“I can manage.”
“You could bleed on a public dock and attract attention we don’t need.” He pulls out a big phone from his pocket and presses it into my hand. Is that the satellite phone? What is it doing in his pocket? He didn’t mention he kept it among the equipment he left here. “Call your mother…and sister. Then getsome more sleep. I’ll have Marcus meet you in Oak Bluffs at first light.”
“My mother and sister?”
“Didn’t you say if Birdie was your mother or sister, you’d want someone to go the extra mile to save her? I’m assuming you have those.”
“I do, yeah, too many of them sisters.”
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile, but the closest thing to one I’ve seen from him in days. “Can’t say I know how that is. I don’t have any siblings.”
“You’re lucky, sir.”
“Agree to disagree. After my parents passed away, it’d have been nice to have a brother or a sister.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, sir.”
“Your folks still alive?”
“My mother is. My father…passed away recently.”
Tristan is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means he heard more than the words. “Sorry to hear that. Were you close?”
“Not especially. He was in and out. More out than in.”
“More reason to call your mom. You were shot today, Brandon. You need to let her know you’re okay.”
“We’re not really talking at the moment.”
He doesn’t ask why, which somehow makes it easier to say.
“She didn’t take it well when I enlisted. She wanted something different for me. Something quieter.” I pause. “I thought she’d come around when I came to work for you. She didn’t budge, though. Private security wasn’t exactly the quieter life she had in mind.”
“More reason to make that call. Not because she deserves it, or because you’ve resolved anything. Call her because you were shot today and you lived to make that phone call because maybe one day that phone call won’t be possible anymore.”
I don’t have an argument for that. I’m not sure I want one. I stare at the phone as the monitor cycles through its rotations. The cove, the trees, the empty path.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll go do just that and then wait for your orders. What about you?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. He’s already looking at the part of the screen showing the cove. The black water, the restless white edges of the waves. “I’ll be here, see if I can find anything else. By the way, there’s soup in the kitchen or take something from the shelves. You need to eat to get your strength back.”
I close my hand around the phone and head for the stairs, and I don’t look back at the sand on the floor or on his shoes or at the wet print his left boot left on the concrete.
A good soldier carries silence like a weapon. He knows when to clock the details and when to lock them away.
CHAPTER 29
Butterfly Man
By nature and by practice, I am an extraordinarily patient man. I’ve waited years for her. I’ve built this place from scratch for this moment. I can wait a little longer for the rest of her to catch up to what is already inevitable. I can wait for the hope to die in her eyes, to watch her finally understand that this is her reality now. Mine. Finally, completely mine.
But she’s still fighting. It’s written all over her face. That particular expression, that cold, inward-turning blankness she retreats into when she doesn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of her pain.
Her unreasonable refusal to accept our truth radiates off her, testing the very outer limits of my patience.
“You still think I’m the detective, Reagan?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m confused,” she mutters.
