I let go.
He takes it out of my hands and turns, already moving, already lowering himself to one knee beside Frank's body, already arranging himself into exactly the shape the sirens are going to want to find, gun in his hand, blood everywhere, standing over the body of a dirty cop like he's the one who ended it.
"No." My chest is caving in. "No, they'll take you, they'll..."
"They'll find a dead cop and a man holding the gun." His eyes come up to mine, amber and steady, and for a second under all the noise coming down the block there's something almost calm in his face, something that looks like a decision he made a long time ago and is only now getting to keep. "That's all they need to see."
"I'm not letting you do this."
"You're not letting me do anything." A ghost of something close to a smile. "I'm choosing it."
The first cruiser rounds the corner, lights washing red and blue across the front of the house, across Frank's body, across Nico kneeling in the gravel with the smoking gun still in his hand. There's no time left to argue, no time to explain any of it, only time for him to look at me one more time before the doors open and the shouting starts and men with their own guns drawn come pouring across the lawn.
"I love you," he says, fast, low, only for me. "Whatever happens now. Remember that part."
Then the cuffs are on him, and they're pulling him up off his knees. I'm standing behind him in the flashing light with my phone still recording in my pocket, and nobody so much as looks at me twice.
I want to scream that he's innocent, that I'm the one who pulled the trigger, that none of this is fair. But I bite it down, because I know exactly what he's doing and why, and I know the tape in my pocket is the only thing that's going to bring him back to me. Not tonight. Maybe not for a while. But it will.
An officer walks past me like I'm nothing, just a woman standing in a driveway, shaking, and that's exactly the point. That's what Nico bought me with his own two hands cuffed behind his back.
I watch them fold him into the back of a cruiser, his eyes on mine through the glass until the door shuts between us. I stand there in the cold with my hand pressed flat over my stomach, over the secret only I know is there, and I promise him silently that this isn't over. Not even close.
38
LYDIA
The detective'scoffee has gone cold in front of him and he still hasn't touched it. I've been in this room for two hours and I haven't touched mine either.
"Walk me through it again," he says. "From when you got the phone call."
"I've walked you through it three times."
"Walk me through it a fourth."
So I do. I keep my hands flat on the table and tell him my rehearsed lines. Frank called my mother's line pretending to be a nurse. I drove to the house. Frank had a gun. By the time it was over, he was dead in the driveway, and Nico was in handcuffs telling three uniforms it was him and only him. I'd never even touched the gun.
That last part is the only lie in the whole story, and it's his lie, not mine.
"And the recording," the detective says.
I already gave it to them. I gave it to them within the hour, before I'd even stopped shaking, because I understood something in that kitchen with more clarity than I've understood anything in my life: a dead man can't be charged with anything, but a recording of him bragging about ordering my father's murder can still burn down everyone he built his career on top of.
"The recording speaks for itself," I say.
He looks at me like he wants to argue and doesn't have the energy. Good. Neither do I.
"You understand what's on that recording implicates your husband too," he says. "In other things."
"I understand it implicates a lot of people. Frank most of all."
"He's dead. Dead men don't get implicated."
"Then it's a good thing he confessed to it while he was still breathing."
The detective almost smiles. Doesn't quite make it there. Slides a form across the table instead and tells me to sign at the bottom, and I do, my hand steadier than it has any right to be.
Nico's lawyerdidn't come out of a phone book. His voice is low and rough and unhurried, and he doesn't introduce himself so much as arrive, already knowing everything, already three steps into a plan I'm just now hearing the outline of.
