I finally got her to visit her dad yesterday, and the whole time she sat there she cried, not knowing how to talk to him. The doctor spoke to me and said to let her stay home for a while, and if anything changes they will call me.
Mum told me three days ago, in the kitchen while everyone else was elsewhere, “She stays here as long as she needs. This is her home now.”
I didn't argue. I know Olivia needs to be around people, and that moment it hits me. If I didn’t forgive her, she would be alone right now, and what would she have done? I nodded at my mom and went back to the living room and sat down next to Olivia. I put my hand over hers on the cushion between us, and she turned hers over without looking and held it.
I've been doing research late at night when Olivia finally does go to sleep.
I take my phone into the kitchen, and I go through everything Miles has been sending me. Patrick Holt, piece by piece. His movements, his properties, and his routine. The places he goes, the times he goes there, the gaps in his security that his own arrogance has left open. Normally I do all this stuff as I’m the one pulling the trigger, but Miles told me I need to be home with Olivia, and he will do it all.
Cain's file sits in my head like a blueprint. I've read it enough times now that I don't need to look at it anymore. I just need to wait for the right moment, the right conditions, the variables to line up the way Cain has always taught me to wait for them to line up.
Patience.
I have plenty of it for Patrick Holt.
For Leo I have something else entirely.
The name sits at the back of everything. Every time I look at Olivia across the room, sitting somewhere that isn't quite here, I think about it. Every time she wakes in the night, and I feel the particular tension of her being awake and unable to say why, I think about it.
He did this and he will pay for it all.
Not just the notes, not just the years of what came before. He got behind a wheel, and he drove it into her parents’ car. He walked away, her mother is dead, and her father still hasn't woken up. Leo Holt is walking around this campus with his routine, his arrogance and his complete and total certainty that he is untouchable.
I’m not even sure if he knows who he hit, did he do it on purpose, or was he just a drunk asshole, and thinks money can save him?
He's not on the list.
I know that.
I remind myself of it every night, standing in the dark kitchen with my phone in my hand.He's not on the list. The rule exists for a reason. You don't move without Cain.I repeat this to myself every time I start thinking about Leo. I know all of this, but yet I want him dead.
I put my phone away, go back to bed and I lie there in the dark and think about all the ways I'm going to make him pay that don't require a list.
I'm a patient man. I can wait for the right time. But then I also know I’m lying to myself, because I want to look him in the eyes when I pull the trigger.
Maybe that's the best way. And smile when I do it.
It’s Thursday and Cain is here, which surprises us all because he never just comes over. So, when Lileah called from the kitchen saying the walking dead is here we all started laughing already knowing she was talking about Cain.
Olivia is in the armchair in the corner. She's been there most of the afternoon, her legs tucked underneath her, a book open in her lap that she hasn't turned a page of in two hours. She looks up when Cain comes in, and gives him a small, real smile. She’s always been comfortable with him, which still surprises me slightly. She might be the only person who’s scared of him, but also not scared at the same time.
He sits down in the chair across from the sofa, and Mum appears from the kitchen with coffee that he accepts.
"How is she?" he asks, not lowering his voice. Cain doesn't whisper around anyone.
"Getting through it," I say.
He nods once. Looks at her again, briefly, something crosses his face that he doesn't name and doesn't need to. We all know Cain has lost a lot, and he came back fighting, and I hope Olivia will too.
"Her father?"
"Still the same."
Cain sets his cup down. "I need to talk to you about the Holt job," he says.
"I know," I say.
"The window is coming." He looks at me directly. "Two weeks, after that his schedule changes and the next opportunity pushes back by months." A pause. "I need to know where your head is."
