I look at Teddy for just a moment, which is all the time he deserves, Nicholas starting to rise to his feet. He lets out a grunt, quick and guttural—holding tight to that shoulder. But he starts to rise all the same.
He winces—the pain visible on his face—but he fights through it. He fights through the tear in his shoulder, ripping through his skin.
“That’s the wrong way to look at this,” Nicholas says.
“What’s the right way?”
“Everything on that tablet never leaves that tablet. You know that’s true. It’s never left that tablet, even to my own detriment,” he says. “As long as nothing happens to my family, it never will.”
Frank moves forward, helping Nicholas the rest of the way up, as though he wasn’t the one who just shot him. As though he doesn’t still have the gun in his hand, firmly cocked, should he decide to use it again.
“That includes nothing intentional, of course…” Nicholas continues. “But nothing unintentional either. Not even an accident. A plane accident. A boat. Anyone in my family gets touched in any way and there is another party that will deploy it.”
“We don’t control a fucking plane,” Teddy says.
“Then I guess you’d better pray,” I say.
Teddy shakes his head, agitated. And disbelieving. But he stays silent. He stays silent because what is there to say? He and his sister created this situation. The only question now is how he gets out of it.
Frank moves in closer to Nicholas.
“This is why you don’t trust someone with everything,” Frank says.
“I guess you could say we both learned that.”
Frank nods, offers a small smile. It should make me more nervous that Frank is standing so close to Nicholas: the gun still by his side, the security guards with their hands on their pockets. But something in how Frank is watching Nicholas makes me calmer. I slow down—my breathing, my heart—and let myself know it. The graze wasn’t an accident. If Frank wanted to kill him, he could have. He wanted to do something else.
“I think it’s time, Nick,” Frank says. “For that minute alone.”
You Can’t Plan for What You Can’t Plan For Part 2
This is what Owen learned.
When he started to study everything about Èze to prepare for tonight—the topography and the history and the village—he spent a lot of time learning about Nietzsche. Or, maybe he should say, relearning Nietzsche. Owen had been introduced to his work in the philosophy course he took his junior year at UT-Austin, the smug TA reading aloud full passages fromThe Antichristthat went right over Owen’s head.
He’s not sure how much more he ingested this time around. But there is no denying that he had to try. They are synonymous with each other in a way—Èze’s most famous resident and the medieval village that helped shape him. The village that helped shapeThus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s meditation on mortality. On the physical world and government and power. On forgiveness.
Nietzsche didn’t believe in forgiveness. He believed it was a sign of weakness to attempt forgiveness, to ask to be forgiven. How did Nietzsche articulate it?I forgive you what you have done to me; that you have done it to yourself, however—how could I forgive that!
Those words have been running through Owen’s head, on a strange recurring loop, especially in moments like this. In moments when Owen bumps up against most wanting the opposite to be true.
That, at the end of this, there will be a way for them to forgive him. There will be a way for him to start to forgive himself. Only that involves undoing what he did wrong. It involves making the right choice.
Finally, making the right choice.
But which way is the right choice?
There is one camera feed that is not on the tablet Hannah and Nicholas have—a feed that only Owen has—a feed telling him a different story.
It’s a feed coming from the camera on that open tablet, letting him see what is happening in that back room in Èze.
Owen watches Nicholas go down as Hannah bends over him. Owen watches as Nicholas slowly gets back up.
Hannah standing there beside him.
Owen looks at the clock. It’s been nineteen minutes. Nineteen minutes and eight seconds. Time is about to be up.
He clicks over to his encrypted calls app, hovers over the numbers waiting to be activated. The number for the US consulate in Nice, and the number to Grady in Austin, and the number to the municipal police.
