“I am telling you to be the harbor he returns to,” I say, and I feel her sway, not because she accepts it, not yet, but because the words find the part of her that will not be moved by rage alone.
The study fills with men and screens and the cold glare of infrared. On the largest monitor the rear lawn is pale and grainy, a field of soft snow and dark hedges, nothing moving but a faint shimmer of frost. Another screen shows the east corridor, another the staff entrance, and then Seamus speaks without looking away from his keyboard.
“Here,” he says, and he freezes the frame on a small window in the nanny wing, latched at ten, open by one inch at ten twenty-seven, open by four inches at ten twenty-eight, and by ten thirty it lifts on its hinge and then it is only darkness and the absence of motion.
“No broken glass,” Eddie says, leaning forward until his nose is almost to the screen. “No alarm trip. Someone had the key to the latch or they knew which pin to lift.”
“Dogs were quiet,” Kieran adds, already on the radio to the handlers. “No barking, no pacing.”
“They were fed,” Seamus answers a moment later as the handler’s voice hisses through, rattled but clear. “Raw ground beef tossed at the hedge near the utility walk, mixed with something bitter on the tongue and sleepy to a body. Both animals sleeping like saints.”
I nod. “Pull the approach to the hedge, twenty minutes either side. The lane beyond the east wall, the lay-by at the post road, the service camera across the street. Run every tag you see.”
They move like a single body that happens to own many hands. I call the watch posts on the bridges, the fellows who keep warm in idling cars near the last gas station before Route 1, the priest who sleeps too lightly to miss a knock after midnight and lends out his parking lot cameras to sinners and saints alike. Phones ring up in South Boston and down by Dorchester Bay, men I have placed for years answering on the first vibrate because they know that when I call at this hour there is no choice but obedience. Within ten minutes the city lights a grid for me, hums a surveillance song I have built over a decade, a network of favors and debts and friendships that survive weddings and murders with equal stubbornness.
“Blue panel van, late model, plate looks common,” Eddie reports from the drive, his breath fogging white as he jogs back from the guard hut. “Gate logs have it in at eight for a flower delivery. Out at nine twenty-two. The florist confirms no evening drop. Clipboard flash and a wave-through. They walked the grounds twenty minutes on the pretext. That is when the latch pin and the meat went in.”
Seamus lifts a hand without looking away from his screen. “Service camera across from the east wall picks a panel van at twenty-two thirty-six. Lights off, front end shows a shallow ding over the nearside grille. Partial on the front plate reads Sierra Seven. Passenger door opens for a minute, figure out, then back in. It idles again at twenty-three fourteen and rolls south.”
It is enough. The watch at the Storrow ramps narrows to two vans with the same front panel and the S7 partial within the hour after Liam was kissed goodnight. One turns toward Allston and disappears into student lots. The other slides down to Southie and stops at an old nursery school boarded since thelate nineties, a place with chipped murals of bears and a crooked swing frame, the kind of property nobody tears down because no one can agree who owns it.
We are on the road before the second battery warning pings on the tablet. The convoy is four cars, low beams, engines quiet. I sit up front and feel the cold through the window even with the heat on high, and every block closer tightens something around my ribs that does not loosen even when we turn the corner and see the van backed into the shadow of the brick building like a beetle hiding its bright back.
“Perimeter,” I say, and the men fan out, one to the alley, two to the back fence, one to the roof of the deli across the street. “Nobody goes in until I say.”
“Boss,” Eddie says, and his voice has that frayed edge around it, the one men get when their training argues with their heart. “Let me sweep first, just once around, take the blast if someone left us a can and a wire.”
“If there is a wire and a can they will want me on the trip line,” I answer, and I am already moving because the longer I stand in the street the more the mind invites weakness. “Hold the doors for me when I come back with my son.”
Inside the school the air is dry and stale, chalk, dust, old wood, the ghost of cleaning fluid from some last attempt a decade ago to make this a place you could bring children without guilt. My boots sound too loud so I take them off and carry them, socks whispering over cracked linoleum, pistol up and close to my chest, breath slowed until it is only the length it needs to be. The hallway is a narrow throat with faded handprints at knee height on the painted cinderblock, a star chart with half its stickers gone, a bulletin board titled Good Choices curling at the corners.
I clear the first room and then the second, the beam of my small light held low because a high beam makes you blind tothe edges, and in the third room I hear the sound I have been hunting since the bed was found empty, not a voice or a cry, only the soft rasp of a sleeping child’s breath.
There is a crate in the center, the kind you use to ship equipment, the kind a man can slide through a window if he is patient. Someone has lined it with blankets. Liam lies crooked on his side with his knees tucked and his hands near his mouth, not bound, not gagged, not marked that I can see. A paper is pinned to his small sweater with a child’s safety pin, the pin the same dull silver as the night.
I holster the pistol before I touch him. My hands are steady when I slide them under his shoulders and hips, and I lift him the way I carried him the first time he fell asleep on me in the car and I pretended not to notice he fit better on my chest than he ever had in any crib. His head tips to my shoulder and he makes a small sound that splits me, a sound like the last sigh before real sleep, and I feel with the flat of my fingers for the pulse at his neck, strong and fast, the rhythm of a child who ran after dinner and drank milk and listened while his mother read.
“Tá tú ceart go leor,” I whisper into his hair, the words close to prayer but not begging, only thanks. “Tá Daidí anseo, mo pháiste. I have you.”
The note is only six words in block letters, the kind a careful left hand prints when it wants no letter to betray the person who wrote it.Leave the woman, or next time blood.They mean Aoife. I fold the paper and put it in my breast pocket and I do not let my mind linger on how a person who writes like this imagines fear to travel, because the mind is a liar when you feed it fear. Clean blankets, no bindings, no bruise marks. Leverage not ransom, a message that wanted to arrive faster than the boy.
The men are shadows at the doorway when I step into the hall, and they move aside as if I were the one carrying a saint, not an exhausted five-year-old in socks with a fox on the toes. Noone reaches out. No one tries to take him. This is not sentiment in them, it is training. They know there are things a man does himself not because others cannot but because the doing is part of the oath.
Outside the street feels too open, too exposed. I do not hurry, I do not slow. I cross the space between the school and the car at the same pace I use to walk out to the vineyard rows in October, the pace of a man who knows that running invites bullets and lingering invites ghosts.
“Hospital?” Kieran asks, already opening the back door so I do not have to shift Liam to reach the handle.
“House,” I answer. “Doc meets us there.”
I sit with Liam’s head on my thigh, the seat belt at his feet and my arm holding him in a cradle that never fails in a hard turn. He sleeps like a boy who has been told a story and is at the part where the hero must go into the woods alone, and his breath remains even as the city slides by outside, first the old streets, then the smooth lanes that thread the estates, then our drive with the iron gate and the stone pillars that bear a name you are not meant to say with affection.
Aoife meets us under the portico and she is not gentle when she takes him from me, which is correct, which is good. She has the grace to steal him without asking because asking would make it a favor and this is not that. She carries him across the threshold as if she will never put him down again, her cheek on his hair, and when she looks back at me her eyes say thank you and why did you let this happen and do not leave us and you cannot stay in the same breath.
“Doc is in the blue salon,” Brigid says, leading them away.
I stand a moment in the hall because the body needs to register the fact that it is still attached to a heart, and then I follow to the salon, where the doctor with hands old enough to know what not to say runs his light over Liam’s pupils, listensto his chest, draws a small vial of blood with a needle so fine it might be a hair. He says words I wanted to hear the moment I saw the blankets in that crate—no marks, no bruises, no injection sites, likely asleep from warmth and exhaustion, keep him close tonight, call if any vomiting or fever. The words sit in my lungs, heavy and relieving at once.
I take Aoife’s hand and feel that she is shaking only in the fingers, which means the rest of her is still frozen. “He is safe, love. He is here.”
