No More Running

Rafe checked the car before we left.

I stood in the kitchen eating half a banana while Alessandro watched the window. Neither of us had slept much.

"You can still be nervous," I told him.

"That's generous of you."

"Just so we're clear about what you're doing with your hands."

He looked down. He had folded the same dish towel into an increasingly narrow strip.

He set it aside and came to me.

"Ready?"

"No."

He kissed my forehead. "Neither am I. Let's go."

The meeting was at Nora's office. The investigators would come there, and the original packet was already secured. I carried only my father's letter, because I wanted it near me.

Our driver, Ben, talked about traffic until the city closed around us. Rafe rode in the front, speaking quietly into his radio. Alessandro sat beside me, his knee against mine.

Nobody followed us that I could see.

At the building, the garage barrier lifted. A uniformed attendant waved us toward a different aisle than the one Rafe expected.

"Why the change?" he asked through the lowered window.

"Water leak by the elevators. Contractors are blocking the usual entrance."

Rafe looked at the floor. Dry concrete. A yellow maintenance cart. A van tucked behind a pillar with its rear doors open.

"Keep moving," he told Ben.

The attendant's hand went inside his jacket.

Everything happened at once.

Rafe slammed his door outward. The man stumbled. Ben accelerated, and a second vehicle lurched out of the aisle ahead, cutting us off.

The brakes threw me against the belt.

Alessandro pulled me down before the first shot cracked through the garage.

I couldn't tell where it hit. The sound was enormous, trapped between concrete walls.

"Stay low," he said against my ear. "Lock the door after me."

His door opened on the side nearest the pillar. I reached for his sleeve and caught nothing.

Then I was alone in the back seat.

I pressed the lock with my whole hand.

Ben made a short, shocked sound. His left arm hung at an unnatural angle against the seat. Blood ran over his sleeve, but he was breathing.

"Ben?"

"I'm here," he said through his teeth. "Keep down."

The world outside arrived in fragments: Rafe shouting, a body hitting metal, Alessandro's voice so cold I barely recognized it.

Someone struck my window.

I looked up before I could stop myself.

The man outside wore a contractor's badge. He was thin, gray-haired, and furious. I recognized his face from the old staff photograph Rafe had shown us.

Edwin Pike.

He held a gun low against the glass.

"Open it," he shouted. "Sloane only wants to talk."

My hands were so numb I nearly dropped my phone.

For four years, I had imagined what I would say if I ever met the man who had helped erase my parents. There was no speech in me now. Just the knowledge that if I opened that door, I might never get to have an ordinary afternoon again.

I called emergency services.

I gave the address from Nora's message. The garage level. The color of our car. My own name, both of them, because I wasn't going to disappear inside a report.

Pike pulled the handle.

"The packet," he shouted. "Tell Vitali to hand it over."

"It isn't here," I said, although I didn't know whether he could hear me.

The operator's voice stayed in my ear. I held the phone against my chest and crawled forward far enough to reach the center console.

Ben's breath came in shallow bursts.

"Can you press the horn?" I asked.

He tried. His hand slipped.

I reached past his shoulder and pressed it myself.

The blast filled the garage. I held it down.

Pike recoiled, glancing toward the entrance. Footsteps sounded on the ramp. Somewhere above us, an alarm began.

Then Alessandro hit him from the side.

They vanished below the window line. I heard a terrible impact, then a second shot. I stopped breathing.

The horn kept sounding beneath my hand.

"Emma!" Rafe shouted. "Stay in the car."

I had never wanted to disobey anyone so badly.

I could see part of Alessandro's coat on the concrete. Nothing else.

The operator asked whether I was hurt. I didn't know how to answer. My body seemed to exist only where my hand touched the steering wheel.

Then Alessandro stood.

There was blood along his right sleeve. He looked at the car first, found me behind the glass, and lifted his empty hand.

I slid down to the floor and started crying.

By the time the police reached us, Pike was facedown beside the pillar with Rafe kneeling over him. The false attendant lay near the open front door, groaning. Ben was conscious, swearing because someone wanted to cut his coat off.

Alessandro came to my door.

I unlocked it.

He crouched in front of me, his face pale beneath a smear of blood.

"Look at me," he said. "Are you hurt?"

I caught his coat in both hands.

"You're bleeding."

"They're looking at it. Are you hurt?"

"I don't think so."

He closed his eyes for one second. When he opened them, I could see how close he was to losing the composure he had spent his whole life practicing.

"I saw him at your window," he said.

I pulled him toward me.

He held me awkwardly because of his arm, and I didn't care. Behind us, someone asked him to move so they could examine the wound. He said something impolite. I laughed into his neck, shaking so hard my teeth hurt.

"You have to let them help you," I whispered.

"In a moment."

"Now. I'm not raising this baby with a man who thinks stubbornness is a treatment plan."

His breath broke against my hair.

Then he let go.

At the hospital, a clinician checked me and arranged the follow-up I needed. There was no dramatic miracle, no promise that fear could never harm anything. There were examinations, questions, and the enormous relief of being told they had found no immediate injury.

Alessandro needed treatment for a wound to his upper arm. He was fortunate. I heard the word several times and hated it every time.

Ben needed surgery. Rafe stayed until his wife arrived, then called to tell us he was stable.

Nora came after the police had taken our initial statements.

The building confirmed Pike had used access connected to a records contractor that served several tenants. The route change was his improvisation, not part of our arrangements. The originals were safe upstairs. Copies had already reached the investigators.

"He couldn't stop this by taking your bag," she told me. "He didn't know how far the material had already gone."

I put a hand over the letter inside it.

Four years ago, fear had worked because I had been alone. This time, there were people who knew where I was, people who had copies, people who would keep asking questions even if I couldn't.

The investigators returned two days later. They asked about Pike's words, the photograph, the flowers, the archive. I answered until my voice went hoarse.

Alessandro waited outside when I wanted him to. He came in when I asked.

By the end of that week, Sloane had been arrested. Nora was careful about what she said: the attack, the records, and the older deaths would not all resolve on the same timetable. There would be more statements. More waiting. More questions.

But he wasn't sending flowers anymore.

Matteo went to speak with investigators through his own attorney. Alessandro learned from a message he read twice before putting his phone facedown.

I sat beside him on the bed.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not yet."

"All right."

He leaned into me, and I held him until he could lift his head.

A week later, we went to my parents' graves.

I brought yellow tulips. My mother had hated lilies and only tolerated roses because my father bought them every anniversary with the panicked reliability of a man remembering at four in the afternoon.

Alessandro stood a few steps away while I knelt.

"I'm still angry," I told the names in the stone. "But I'm eating properly. Liam would want you to know that."

The wind moved through the bare trees.

I laid my palm against my mother's name.

"I'm having a baby. I wish you were here to tell me I'm doing everything wrong."

When I stood, Alessandro was crying quietly.

I went to him. He kissed my cold fingers and said nothing about earning forgiveness from people who couldn't offer it.

That evening, we returned to the house by the lake.

He took off my coat. I set the flowers' empty paper on the kitchen counter. Upstairs, his bandage needed changing and my hair needed washing, and somewhere between those small tasks I realized I hadn't checked the rear window.

I wasn't cured of fear.

I had simply spent an hour living without asking its permission.