Page 107 of The Maverick
Some part of me, the part that wasn't the boy and wasn't the man and was just the animal underneath both of them, wanted to step out into the hall and grab him by the arm and tell himdon't leave again, not ever, you don't get to leave again,and the part of me that was the boy wanted that even harder, and thepart of me that was the man I'd built on top of both of them held the door frame and watched him go.
He turned the corner.
He was gone.
I closed the door.
I leaned my back against it.
I closed my eyes.
I let out one long breath, and it came out shaped like a sound, the kind of sound that was not crying and not laughing and not speech, just a body unloading a small part of what a body could carry before something gave.
My phone buzzed on the bedside table.
I crossed the room and looked at it.
Rebecca's text from earlier.I choked. I froze. I walked off the stage after one song. I'm such a loser.I'd missed it by something like an hour, and I'd missed it because I'd been on the doorstep of a man I hadn't seen in twenty-some years, and I had not heard the buzz, which was a thing I had never failed to do before in my life as an operator and a thing I would have to think about later, in some calmer hour.
I read it once.
I read it twice.
I felt for her—real feeling, clean and direct, the kind that arrived underneath all the other feelings that had been running through me for the last sixteen hours. I felt for her, and I was not surprised. The big stage had found the place she'd been hollowed by the morning, the way big stages did to people who'd been hollowed by anything that day, and the not-surprised in me was not the not-surprised of disappointment—it was the not-surprised of a man who had been built to read the people in his life and had read this one accurately.
I should have called her.
I didn't.
I texted her. I think I texted her something. I don't remember the exact words.I'm sorry, sweetheart. Are you home?Or something close to it. Whatever I sent, the conversation went where it went, and the place it went, two minutes later, wasRebecca Lynn. Come here. I need you.
I would have to think about that later, too.
I had not asked for anyone in twenty years.
She came.
The cab dropped her in the drive and the butler brought her in.
I came down the staircase.
She turned.
Her face did the thing.
I did not crumple. The soldier in me, the one Bratton had sent down the long hallway alone, the one who had stood on rooftops in Southeast Asia and slabs of sandstone in Utah and across hotel rooms from deputy directors of the FBI without his face moving by a single muscle—he was the only piece of me that was still operational, and he held me upright down the staircase and across the marble.
I didn't crumple into her arms.
It was very close.
I took her hand instead.
"Come on," I said. "Let’s go out back."
She didn't ask why.
She let me lead her past the parlor and down a corridor I hadn't been down yet and out through a set of French doors onto a wide stone terrace, and then down a flight of brick steps to the lawn, and across the lawn toward the pier the lawn led to. The night was cold. The grass crunched faintly under our boots.
