Page 143 of Dead Beat

“But you managed better than anyone else ever has.”

“It’s not enough.”

Maybe not, but it was more than Alex had ever hoped for.

Later that night, curled against Darlington beneath the heavy covers in the Virgil bedroom, they lay awake, unable to sleep.

“What were you reading when I came in?” she asked, her cheek pressed against his chest, listening to the steady thud of his heart. He had been propped against the pillows, a book in his hands, more beautiful than ever in the gold wash of lamplight. “Please don’t say the Divine Comedy.”

“Too on the nose. At Scroll and Key I was up to my ears in Tennyson. I kept thinking about the inscription on the back of that photo of the first pilgrims.”

“The Praetor quoted him too.”

“Sir Alfred has been out of fashion a long time.”

“Professor Raymond Walsh-Whiteley is not a fashionable guy.”

“I didn’t really think I liked Tennyson, but…” He closed his eyes and recited, “And this gray spirit yearning in desire / To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”

“You’re thinking of Kittscher.”

“I can’t help it. He dared. Probably for the wrong reasons. Definitely without thinking. But he dared more than most ever do. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. All very heroic. If they’d been reading Auden, they might have been a little more cautious.”

It was the donors Alex kept thinking of—Anna Harkness, who had lost her son. Ned Harkness, who had lost his brother and sent Hector into the abyss. Sterling, who had never gotten to live the life he wanted despite his heaps of money. All the faceless men who had lost friends and family to the First World War or disease or just the creeping hand of time, driven by fear and grief and most likely greed, a dream of being unbound by mortality.

“You have to call on me tomorrow,” he said. “When the time comes, don’t wait. Let me fight.”

“I will. I’m not looking to die.” He was quiet so long she pushed herself up on her elbow. “You don’t believe me?”

“You throw yourself into the fray. This time I need you to think twice.”

“If I thought twice, I’d steal your Mercedes and drive to Key West.”

He laughed. “Why Key West?”

“I like that ‘Key Largo’ song.”

“That’s what I mean. That’s not a plan.”

“The pilgrims had a plan. They had all kinds of plans.”

“True,” he said. “Maybe I just hate being afraid.”

“You get used to it.”

“Do you?”

“No, that’s the whole point to fear. It keeps you alert, keeps you awake, keeps you safe.”

“I’m not sure that it does.”

He wasn’t wrong. But Alex had kept her fists up for so long, she’d forgotten how to stand any other way.

“I’m like Achilles,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Good in wartime. Not so great when the dust settles.”