Page 118 of Unlocked

Something in her face softened. "You're saying it now."

"Yes," he said. "I am."

She almost smiled. Almost. And then her eyes closed.

"Tatum." He kept his hands on her face. "Tatum, open your eyes."

She didn't.

He stayed where he was. He kept his hands on her and listened to her breathe and counted her breaths and did not move and did not look away from her face. He said her name twice more in a voice that he would not have recognized as his own.

The elevator dinged.

Bunny stepped out.

She took in the garage with the swift, comprehensive assessment of a woman who had been processing difficult information her entire life and had learned to do it without showing her mental calculation. Her eyes moved from Josh to Tatum to Archer and back to Josh, and she said nothing for a moment.

Then she said, "What happened?"

Archer looked at her. "Josh attacked your daughter," he said. "She hit her head. The ambulance is on the way."

Bunny crossed the garage floor and crouched down on Tatum's other side and looked at her daughter's face with an expression that Archer could not read and did not try to. Whatever Bunny Wellington felt or didn't feel about the person lying on this concrete floor was not something he had the capacity to engage with right now.

"Josh," Bunny said. Not a question.

"Yes," Archer said.

Bunny looked over at Josh. Back at Tatum. She pressed her lips together and nodded once, the nod of someone absorbing a significant operational complication and already rearranging around it. "He was always so jealous of Tatum," she said. "I didn’t think…I should have dealt with it sooner."

Archer said nothing.

The ambulance took six minutes. It felt considerably longer. Archer stayed where he was, his hands on Tatum's face, talking to her in a low, continuous voice about nothing in particular, just words, just sound, just something for her to follow back if she could hear him.

He rode in the ambulance. He sat beside the gurney, held her hand and watched her face, and never once looked away.

At the hospital, they took her into a room where he couldn't follow. A doctor came out twenty minutes later and used words that Archer heard and processed and filed away with the same precision he applied to everything: head trauma, induced coma, swelling, monitoring, the next twenty-four hours… And he nodded and thanked the doctor and sat in the chair outside her room.

Bunny arrived within twenty minutes. She had composed herself completely on the ride over and presented to the hospital staff as a concerned mother and nothing else. She was very good at it. Archer watched her performance and felt nothing.

They let him in to see her after an hour.

She looked smaller in the hospital bed than she had ever looked anywhere. The particular smallness of someone who was usually so present and so alive that the room they were in felt different when they were in it, reduced to this, to monitors and tubes and the particular stillness of a person whose body was doing what it needed to do without their awareness, approval, or cooperation.

He sat beside her, holding her hand, which was warm, alive in a way he could hold on to.

He looked at her face for a long time. At the line of her jaw and the curve of her mouth and the dark circles under her closed eyes that had been there since before any of this started, since she was already tired and already fighting and already refusing to back down from something she believed in. That summed up who Tatum was and had always been.

He thought about what she'd said in the garage. He thought about what he'd said. He thought about the fifty-fifty odds he'd given himself this morning and understood that the calculation had changed. Not in the way he'd expected it to change. In a way that made the odds irrelevant.

"This is not the end," he said quietly. To her. To the room. To whatever was listening. "Whatever happens tonight, whatever happens tomorrow, this is not the end."

He didn't know if he believed it. But he meant it, which was different, and it was the most he had to offer.

He heard Bunny in the corridor outside, her voice low and controlled, speaking to someone on the phone. Probably Stuart.

Archer stood.

He held Tatum's hand for one more moment and then set it down gently on the blanket. He gazed at her face one last time and then walked to the door. He paused with his hand on the frame.