“Thank you.”
Another small pause. He isn’t done. He’s weighing the thing I didn’t ask for.
“There’s a second part you don’t want to hear yet,” he says. “You’re going to hear it anyway.”
“Say it.”
“When you get her back,” he says—when, not if, and my body loosens one notch I didn’t know was clenched—“she is going to be hurt. Maybe not in a way you can see. Likely in ways you can, though. She’s going to be in a state that is part shock, part rage, part collapse. She’s going to be looking for control. Don’t give her decisions she can’t deal with. Give her small ones she can, and be ready for her to panic and throw them back at you.”
I stand at the window and watch the river. I want to tell him that Phoenix is tough, that we don’t need to know this stuff. But with my left hand I start a list on the pad.
“Keep going,” I say.
“You’re going to want to surround her,” he says. “Don’t crowd. She’ll need quiet. Light she can control. Doors she can lock that you can open with a key she can see. Clothes that are clean and soft and not yours. Food within reach that doesn’t smell like the place she was. A shower. Warm water and no questions.”
I squeeze the bridge of my nose and keep moving my pen.
“She’ll need a doctor,” he says. “Preferably a woman. If she refuses an exam, don’t push. Offer again later. Make sure she understands the chain of custody if she wants it. A trauma therapist on standby, not on the couch with a clipboard when she walks in. Someone who will sit on the floor and breathe with her before she talks.”
“Names,” I say again, and he gives me two. I know one—she testified in a case where a girl made it into the courtroom without losing her name.
“She’ll need her dog,” he says, and it knocks the air sideways in my chest because he knows about Zeus. “If he can’t be there in the room, you find a way for his smell to be there. A blanket. A collar. Something.”
I writeZeus, blanket, and my handwriting turns into a notch of black ink where it digs.
“She’ll need to be believed,” he says. “By each of you. Without hesitation. Without your egos getting in the way. You’ll have to manage Conrad. He’ll want to make everything safe all at once. He will drown her in it if you let him. Atticus will want to arrange the air around her. Maverick will want to pull the laughter back into the room just to prove it can return. All of that has its place. None of it should be put first.”
“What’s first?” I ask, even though I know. I want to hear it in another man’s voice so I can make it law.
“Presence,” he says. “Simple. Steady. You sit on the floor outside the door, and when she opens it, you do what she asks you to do. You do not add pain. You do not ask her to be the woman she was last week. You let her be who she is in that hour and you make sure that hour doesn’t kill her. Because there’s a good chance that she was hurt in a way you can’t take back. A way that could destroy her if she lets it.”
I close my eyes, and I picture the guest room in the penthouse, the one that doesn’t have a view because Atticus said views make a person feel watched. I picture how to strip it and soften it in under an hour. I picture sitting on the floor with my back to thedoor, my knives exactly where I can reach them if the door opens the wrong way.
“Security?” I ask. “Because I’m not trusting a lock.”
He hears the edge in my voice and matches it. “Two men in the hall. Not ours. Not anyone who works for you now. Call the firm in Charleston. The woman who runs it used to be Secret Service. She trains men who know how not to be seen.”
“Already have her number,” I say.
“Good,” he says, and I hear pride where I usually hear distance. “You’ll also need to be ready when the first person calls to use her against you. Someone is going to want a trade. You cannot trade her for anything. If you do, you will never get her back in a way that counts.”
“I know,” I say. “She’s not a chip to be bargained with.”
Silence settles for a beat. The kind that doesn’t hurt.
“You did the right thing by calling me,” he says.
I rub my knuckles into my sternum as if I can press back the heat there. “It might not be safe for you.”
He makes a dismissive sound I haven’t heard since I was small. “Your mother does not scare me,” he says, and we both know that’s only a partial truth. “She only surprises people who don’t know what she is. You see her now. She can’t hurt me the way she once could. Not anymore.”
“I…I’ve always seen her,” I say, and it feels like a confession, like the night in the hall shed its last layer of secrecy.
“She would consider Phoenix an acceptable loss too,” he adds, and I hear him consider the larger board. “Which is why we keep the circle tight and the path quiet until we have her.”
“Understood.”
“Storm,” he says, and the word lands warmer than my name has any right to be.
