“Thank you for that confirmation.”
“Is… is this part of your investigation?”
“It is,” Larkin confirmed.
“Detective?”
“Yes.”
Manuela hesitated, and when she spoke again, her words were thick with dread. “What happens when we die?”
But what she had meant was: Is there anything after this? Is there a Heaven? A Hell? Or is it a vast expanse of space where consciousnesses ebb and flow on tides of stardust until the universe, as we fathom it, one day collapses into nothing?
And to placate her with the tired platitudes of a harp and hymn afterlife, or an all-knowing God he didn’t believe, would make Larkin no better than the snake oil salesmen on midnight TV who ask their followers tocall, call, callandbuy your seat beside the Lord today!
Larkin adjusted his tone and said quietly, so very gently, “I think, when we die, we’ll be guilty of instilling a sadness in others that never goes away. But I also think, that if we’re so lucky, those same people will remember us. And if we’re remembered, Ms. Ramos, we’re never truly gone.”
Manuela heaved a great big breath, like the weight crushing her chest, her soul, had been lifted for the first time in decades. She sobbed loudly, a kind of cathartic cry that was contagious, and Larkin had to grit his teeth against her outpouring of emotion.
“I’m an old woman,” Manuela cried. “Who’ll remember my Mia when I’m gone?”
Larkin’s Rolodex brain automatically spun to March 31 at 8:34 p.m. when Camila Garcia had asked him:“Does anyone mourn with you?”and then the unrelenting pain and rage he’d felt when he said, “No.” He swallowed the knot in his throat and told Manuela, “I will.”
Larkin allowed her to cry a moment longer, promised to remain in touch as Mia’s case progressed, then said goodbye. Larkin blinked his eyes clear while hastily typing out a new reminder on his phone’s calendar:Check on Manuela Ramos.
“Hey,” Doyle said, coming toward Larkin from the office. “Connor’s on the phone about making that maternity test happen ASAP.”
“Good,” Larkin answered, looking up from the screen. And that’s when he caught it—Doyle’s awareness of him suddenly shifting, adjusting, a change imperceptible to anyone else and so minute to Larkin that he had to briefly wonder if he’d superimposed his sudden desire to be seen—to let all of his grief and trauma and compulsions shine in a brilliant display of technicolor light, like the billboards of Times Square—because it was just so fucking exhausting to always hurt alone.
But no.
Larkin hadn’t imagined it.
And he wasn’t alone.
“People don’t want to know. But I do.”
And when the time came that Doyle was ready to acknowledge his own guilt and heartache—
“Mourning used to be a public ritual.”
—Larkin would be there for him too.
“Did you take your prescription this morning?” Doyle asked, standing in front of Larkin’s desk.
“No.”
“Do you need to?”
Larkin took a breath, shook his head. In his usual voice, he said, “Manuela Ramos confirmed that Mia likely had trypanophobia.”
“Fear of…?”
“Needles.”
“Which would make the punctures on her arm that the ME found pretty suspicious,” Doyle remarked.
Larkin held his cell out in his open palm. “Please call Ray O’Halloran and ask if Earl Wagner is able to be interviewed yet.”
