I hold it together through the song, and the final words.
My dad's wheelchair moves carefully over the path, the Crawfords are around us like a tide that has simply decided this is where it belongs.
I hold it together across the grass. I hold it together as we gather at the graveside, the ground soft from last night's rain, the sky low and white and completely indifferent to all of us standing beneath it.
This is the part where the ground closes over her and she’s gone; she’s not coming back. She will never sit in a kitchen and hum without knowing she's doing it. She will never press her lips together at something that's taking too long, and she will never hold my face in her hands the way she did in that hospital room, or look at me like I was something she made and was proud of.
She's gone.
She's actually gone.
The sound that comes out of me is small and broken and it takes my legs out from under me.
Hayden catches me before I hit the ground.
Both arms wrap around me, the same way he always catches me, like he's always positioned for it, like some part of him is always ready. He pulls me against him, and I turn my face into his chest. I cry at my mother's graveside in the cold grey morning while the earth receives her.
He holds me, one arm around my back and one hand at the back of my head, and he lets me grieve for her properly.
Behind me I hear my dad's voice, very low, saying her name once.
Just once.
“Patricia”.
Like a goodbye.
It makes me cry harder.
Afterward, at the graveside, while others drift back toward the cars, I stand for a moment alone.
Hayden is a few feet behind me. I can feel him there without turning around.
I look at the flowers on the fresh earth; the pale blue threaded through the white.
"I'm going to be okay," I say quietly.
I turn around, and Hayden is there, hands in his pockets. I walk back to him. He puts his arm around me without a word, and we walk back across the wet grass together, toward my dad, toward his family, toward the cars waiting to take us somewhere warm.
I don't look back.
But I carry her with me.
I always will.
Thirty-Five
Hayden
Cain sent over allthe information on Tuesday, everything I needed to know was there for the hit.
I read them once, in the kitchen at two in the morning while the house slept, and then I burned the paper the way he taught me, and I carry everything in my head from that point forward the way I always do.
It’s the important part of the family business, remember everything, make sure there’s no trace you were ever there.
It’s Thursday night and I've been waiting for it. My body’s been full of adrenaline, waiting for the moment I can finally pull the trigger.
Patrick Holt has a routine, the way men like him always do, because men like him have never once believed anything could touch them. He leaves his office building at nine. He drives himself on a Thursday, no driver, ever. That's his one night of the week he probably calls freedom and goes to a private members’ club forty minutes outside the city. He stays until eleven, sometimes eleven thirty. He takes the same road home every time.
