Page 101 of The Hitman’s Final Job

“What are you going to do now?” he asks.

“I’m going back to Atlanta as soon as I’m allowed to leave the state.”

“Are you sure?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to say goodbye to my dad?”

I look out the window. “I don’t think he wants to see me.”

“Give him some time,” he says.

“Yeah.”

I stand up, then squeeze Rowan’s good shoulder gently. He puts his hand over mine.

“Silas,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t disappear. Whatever happens with Dad, don’t disappear on me.”

“I won’t,” I say. “I promise.”

I pick up my jacket and walk out the door.

THIRTY-ONE

SILAS

A MONTH LATER

The roof garden of my apartment building looks better in theory than in practice.

It always has. When I first moved in, I thought about what I could do with it since it seemed no one else in the building was interested. It’s not a huge space, but it has good light, so I bought a bench and put it by the low wall where you can see the Atlanta skyline.

The first time I sat on that bench, I thought about what I’d grow up here.

Then I went away for a job and came back and the first seedlings had died, and I went away again, and came back again, and eventually I stopped trying to grow things and started keeping one plant inside where I could manage it better.

Cathy.

Cathy is still alive, which is more than can be said for everything else up here. The containers I had going before Pine Ridge are dead, thoroughly dead, the soil cracked and gray, the stems brown and finished. I haven’t touched them since I got back. I’ve been sitting on the bench and looking at the skyline and not touching anything.

It doesn’t matter.

The apartment is for sale.

I put it on the market the week I got back from Pine Ridge, which is either the most decisive thing I’ve done in years or the most impulsive—after quitting my job, that is. I’ve had four viewings already, and the estate agent is cautiously optimistic, which in estate agent language means she thinks it’ll sell quickly.

The price she suggested is good. I don’t need the money. I have more money than I know what to do with, due to ten years of being very good at a well-paying job and having nowhere to spend my salary, but the sale means I have no ties to any particular place.

I don’t know where I’m going yet.

I know what I want. A single-story house somewhere. A garden big enough for a proper vegetable patch, not containers, and definitely not a rooftop. I want actual ground with actual soil I can work and tend and make something of.

Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that feels like the kind of place people choose rather than end up.