Page 41 of Havoc

His shirt's still on. That's what gets me. The whole thing happened and he never got his shirt all the way off, and it's hanging open with the cut over the top of it because he never took that off either.

He puts his head back against the wall and shuts his eyes.

"Well," I say.

"Yeah."

"That was a mistake."

"Yeah."

"I'm not sorry."

"Ain't asked you to be."

"I'm not going to be sorry tomorrow either. I want you to know that going in, because I know how men are on Tuesdays."

He laughs.

It's about half a second long and it comes out of him like something startled, and it's the first time I've heard it, and I have to look at the floor.

"Lennox."

"Don't."

"I got somethin' I have to say⁠—"

"Then say it in the morning." I get up. I get my shirt off the floor and I put it on and my hands are not steady, finally, for the first time in four months, and I turn away so he can't see them. "Say it in the morning, Havoc. I mean it."

Because here's what I understand, standing in that hallway with my back to him and my heart going like a bird in a box:

Six days ago I could have told him.

I could have said my father's name is on your wall in a motel parking lot and been in that clubhouse by Wednesday, and whatever happened after, it would have happened to a stranger.

I can't do it now.

Not because I'm afraid of what he'd do.

Because now he'd have to choose, and I have just made it impossible for him to choose the way he's supposed to, and there is a man in New Orleans with a clock running and nine men in a building on Route 9 who don't know my name and one of them says my father's out loud every New Year's.

I did that. Twenty minutes ago, on purpose, with my eyes open.

"Goodnight," I say.

He doesn't answer, and I don't turn around, and I get all the way to the door of that empty little room before I hear him move.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HAVOC

Four minutes I sit on that floor after she goes.

Long enough for the light around the corner to start hummin' in that way it does, long enough to get my breath square, and the whole time there's a sentence sittin' in my mouth that I have been carryin' since eleven forty this mornin'.

Monday.

That's what I was fixin' to say when she stopped me. Seventy-two hours, called Friday, which makes it Monday, and after Monday a man in New Orleans starts puttin' his own people in this parish to look for her.