But Frank puts up his hand, blocks me from following.
“No, just Nicholas. I’d like to discuss this with him alone…” he says. Then he motions toward Quinn and Teddy. “You two stay here. Keep Ms. Hall company.”
“Not possible, Frank,” Nicholas says. “They’re coming too.”
“And why is that?”
“This involves them now. They made sure of that.”
Quinn glares at Nicholas. She is glaring at both of us, like her father’s displeasure with her is our fault. Like she’d will the guns back on our ribs, if she could, as punishment for that alone.
“I would say so…” she says.
Frank meets Nicholas’s eyes, but it feels private. Not like a warning, more like a plea. Like he is unhappy that Nicholas is involving Quinn—that he is choosing to do this in a way that’s not just the two of them.
“You better know what you’re doing here, Nicky,” Frank says.
“Haven’t I always?”
“Maybe not always.”
“Sixteen minutes.”
“Follow me.”
This Slip Is Spoken For
Owen could be anywhere.
His back is to the water.
He is surrounded by computer screens and monitors. He has tracking devices on eighteen people and two police stations and encrypted calls set to deploy to the municipal police and the US consulate in Nice and a certain US marshal in the eastern district of Texas in conjunction with the Southern District of Florida.
He has everything covered, as much as it’s possible to have it covered. He is confident of that. He’s run it out, too many times to even count, every possible scenario for how the next sixteen minutes will go. How the night needs to go after that. Every possible scenario to get them all to safe harbor.
Especially Hannah.
Especially Bailey.
Bailey, who is in the cabin next to him. He can hear the shower going, can hear her music kicking out of the speakers. He wanted to give her a minute to herself—to process, to take a breath, to settle back into herself.
He’s even put a keyboard in her cabin so she can begin to work on her music if she wants to do that. Anything she wants to do to help keep herself together, until he brings Hannah home to her.
It’s taking everything that he’s got not to knock on that cabin door, to wait for her to let him in so he can take another look at her.To make her a cup of peppermint tea or ask her to play him a song on that keyboard. Or do anything at all so that he gets to watch her for a bit. To prove to himself that she’s here. She’s safe.
It’s taking him back to it, a little too viscerally. It takes him back to their first night in the floating home. Their first night in their new life. It was a few months before Bailey’s fifth birthday—five weeks and five days after they had first run from Austin, and the organization, and the life he couldn’t protect Bailey from. He had failed, after all, to protect Kate. The price of that, the pain of it, living on his daughter’s face. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again, not with their kid.
At the same time, he’d had no interest in a life in which he was at the mercy of WITSEC and government bureaucracy to protect him—a life in which Owen would constantly be looking over his shoulder. You could argue that the same was true with the path Owen has chosen. But at least, doing it this way, Owen wasn’t counting on anyone but himself.
That first night in the floating home, Bailey had wanted to sleep in her own room, which he’d filled with her favorite things: Hello Kitty pillows and oversize LEGOs and Cinderella coloring books. It was the only room Owen had managed to decorate, at all.
Owen was relieved that Bailey felt safe enough to be in there on her own—that she’d wanted that. It made him feel like he had managed to hide it from her—just how much danger they were actually in.
And still. Owen sat outside her bedroom door all night. He didn’t even have a blanket over him, the chill of the mostly empty houseboat helping him to stay awake.
He was trying to imagine a day when keeping watch like that wouldn’t be what was required of him—in order to keep his family safe.
Apparently, nearly two decades later, he doesn’t have that answer. Not just yet. Not tonight.
