Page 102 of Crowned in Sin
I fold the paper once, put it back exactly where I found it, and leave the box behind. Someone else can finish the estate. I've got what I came for, even if it wasn't what I was looking for.
The doctorat the facility doesn't ask me for permission anymore. That's the first thing I notice, three days later, standing in the hallway outside my mother's room.
"We'd like to adjust her pain management," the doctor says. "With your approval."
With my approval. Not someone's approval, not a call to legal and a wait for the account holder to sign off. Mine.
"Yes," I say. "Whatever she needs."
It's such a small sentence to carry so much weight. Six months ago I would have needed three phone calls and a fax number to say it. Now I just say it, and the doctor nods and writes something down. That's that. It's done.
I stand there a second longer than I need to, because some part of me is waiting for the catch, the follow-up call, the man on the other end saying it isn't that simple. It doesn't come. Frank isdead and with him died every single door he used to make me knock.
I owe her everything, my mother. I've spent so long carrying that debt as a weight, a thing I could never pay down fast enough, and standing in this hallway I understand, quietly, that paying it doesn't have to mean suffering for her. It can mean this. A doctor asking me a simple question and getting a simple yes.
I go sit with her for an hour. She doesn't know who I am today. Some days she does and some days she doesn't. But she lets me hold her hand and hum something off-key, and I let myself have that, an hour where nothing is a fight.
The call comeson the fifth day.
"He's out," the lawyer says. "Processing now. Should be walking out the front in under an hour."
I don't remember driving there. I remember the parking lot, the gray concrete, my hands too tight on the wheel the whole way, and I remember standing outside the doors with my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
Everything about what happened between us the night before the standoff is still sitting in my chest, unresolved, ugly, mine to carry along with everything else. He didn't reach for me after. I don't know if he's going to reach for me now. I don't know what we are, walking out of two separate kinds of captivity and back into whatever's left of a marriage that broke the night before it nearly ended for good.
I know one thing I haven't told him yet, and it isn't the moment for it, not standing in a parking lot with cameras still lingering by the entrance, waiting to catch the corrupt captain's downfall from every angle they can get. But it's there, low in my body, quiet and real, a fact that's going to change both our lives whether either of us is ready for it.
I've known for a week. I've said it out loud exactly zero times, not even to myself in the mirror, like saying it might make it something I have to explain before I'm ready to. There hasn't been a version of the last eleven days that had room in it for that conversation. There's a dead man, a police report, my mother's medication schedule, a lawyer who calls before eight in the morning. Somewhere underneath all of it, quiet as anything, there's a version of Nico and me that neither of us has met yet.
I press a hand flat against my stomach without meaning to. Just for a second. Then I make myself stop.
The doors open.
He walks out in borrowed clothes someone brought him, and for a second he just stands there under the gray sky, still, blinking, letting his eyes adjust.
Then his eyes find mine.
Amber, steady, the scar along his jaw catching the light for a second before he moves. He doesn't run. Neither do I. We just stand there, ten feet apart, two people who know exactly how much wreckage sits behind them and no idea yet what happens next.
"Lydia," he says.
That's all. Just my name, in the voice I haven't heard outside of a locked room in five days, and my knees nearly forget how to hold me up.
I don't know what I'm going to say back. I don't know if sorry is even the right word for what happened between us, or if there's a word for it at all.
But I take the first step anyway.
He meets me halfway.
39
NICO
The house is tooquiet for a place that just got both of us back.
Five days in a holding cell leave a residue a shower doesn't touch. My jaw is rough, three days past a razor. My knuckles are split from a cinderblock wall I put them into when a guard mentioned her name and I couldn't stand still for it. Under all of it, faint, I can still smell driftwood and salt on my own collar, the one thing about me tonight that hasn't changed.
Lydia stands by the window with her arms crossed over her ribs, holding herself together with her own hands because nobody else has offered to do it for her. She hasn't looked at me since I walked in. I let her have that. I've had five days to think about what I owe her, and none of it was silence.
