Jace woke up fast, rolled off the couch in the dark, and was on his feet, reaching for the Glock on the table along the way.
Beside him, Tobias whined.
He heard it again. A startled cry. Coming from the loft.
He was up the stairs two at a time, hugging the wall, silent in his bare feet, the dog at his heels. His eyes used to the dark, and seeing only one thing when he got up there. A woman sitting up in bed. Sobbing now.
“Lil—” he began to say, then remembered. “Paige. What’s wrong?” He was at the bed now, sitting beside her, setting the Glock on the table. His heart was still knocking against his ribs like it wanted to get out, but for a different reason now.
She had her good hand spread over her face like she could keep the bad things out or the pain in, and was rocking back and forth, gasping with the force of her sobs. “Paige,” he said, and got an arm around her. She shook her head violently, then gasped again, and he knew why. Because her head hurt, and her mind hurt more. Because she was back there.
“I’m coming,” she said from behind her hand. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Hang on. I’ll get you out. Just hang on.”
He had both arms around her now. “Paige. It’s a flashback. You’re here with me. With Jace. Come on, now. Breathe with me. In.” He hauled in a breath. “Out. In. Out.”
He kept up the count. She didn’t respond at first, and then she did. He kept rocking her, keeping the motion rhythmic, and felt her agitation gradually easing.
Finally, her hand came down from her face. “That’s right,” he said. “You’re all good, no worries. You’re here with me. You’re in my bed, and I’m right here with you. You’re safe. I’ve got you. It’s all over. Count to ten with me on the breaths. One. In and out. Two. In and out.”
Talking. A flow of words, gentle and steady, giving her something to focus on. Breath. The simplest thing there was, and the most important. And when she was lying back, limp, he pulled the pillows up behind her, settled her gently back onto them, and said, “Stay there. Keep breathing.”
“Don’t leave me,” she said, sounding so exhausted. So beaten. “Please. I know you hate me, but please. Please stay.”
This pain. It was a physical thing, squeezing his chest. “I’m not going to leave you. And I don’t hate you. I’m getting you more water and a towel, and then I’ll be back.”
“Thank you.” Spoken so quietly, he could barely hear it.
He was back in thirty seconds, leaving the bathroom light on behind him, because light helped. The bad things loved to lurk in the dark, trapping you there, leaving you nowhere to run. He climbed into bed beside her and pulled her good right side up against him, because touch could help, too, could anchor you here, keep you in the now. She drank her water, and he took the glass away and handed her the towel. When she’d mopped her face with it, she sighed and said, “It wasn’t like a dream. It was like it was happening again. Really happening.”
“It was a flashback,” he said. She hadn’t heard him the first time, he was pretty sure. It was hard to hear when you were someplace else. “You had the same trauma again, too soon after the first time, and it triggered your brain the same way. Sometimes, a piece of your mind gets left behind. It gets stuck there. But you can unstick it, and you did. Who was it you were with? Was it Patrick?”
It helped to talk it out. He knew that, too.
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “You know his name.”
“I looked it up. After you told me your name.”
“Oh.”
“You were on a call,” he prompted. “A domestic disturbance. Almost four weeks ago now.”
“One-thirty in the morning,” she said, and that was good. If she told him, if she went through it again from the outside, she could put it back into the past. “After one, you know, most of the minor stuff has died down. When you get a call for service that late, you know it can turn bad fast, or it can start out that way. It wasn’t the first call from that address. Her address. He was her latest kid’s father. They’d get wasted, he’d hit her, she’d fight back. He’d be arrested, he might even do thirty days, and then he’d be out again. She’d kick him out of the house, he’d come back, and it would start over. People say that the cops don’t take it seriously. We take it seriously. If the DA doesn’t charge, if the courts don’t put him away, if Social Services doesn’t step in, if she takes him back… what can we do? We can respond, that’s what. That’s our job.”
He didn’t say I get it, even though he did. He knew all about being the first response, too often the only response, in a place where nothing ever seemed to change. You put out the fires you were sent to. You couldn’t stop them from starting. He didn’t say that, though, because that wasn’t what she needed. She needed to talk. “So you responded,” he said.
“The neighbor called it in. Because of the screaming. The woman—Frankie Roberts—was on the sidewalk outside the apartment when we rolled up. Pat took point, and I was on the flank. She turned toward us, and she had a knife. Pat yelled at her to drop it. She didn’t. She ran at him. Ran for help, I think now, but who knows. Her blood alcohol was pretty high. She ran, and Pat shot her. And I didn’t see.”
She was rocking again. He let her do it, but kept his arm around her and asked, “What didn’t you see?”
“Her scumbag boyfriend. Marcus Willingham. I should have seen him. He was there, pulled back between the buildings. He’d chased her out of the apartment. It was my job to see him, to cover Pat, and I didn’t. He shot Pat. Maybe he was aiming for Frankie, or maybe it was because Pat had shot Frankie. No way of knowing. I think he meant to kill her that night, though. She had some hair out. I think he pulled the gun and dragged her by the hair, and she got a knife and got out. All I know for sure is—he shot Pat, and I still hadn’t seen him. I still didn’t get it. When Pat went down, I thought Frankie had shot him. I was on my way to get Pat, and he shot at me from behind. Marcus did. Mostly he missed, but he got me in my thigh. What you saw. In and out, bouncing a little along the way.”
“And then what?”
“Then I shot him. I was down, on my knees, but I saw him then. I didn’t know if I’d gotten him, though, if he’d run, or if he was still there, waiting. He was beside the building, and I was down, and I couldn’t see, and I had to get Pat and get us out. I called it in. I tied my leg off, and I got Pat, dragged him to the cruiser.” She was crying, but quietly. “Everybody else came screaming in. The EMTs got to us, to Pat and me, and to the others, but they were already gone, and so was Pat. I could hear him breathing, hear the sounds. He was gut shot, right below the vest, and it hurt so bad. I told him to hang on for his wife. For his kids. He wanted to. I know it. He couldn’t. I heard when the sounds stopped.”
“And that was your fault how? Why the investigation?”
“Because we killed the victim. And that was true. But Pat was right. She ran at him, and she had a knife. You have less than a second to make that decision, and in that second, they’re on you. But there’s me, too. I was the one who was supposed to be looking past her, who should have been looking for him, for Marcus. We knew he was there. It was such a mess, happened so fast, but I’d been a cop for almost four years. That’s what I’d trained for.”
All of that had tumbled out, and he knew why. How endlessly that loop had played in her head, how many times she’d rewritten the story. “How long had your partner been on the force?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“Nineteen years.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “it turns to custard. Sometimes it isn’t what you were told, it isn’t what you thought. And sometimes you can’t save your partner. Sometimes you can’t save your squad. And sometimes, part of that is what you didn’t see. Would somebody else have seen? Maybe so. Maybe not. That’s why almost nobody can do our jobs. That’s why almost nobody wants to.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve heard it. I’ve gone over it. There’s no getting around it, there’s only getting better. I can be somebody who couldn’t handle it, or I can go back and get better. But I can’t, because the case is still under review. Three people died, and one of them was a cop. And there was only me to tell the story.”
“Body cameras?”
“I had one. Pat didn’t. The footage was inconclusive. You know there are bad cops. I know there are bad cops. Pat wasn’t a bad cop. He was a good man. He was ex-military, like you. He was less than a year from retirement.”
“He was a friend.”
“He was more than that.” Her voice came out tight around the lump in her throat. “Do you know what it’s like to be a woman on a police force?”
“No. I’ve heard what it’s like to be a woman in the army, though.”
“Yeah. Worse there, because you’re living in it, and you can’t get away. But as a cop—it’s hard. It’s jokes that go too far. Harassment, even. Partners who don’t want to work with you, so you wonder why you’re bothering, why you’re there if nobody even wants you. Pat had two daughters, and he wanted his daughters to believe they could do anything. He told me I could, too. He taught me like he’d have taught a man. No favors, no punches pulled. He told me I could do it. He told me I could go far. He helped me believe it.”
“And you watched him die.”
Her face twisted, and he knew she was crying again. Crying silently, now, but these tears helped. They carried the pain out with them. “It just… hurts, you know? It just…” She had a fist over her heart. “Hurts.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
There was nothing else to say, so he didn’t say anything. He lay there with her, the fabric of the faded cotton scrubs, washed a hundred times, soft against his skin, her body warm against his. He breathed in her scent, a mixture of soap from his shower and a faint sweetness that was all her, let her hot tears fall onto his chest, and was, suddenly, fiercely glad to be here. To be the one holding her. To be the man she needed.
You are one hell of a woman, he thought. Whatever your name is.