathe until breaths stop clawing.
Through the thin curtain I hear low voices—Hartley, clinical and inexorable; my father, smaller and smaller. Somewhere, a door opens. Somewhere, a pen scratches ruin onto paper.
I think of Sawyer in the hallway. I think of the way his eyes softened when he saidalwaysand the way they hardened when he saidwe finish it. I think of the sticky note I pinned to his chest—trust your gut—and wonder if I can obey my own handwriting when my gut is an ocean churning.
A soft shadow falls across the curtain. “It’s just me,” comes his voice, low and careful.
“Go away,” I say, because love is a thing with edges and mine is flayed to ribbons. “Please.”
A beat. “I’ll be right outside,” he says.
“I know.” It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t anything yet. It’s just a fact. He leaves footsteps in air where there should be floor.
I stare at my paint-stained cuticles. They look like somebody else’s hands, somebody else’s life. I flex them, feeling tender skin pull. Color can’t cover blood. I know that now. But maybe, when the blood dries, color can make a map. Later. Not yet.
For now, I lie under the hospital light and let the ache expand until it’s as big as the sky. I let the truth sit, sour and heavy, because it’s better than the lie that almost killed me. I let myself hate and love the same two men in different measures that change with every beep.
And I wait for the next breath to come without breaking.
23
Sawyer
Hospitals are built from two materials: antiseptic and time. The antiseptic burns your nose; the time gets under your nails. I take up my station on a plastic chair outside Cam’s room and count the flicker in the fluorescents until I know exactly when the ballast in the fourth light down the hall is going to stutter. It’s every forty-seven seconds. The pulse lines up with the steady ping of a telemetry monitor two rooms over and the intermittent squeak of a med cart with a bad wheel.
It shouldn’t help. It does. Patterns mean I’m not thinking about the way she saidgowithout sayingaway, the way her mouth trembled when I told her what her father did, the way I couldn’t bring myself to reach for her when everything in me wanted to.
I’m close enough to the door that if she called my name I’d hear it through a blanket. Far enough that I’m not breaking the last instruction she gave me. That’s the line I’m walking now: the width of a hallway, the height of a vow.
Riggs texts a photo of a whiteboard in our mobile command app—the case board reproduced in markers. At the center: VALE inred underlined twice. Radiating spokes: Kestrel Risk (subhead: “front office, Magnolia Ridge P.O. box”), Alder Street Holdings (“shell/ACH funnel”), Red Trace (“South SP units 312/314”), Rourke (“ex-mil, blacklisted, current location unknown”), Perps #1/#2 (“lawyered, giving us crumbs”), Gregory (“cooperating; secured”). In the corner Rae added a doodle of a little triangle sticker peeling off a van. The caption says:peels like a scab.
I send back:Good. Keep pushing Alder—follow every wire.Then I pocket the phone when a nurse rounds the corner with Cam’s chart. She’s seen me enough times today to stop jumping when she notices the large man with the permanent scowl and the neck mic.
“She’s resting,” she says softly. “Vitals are good. She asked for water. We’re keeping it sips for now.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’m five feet away if she needs anything.”
The nurse studies me. The look isn’t romantic or suspicious. It’s the look of someone who’s moved a thousand families through this hallway and can tell when a man’s chain of custody on his own heart is precarious. “We’ll keep the press off this floor,” she says. “Security briefed us.”
“Appreciate it,” I tell her. I mean it.
My satphone buzzes in my pocket. Dean.
“Status?” he asks with no preamble.
“Cam’s cleared medically but they’re holding her for observation. Her statement will wait until she can breathe without tasting duct tape. Perps one and two are in a fifth-floor interview at SPPD, lawyers present. Hartley’s walking them through a plea ladder. Gregory confessed the controlled-crisisscheme, named Vale and Kestrel, handed over a file thick enough to choke a wood chipper. We found the Riverfront unit, got Cam back. Rourke is still dirt we haven’t shaken out of the rug.”
“I’ve got a fed at Main Justice who owes me,” Dean says. “SEC, FBI, and USAO are salivating over the market manipulation angle. They’ll squeeze Vale on wire fraud and conspiracy to commit kidnapping even if he never touched a van. We’re pushing ex parte warrants for Kestrel’s accounts and a Title III on Vale’s current phones.”
“Timeline?”
