“Twenty-six years on the Boston PD.” Her voice softens with grief. “He died three years ago. Heart attack at a Little League game. Died doing something good.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He was a good man. Just—not good at seeing me.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I keep thinking… If I’dbeen the one to get promoted. If I’d been the one who needed rescuing, like Riley. Would he have seen me then?”
“He saw you.”
“He didn’t.”
“Cassie.” I reach across the console. Take her hand. “He saw you. He just didn’t know how to show you.”
“I know.” A small smile. “I’m starting to believe it, but it doesn’t help with feeling invisible.”
She gave me something real. Now it’s my turn.
“Sofia was pregnant.”
The words come out harder than I intended. Cassie goes still beside me.
“Eight weeks. I didn’t know.” My hands are white on the wheel. The bandages pull tight across my abraded palms. “She was going to tell me when I got back from Syria. Wanted to do it in person. Wanted to see my face.”
“Diego …”
“I found out two days after the funeral. Her sister told me.” The name scrapes past my teeth. “She thought I knew. She said, ‘Hey at least you didn’t have to bury both of them.’”
“What? What a callous thing to say. You did. You buried both of them.”
“Yeah, but the baby wasn’t born. We weren’t married. It was the family’s disgrace. Therefore, it never existed.”
“Oh, Diego. I’m so sorry. It did. It definitely did.”
The highway blurs. I blink it clear.
“Both of them. My girlfriend and my …” The word won’t come. It’s been six years, and the word still won’t come.
“Your child.”
“Yeah.” The confirmation feels like a knife between the ribs. “My child. Eight weeks old. The size of a raspberry, apparently. That’s what the internet says. I looked it up. After. Like knowing the size would make it feel more real.”
“Did it?”
“No. Nothing made it real. Nothing made it make sense.” I stare at the road. “I could have had a family. A reason to come home. A life that wasn’t—” I gesture vaguely at the van, the road, the endless running. “This.”
Cassie’s hand finds mine. She doesn’t try to fix it. Doesn’t offer platitudes or comfort or the hollow reassurances that people always offer when they don’t know what to say. She just holds on.
“That’s why you said you couldn’t do it again.” Her voice is quiet. “Lose someone. Someone who mattered.”
“I went to Colombia after the funeral. Ghost found me three months later in a cartel warehouse, bleeding out, with six dead sicarios on the floor.” I pause. “I wasn’t trying to survive. I was trying to find the men who killed her. I was trying to make them pay. And if I died in the process?—”
“You wanted to die.”
“I wanted to stop feeling. Death seemed like the easiest way to do that.”
“But you survived.”
“Ghost dragged me out. Patched me up. Offered me a choice.” I glance at her. “Join Cerberus and fight the right way, or spiral into the dark and die alone.”
“You chose to fight.”
