Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
We find the inside assist too, and that one perforates something soft I didn’t know was still intact. It wasn’t my father’s assistant—bless her iron spine—but a junior account exec at the PR firm who’d been tasked with “monitoring my channels.” She sent Vale a spreadsheet labeled INTEL—CAM PERS CONTACTS the week before the gala: friends, vendors, staff, my father’s patterns, and—buried halfway down like a nail under a rug—my cell. “Optimization,” her email said. “In case we need nimble plays.” Nimble plays. I almost throw the printout across Hartley’s interview room, but I hand it back instead and watch the ADA put a neat paperclip on it like she’s tacking a butterfly, as if that stops the wings from ever having flapped.
At night I climb into a bed that feels too big and too loud with memory. I dream about van doors and then, sometimes, about a thin white line that never lets the red touch me. When I wake at two or four, the hall light is a soft gold sliver under my door, and Sawyer’s shadow sits with it like a patient dog. I don’t ask him in. He doesn’t press. My fingers ache to curl in his shirt anyway.
On the fourth day, Hartley calls while I’m rinsing brushes. “We’ve set the arraignments,” he says. “Rourke today, Vale tomorrow morning. The judge is old school; he likes personal impact statements at bail. No pressure.”
“I’m not ready,” I say, throat thick. “This can’t be about cameras again.”
“It’s not,” Hartley says. “Your presence—silent—speaks to risk. A nod, a shake of the head. Or nothing at all. Your call.”
I hang up and find Sawyer already at the doorway, as always, reading my face the way bomb techs read shadows. “You don’t have to go,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “I think I need to see their faces once without masks.”
At the courthouse, the air tastes like old paper, and voices pool under the marble ceiling like low thunder. I sit between Vanessa and Rae; Sawyer stands at the end of our pew, a pillar in a suit that makes him look like a better building. When they bring Rourke in, shackled, he scans the room and then drops his gaze mid-sweep when he hits me. I think: Look at me. He doesn’t. He stares at a water stain on the floor like it’s a map out. His lawyer talks about roots and jobs and the presumption of innocence. The ADA asks for remand without bail. I don’t stand. I don’t cry. When the judge denies bail, a breath I didn’t realize I’d strapped down unbuckles.
Vale the next morning is all polish cracked at the edges. He arrives with a haircut, a pale navy suit, and the flustered entitlement of a man who’s only ever been first on the golf tee. He scans for cameras and finds eyes. Mine. He jerks, and looks away. The ADA talks about money as leverage and crime. The judge listens with a face that belongs on coins. Bail is set like a number you need to choke on to learn a lesson. Vale nods as if he can pay any number. Later, I hear the freeze order hit his accounts, and the weight of that nod crushes him.
Between court and sleep, we finish something we started months ago: the downtown mural with the kids. Hartley posts two officers on the corner; the new day-to-day security company—HarborShield, local, discreet—sends two agents in polos that look like lifeguards to watch the crosswalk. Riggs elbows Sawyer, teasing that he and Rae are going to miss their celebrity detail; Rae flicks a paint dot on his sleeve like a salute. The kids arrive in a flurry of backpacks and squeals. They want to know how I escaped a “movie van.” I tell them: knees and noise and never forgetting your name. Sawyer leans against a lamppost, arms folded, eyes on everything. When a third-grader named Addie asks him to hold her palette because her arms are tired, he does, solemnly, like she’s entrusted him with the nuclear codes. I fall in love with him all over again from six feet away and then remember I asked for space. The ache and the heat share a bench in my chest.
Gregory shows up to the mural mid-afternoon with his tie off for the first time since I was eight. He stops at the tape line Sawyer quietly sets with his body. He doesn’t cross it. “May I watch?” he asks, voice careful.
“It’s a public wall,” I say, dipping cobalt into sunlight.
“Your mother would have loved this,” he says after a while, not quite to me. “She was the one who taught me how to look past the renderings and see the people in the building.”
“I know,” I say, because this is true and doesn’t cancel anything else.