THE ELEVATOR HIT the bottom level of the hospital where the morgue was located.
“I can’t identify Dom’s body right now,” I said to Hal, remaining in the elevator. “I need to see Nikki.”
As I followed him…something didn’t feel right. I could feel it churning inside my gut. My insides felt weighted by a thickening hollow. I'd never felt anything like it.
The moment I walked up to the trash can, I became sick and knew I barely had the will to go on.
Hal kept hitting me on the shoulder, trying to push me to walk.
My body was on automatic drive, making sure I had enough strength to make it down the corridor. My hand dangled in the air, torn between the private viewing window and going inside the morgue. Slipping my badge out of my pocket, I slid it through the reader, hoping it still worked. It didn't bring me any contentment to know it did.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. I felt like I was out of my body and no longer the person I was minutes ago.
The attendant there, Sandy, was standing by the end of a stainless steel cot in the middle of the room. A white sheet was covering a body I couldn’t bring myself to view.
Sandy had a grim look on her face as she looked at me. “Usually numb to this sort of thing, ya know? Feels different when it’s someone you kinda know.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked, my voice fading. “Where is Nikki?”
“You weren’t told?” she asked with her eyes wide.
“Told what?”
“Shit,” she muttered and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know what to say… I—” She looked down taking a breath and slowly uncovered the person on the cot. “I tried to clean her up as best as I could for you. They left her a mess after surgery.” She took a moment before she looked up at me. “I’m sorry for your loss, Eric.”
“What?” I blinked and finally looked down at who was the cot. My feet started moving toward the body. The woman.
Please tell me I’m fucking dreaming. Please tell me I’m going to fucking wake up and this is just a nightmare.
My knees knocked and could barely hold up my weight. I touched her face…her cold, grayish-brown face. The lump in the back of my throat choked me. “Nikki?”
The guy screamed as he grabbed his wife and fell to the ground with her in his arms. He’s cursing, screaming, and bargaining all at once. His howling cries reverberate across the room.
I realized…I’m that guy. My beautiful wife. The love of my life. My soul. My heart. My breath…is gone.
Gutted.
Empty shell.
I was…gone.
Voices spoke to me, but I couldn’t tell one from the other.
“Dr. Brenton? We have regulations. I have to get her back into refrigeration or I’ll get in trouble for this. Eric?”
“Get up. We have things to do. You have to let her go, man.”
“Why didn’t you tell him? He shouldn’t have found out this way.”
“I didn’t know how to tell him. I thought he was going to do something.”
Someone snapped in front of my face. “Worse than this. I think he just checked out. I can’t blame him. This is a horrible way to find out. Did you find out anything about the baby?”
“They won’t tell me anything. Hear that? You need to get up and see if your baby is okay.”
I fingered the surgical wound with staple closures on Nikki’s abdomen and the set of stitches along the vertical cuts on the inside of her arms from underneath the sheet. Her throat. They slit her throat from ear-to-ear.
My heart can’t take any fucking more.
I could barely see a damn thing beyond her. Everything else had a white haze over it. Everything but her face.
I wish she would open her eyes just once.
I wish I could take back the last twenty-four hours. I wish I had shown her that I really was a better man and stayed. I needed another chance.
I wouldn’t get the second chance. It was too late. I fucked up the one good thing I had in my life. I was supposed to protect her by any means necessary.
I failed her mother.
I failed her.
“Ethan?”
My eye twitched, but I couldn’t look at who was sitting down in front of me. I couldn’t look at anyone but Nikki. I kept thinking, if I willed hard enough, I’d wake up from the nightmare. Nikki would be alive, and she’d be okay, looking back at me with the look that made my heart feel like it was on fucking fire.
A woman’s hand drifted under my chin and directed me to look up.
Tears streamed down Janet’s face as she held up her cell phone. There was a picture. I couldn’t see what it was. I felt like I'd been staring at the sun for too long; my vision was obscured by blinding white lights.
“Do you see who is in the picture?” She held the phone in front of my face with shaking hands.
“Can’t,” I whispered, barely recognizing my own voice.
Janet sobbed when she glanced down at Nikki. “You have to let her go, Eric. She left you with a blessing. She’s a survivor, Eric. A survivor who needs her father to hold her and let her know she’s not alone. You have to get up. She won’t stop crying and nothing the nurses do will make her stop. She needs you.”
Swallowing down the dryness in my throat, I finally blinked.
“That’s right,” she said through a sad smile. “You have a baby girl.”
On her last word, I looked at the picture. A baby swaddled in a pink blanket with a pink hat and squinting dark brown eyes. I looked down at Nikki, locking on to the vision of her face. I touched her stiff neck, running my finger along her jaw. “I can’t let her go.”
“No one is telling you to let her go, but you have to keep going. You have to get up.”
I finally found my footing and cradled her rigid body in my arms. I placed her back on the cot, gently, slowly. I touched her face, falling still. “For believing things about you that weren’t true, for keeping you at a distance, for punishing you, and for all the fucked up things I’ve done… I’m so sorry for everything. I always loved you, my twisted angel. Always,” I whispered against her lips and kissed her. Pulling the sheet over her face, I slid my feet backward.
Sandy walked around me and touched my shoulder. “I’m really sorry for your loss.” She sniffed.
I couldn’t show her any appreciation in the moment. I could barely feel anything other than the one thing that took over every damn inch of my being.
Janet slipped her hand into mine and pulled me forward, leading me out of the room. I only made it to the hall before my legs gave out.
“I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO allow anyone in the nursery.”
“Please make an exception,” Janet begged the nurse. “Dr. Brenton lost his wife.”
I didn’t care if she said no or not. I was going to see my daughter. I walked down the row of quiet babies to the one screaming the loudest. Without looking at her nametag on her bassinet, I knew she was mine. I spoke to her. I knew babies’ eyesight was for shit, but she focused on me and began to quiet down. I cradled her head in my palm, her body in the other, holding her close but apart from me. And when she continued to look back at me like she could see me, all I saw was Nikki staring back.
“Tabala Rasa,” I whispered to her with a sad smile.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “I didn’t realize you were Dr. Brenton. I have some paperwork for you whenever you’re ready. She will be ready to go home tomorrow. Have you thought of a name for her?” the nurse asked.
Without looking at her, I said, “Dominique Monica Brenton.”
WE SAT IN THE cafeteria in silence. I kept replaying things in my mind. It was like a horror film. A horror film I wished wasn’t real. I fingered my now cold coffee, barely able to look at anything else. It reminded me of her. I don’t think I’d be able to drink another cup of coffee again.
I pushed it away and glanced up at Janet as she sat across from me.
We sat like that for hours with neither one of us saying anything. Janet wrung her hands and quietly sobbed every now and again. I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t know what to say to myself.
My phone consistently vibrated with incoming calls. In a second, I was going to throw it out of the window.
“Why…did you help me, Janet?” After all I had done, I was completely underserving of her kindness.
She blotted the corner of her eyes with her tissue, keeping her gaze to the table situated between us. “I heard rumors of an arrival in trauma from some of the girls who had Mrs. Givens as a patient.” Her eyes fell away. “Are you sure you want to know this, Ethan?”
I wasn’t bothered by her calling me Ethan; I preferred it. “Continue.”
“She uh…they—those monsters—slit her wrists and throat. It looked like they were going to cut her belly but were interrupted or—I don't know. The baby still had a faint heartbeat, so—”
“I changed my mind.” I slanted forward putting my hands in a steeple position. I interlocked them together, closing my hands as they began to tremble. “Don’t continue.”
“I…came to get you because I thought I could get through to you. I don’t know what I saw the last few times we spoke, but I know it wasn’t you.”
“It was me, Janet. I’m a fucking bastard who’s killed a lot of people. Broken a lot of women. And unless you grow a conscience, I’m going to continue to be the bastard who gets away with all the shit he’s done.
“Thing about it is…” I stared off into the distance, trying to remember Nikki’s smile and remember her laugh. It had been so long since I’d seen or heard either, I’d almost forgotten what it was like. Choking on the emotion, I kept going. “I’m going to be forced to live my life without Nikki. It’s a life worse than prison. Worse than having a needle injected in my arm. Death is too fucking easy. Looking into the eyes of our daughter and wearing a mask to hide everything I’m feeling right now was torture. I’m dead inside. It’s my fault Nikki is dead. It’s completely my fucking fault the only woman I ever loved will never get to see her daughter grow up, will never know everything I told her—my last words to her that came to late—were all real.
“But I have a daughter to raise, so now I’m going to have to do the shit I hated other people for doing. I have to pretend. I have to smile for her. Lie to her. Live for her. Pretend I’m not the monster I really am. I owe it to Nikki. But between you and me, Eric…died with her.”
Her lip quivered as she suddenly got up. “Excuse me. I—” She raced out of the cafeteria.
There was one thing I hadn’t lost, and it was my ability to figure people out; I had a feeling it would be the last time I’d ever see Janet again.
I HAD A DREAM about Nikki and her mother. Together. Smiling. Laughing.
I wished I could’ve lived in the dream longer, but the cold barrel of a gun burrowed into the back of my neck and woke me up.
I sat up with my hands out at either side of my head. Straight across from me in the window’s reflection, I spotted Hal standing behind me. Immediately in front of me sat Charlie Sanderson.
No one else was in the hospital cafeteria but the three of us.
“Do it,” I said. “I’m fucking dead already.”
“I’d definitely beg to differ, if you don’t mind.” Glaring at me, Charlie’s posture became rigid.
“Couldn’t you have at least waited until I buried her?”
He continued to stare at me. Like a goddamn statue he didn’t present one iota of emotion. “You think this is revenge?”
“Isn’t it?”
“You are the reason she’s dead, are you not?” he asked. “You are the reason I lost one of my best agents, are you not?”
He never received an answer. I was so fraught over Nikki, I forgot about Pete and Dom. There was no comparison. The loss I felt over Nikki trumped all.
Charlie slid a folded-up piece of paper across the table toward me. “I was given this. It is addressed to you.”
I fingered the paper, running my thumb across the word “Ethan” written in Nikki’s handwriting.
“I’m not going to kill you, because what’s contained in that letter might very well do the job for me. Your debt to me is repaid. Your connections are mine, and anything Victor willed to you is mine. I no longer think you are fit to fill father’s shoes.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” I kept touching the letter, wondering what was in it. I was so stuck on the letter, I let what Charlie said slip by me. “Father?”
“Even in his last breath, he didn’t tell you? Victor Meíja was your real father.”
Dropping my chin, I rubbed my face.
“Ethan?”
I glanced up at him. “Take everything. I don’t give a shit, but the things that belong to Nikki, belong to our daughter.”
“That’s fair.”
“You never answered me before,” I said. “Was she your daughter?”
“Had she been, you would never have been able to lay a wandering eye in her direction. Had she been, you and I wouldn’t have a conversation. Pete…would’ve killed you before you had a chance to kill him. Had she not written the letter, and I didn’t know the things I know, you would most certainly be dead.”
“Things like what?”
“It was an oversight,” he said quickly and manically adjusted his glasses. “Dom’s loyalty always laid with the wrong man—Victor. He assisted Victor in orchestrating numerous misadventures.”
“He…betrayed me?” I had a suspicion, but I didn’t know to what extent he’d fucked me over. I wasn’t sure why I’d asked when I didn’t truly care anymore. I only had one person on my mind, and it wasn’t Dom.
“He betrayed us both,” he replied.
“And the reason you failed to protect Nikki?”
“She purposely slipped our protection with a dopplegänger. She lied to me—us. She prepared for this. She had her mother’s belongings donated, some personal effects were placed in storage. The house is gutted, save for one room. Her mother’s room. When you have a chance, take a look. If the letter doesn’t clue you into her plan, what’s inside, that room will. Have a blessed life, Dr. Brenton.” He buttoned his sports coat as he stood. “I hope to never see you, nor have business dealings with you again. Keep yourself out of trouble, else, I won’t have leverage to protect you, and your daughter will wind up in my care.” With a nod, he left.
Hal patted my shoulder. “He knows Pete’s death was a necessity. Despite what he says, we need you. The connections you made in Colombia for Vic are valuable. If you ever change your mind and decide you want to take over for Vic, that is your way in.” He started to walk away and paused. “I’m sorry for your losses.”
When the footsteps faded away, I fingered the letter…