I do not answer.
I sit on the chopping block in the dark and I do not answer Val Mercer and the not-answering is the answer, and we both know it is the answer, and she does not press for the word.
"How long?” she says.
"I don't know."
"How long, Hale."
"I do not know how long, Chief. Probably straight away. And ever since.”
"All right."
"Yes, Chief."
She walks a step.
She walks a step away from me and a step back. The step is a thing I have not seen Val do in this kind of conversation. Val does not pace. Val sits or Val stands. The step is the small thing that tells me she is not as far ahead of this as she has wanted me to think, and the step is what tells me she is going to say what she came to say.
She comes back. She stops in front of me.
"Hale."
"Chief."
"I am going to say a thing now and I am going to say it once."
"Yes, Chief."
"You are the woman I have built into the lieutenant of Engine 9 over fourteen years. You are the woman I pulled out of a class of thirty in 2007 because I saw what you were and I knew what to do with it. You are the woman I have put into rooms I have not put any other body into. You are the woman I trust at a fire ground above any other body in this house."
"Yes, Chief."
"And you have a missing widow in your bed."
"Yes, Chief."
"A widow whose face is on the seven a.m. feed. A widow whose father has given a press conference. A widow the city attorney used the wordwhereaboutsabout twice this morning in a meeting room that had Elise Warren in it."
"Yes, Chief."
"A widow whose husband you killed. Does she know that bit?”
The pines are quiet.
I do not move.
She has said the sentence I have not been able to say.
I sit with the sentence on the chopping block and I let it sit between us in the dark, and the wind moves the tops of the pines, and somewhere a long way up the ridge an owl calls once.
"Yes, Chief."
"You set the fire."
"Yes, Chief."
"At my order."
