Page 13 of The Jackal

She gave me the look. I know the look. It isn't rude—Sasha was too well-trained for rude—it's just the look people give me when whatever I've said lands a quarter-inch outside the world they live in. A small recalibration behind the eyes. They don't get me. They never do.

That's all right. No one gets me. Not really.

Except her.

That was the whole problem, standing there with a key folio in my hand and rain on my collar. Mags got me. From the first, in a way no living soul in my life ever has—she looked at me and didn't take the step back. Didn't go careful. Didn't file me under the things that frighten the comfortable. She looked at me like a man. Like the strangeness was just weather, and she'd brought a coat.

And that was the one thing I couldn't be anywhere near.

Because a woman who can see you all the way down is the one woman who can cost you something. Everyone else nods from the edge of the light and keeps their distance and lets me go on being what I am—alone, clean, free to do the work. Mags wouldn't keep her distance. Mags would walk all the way in. And I'd spent my whole life making sure there was nobody on this side of the door whose loss could reach me, because the day one of them can reach me is the day I'm no good to the dead.

I gave her a coin once. In a parking lot. Instead of the thing we both knew I wanted to give her. I closed her fingers over it and stepped back. It was the hardest decent thing I ever did. I did it for her, whether she ever understood it or not.

I wasn't going to answer the text. Not now. Maybe not ever. Best for her if the name on her phone stayed exactly what it had always been—a man who didn't write back. A closed door she could lean on a while and then, finally, walk away from, toward some life that made sense. A life I'd never be able to give her, and would never drag her into. She had no idea what my days were made of. God willing, she never would.

I put the phone in my pocket, the screen gone dark.

"Your key, Mr. Dane." Sasha set it on the marble. "Anything at all, any hour—you call down."

I took it and thanked her. I rode up alone, and let myself into a room that probably cost more for the night than I spent on myself in a season. Good linens. A window full of wet rooftops. The rain still going. I set my pack in the corner, the same corner I set it in every room in every country. I settled on the one thing I was sure of: a long, hot shower was exactly what the doctor ordered. Wash off the flight and the tarmac and Aleppo and the whole drowned week of it.

I stood under the water a long time.

And the whole while, I couldn't get her out of my head.

Mags in this city. Mags somewhere out past the wet window, close enough to drive to. Mags, who'd texted a man she had every reason to write off, and signed it I hope you're well, like I'd ever once given her cause to wish me anything.

Dammit.

Twenty-four hours ago, I'd been kneeling on a floor in Aleppo, putting a hero in a bag, and my life had been the simplest thing in the world. One job. One door. One man to carry home. Clean.

Now, there were brothers in trouble I couldn't yet see the shape of, a woman in a van counting my steps, a car worth a fortune I could have for the asking, and a name on my phone I'd spent a long time trying not to think about—sitting minutes away, in the rain.

Damn.

7

MAGNOLIA

My mother called while I was elbow-deep in a fifty-pound bag of kibble, which was exactly the wrong moment and also the only kind of moment my mother ever called in, because Audrey Bennett did not believe in waiting for a good time.

A good time was a thing other people sat around hoping for. She'd built an entire life on the principle that you called when you had two minutes, said the true thing, and got off the phone before either party could ruin it.

"You're not answering with your hands," she said, by way of hello. "I can hear the kibble."

"I'm putting it on speaker. Hi, Mom."

"Don't get dog food on your phone, Magnolia, those things cost more than my first car." A pause, the click of a pen—she was at her desk, then, between patients, the way she lived most of her waking life.

My mother ran a cardiology unit at a hospital in Atlanta, a department she'd been quietly rebuilding for the better part of four years into something that got written up in journals I didn't understand. She'd spent her marriage giving her career away in pieces, one base at a time, and she'd spent the years since taking it back with both hands.

I was proud of her in a way that had its own ache in it, because the woman she'd become was so obviously the woman she'd always been, just finally allowed.

"How was the weekend with your father?” she asked.

And there it was. Not how are you, not how are the dogs. How was the weekend with your father, asked in the careful, level voice she used for things she'd decided not to feel too much about in front of anyone, including herself.

"Good," I said. "He bought me a grill."