“Thank you.”
“Go on, please. And later, you will tell me what is a nine-eleven.”
“It was a day. A terrible day,” he replied, sounding distant and sad. “But that’s another story. Clements and I had been investigating a homicide and got a tip on a guy who lived above a bodega uptown. We drove up there. We weren’t out of the car for five seconds when we heard the shots coming from the store. Someone ran out with a gun in his hand. Clements shouted for him to drop his weapon. The perp shot him. I shot the perp. It all happened so fast.”
This was real. At least it was real to him. He used words Charlotte had never heard before. Words like bodega, uptown, and perp. But she understood that his closest friend was hurt or killed while trying to uphold the law.
“Clements was down. He was who I cared about. I called it in, but I didn’t leave my partner’s side. He didn’t make it.
“Neither did the killer. He was a sixteen-year-old boy. I ki…killed a…child.”
“Oh, Michael,” Charlotte whispered. She didn’t know what else to say. This was tearing him apart. “That must have been very difficult.”
“It was,” he answered quietly. So quietly she almost didn’t hear him through the wall.
“It still is,” she added, wanting to go to him. She didn’t move. Perhaps it was easier for him to open up this way, without seeing the listener.
“It still is,” he echoed. “I lost others after that, but that was the worst thing that could have happened. But you know what they say, time heals all wounds.”
“Who says that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Why? Do you think it doesn’t?”
“Do you still feel the same as you did when this tragedy happened?”
“Some days I do.”
“What is it that stops your wounds from healing?”
“I don’t know. What do you think of me now, Miss Whimsey? Now that you know what I’ve done?”
“You mean the sixteen-year-old boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you know he was young before you shot him?”
“No. Everything happened so fast.”
This was what was stopping him from healing. He couldn’t forgive himself. He was ashamed and filled with guilt over what he’d done. “I think ’tis a very sad thing. Sad that a boy carried a weapon that could kill. ’Tis too much power for one so young. He likely would have hanged even if you had not shot him. I feel sympathy for his family, but I do not blame you for shooting someone who just shot your friend and would have shot you next.”
“Yeah.”
She thought she heard him make a sound as if he sniffed.
She reached out with her left arm, the one against the wall and closest to the open door. “Michael, reach for—”
He took her hand in his. She was expecting it, but she didn’t expect his warm, curious touch, and the way his big hand covered hers, to rattle her bones, her senses, her logic.
“What about you?” he asked. “What makes you break the law?”
She laughed. Ugh, she hated talking about it. But she guessed if he could do it, so could she. “I was forgotten.”
“What do you mean?”
“An hour or so after my mother gave birth to me, my parents forgot me. My father continued to work, and my mother claimed to have a terrible headache. Too horrible to feed her newly born babe. So the servants did it—and kept me alive. It never changed. Whenever my parents were together, they fought, so they stayed apart. They came to visit me once in a while, but they never stayed long. I didn’t know who they were so every time they came near me, I cried. My father hated it. As I grew older, I cried harder just to prick him.
“On Sundays he used to take me with him to the courthouses. We didn’t spend any time together. I used to wait outside for him. That’s how I met Preston. He became my friend.”
