She smiles, thinking of Bo, of his belief in the rapport between her and Tommy. “You and me,” she says.
There is another spate of silence as he takes this in. She needs him to believe she is there for him, that she is on his side. Sheglances over at the team who wanted to be where she is right now. In some ways, she is on his side and not theirs. Needless to say, once this is over and Tommy is in custody, that can no longer be true. But Tommy doesn’t need to know that. He won’t know until it is too late.
“When’s Covey going to be here?” Tommy changes the subject. “You promised.”
“I did,” she says. “And I always keep my promises. Do you remember the promise I asked you to make?”
“Yes,” he grouses.
“Are you still going to keep that promise?” A silence follows, and she imagines that he is looking at the women, remembering his promise not to harm them.
“Tommy?” she prompts. “You can’t expect me to keep my promise if you’re not going to keep yours.”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice gruff. “I’m gonna keep it.”
“Good,” says Hope. “I’m glad to hear that.”
On the screen in front of her a text box pops up. It is Adam asking,What did he promise?
She types her response,That he would not harm anyone.Across from her, Adam gives her a thumbs-up, looking relieved. But also surprised.He thinks, Hope suddenly understands,that I’m a rookie, that I’m just winging this and I’ve never negotiated before. No wonder this team is so anxious to move me out of the way.
“I don’t have an exact ETA on Covey’s arrival, but your stepmother said she was going to get here as fast as she could. She said she needed to get ready first, and then she had to make the trip here.”
Tommy gives a dismissive little laugh. “That woman won’t go anywhere without her face on.”
“In my experience, that’s true of a lot of women,” Hope says. She thinks of her mom, who always fussed at her for not wearinglipstick. She hears her voice even now: “You need color or you look sick.” Even on her deathbed her mother had insisted Hope help her sit up and apply the bare minimum of makeup. “Wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m dying,” she’d quipped. Sometimes Hope was able to laugh when she said this. Sometimes she had to excuse herself and cry. After her mother was gone, Hope stopped wearing makeup altogether. She stopped doing a lot of things. But she cannot think about that now.
“Tell me about Covey,” she says, to keep Tommy talking.
“Not much to tell,” he says. “He’s a Boykin spaniel, a hunting dog. He was... with my dad when he died. They say that he came and sat right by my dad when he...” She hears the emotion pinch off his voice and gives him time to compose himself, listening to the pain that radiates through the air between them. A big part of negotiation, she knows, is just listening to someone whom no one has listened to in a long time.
“Back when I still lived at home,” he resumes, “I helped train him. I went on his first hunts. So he was sorta my dog too. And after my dad was... gone, I wanted to bring him to live with us, but Jane—that’s my stepmother—she said she couldn’t part with him. Said he was her emotional support animal now.” Hope can almost hear him rolling his eyes. “We went back and forth over it, but in the end there wasn’t really anything I could do about it. So he lives with her, and my dad is gone, and I—” She can hear him swallow back the tears. “I’m here,” he finishes.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says to him for the second time, feeling as inane as the words sound.
“Why are you sorry? It’s not your fault.” She can hear him trying to make things lighter, to banish the heavy feelings welling up inside him, threatening to spill over. He doesn’t want the women he’s holding hostage to see anything but the bravado he’sbeen relying on all day. But Hope sees the crack and decides to stick her finger in it.
With all the compassion and gentleness she can muster, she says, “It’s not yours either.”
His retort is quick. “You don’t know that.”
Hope looks at the screen in front of her, at the words Adam typed, taking in the shape of the wordpromise, the roundness of thep, the dot on thei.
“What don’t I know?” she asks.
There is another long silence. For a moment she thinks that he will hang up on her, that she has pushed too far. But then he speaks.
“I wasn’t there,” he says. “The day of the accident. I could’ve been, but...” Hope realizes she’s holding her breath, waiting on how he will finish the sentence. She exhales at the same moment he says, “It doesn’t matter.”
Behind her, from the outer area, she hears shuffling, breathing, little human noises that remind her they are all out there listening to this, each with opinions, she is sure, of what she should be doing or saying, each deciding what they would do if they were in her shoes. But they aren’t in her shoes. She looks down at her feet, scrunches all ten of her toes as she does what comes next, what feels natural. “Trust your instincts,” her mentor Rich used to say, “your instincts and your training.”
“It does matter,” she says. “I know that better than anyone.” Tommy says nothing in response, so she continues talking. “I wasn’t there when my mother died,” she admits, telling Tommy and a roomful of eavesdroppers the thing she hasn’t been able to say to anyone in eight months.
“I was at work even though I wasn’t supposed to go in that day. She was dying, and I was supposed to be with her, to helpmy dad with her care. But there was a situation that developed, and I—I told myself I’d just go see what was happening and then I’d go be with her after. But once I got there, things...” She stops talking, thinks about her choice of words going forward. She will avoid the details of the hostage situation that day, another domestic, but this one involved a man, his estranged wife, and their two children.
She continues. “Once I got there, I found out they really needed me. And I couldn’t leave. Or at least I felt like I couldn’t leave.” It was the children that made her stay. She had to do whatever she could to make sure those kids got out of there safely. And they did—after nine and a half hours of terror, threats, and fear, they did.
She thinks about that day. Talking to the man with the gun who was threatening the lives of his family even as her personal phone buzzed in her purse, torn between needing to be in two places at once. She hadn’t answered the calls, reasoning that she’d check on her mother once the siege was over. She thought her dad just wanted her help. He was afraid of being left to care for her mother alone; he wanted Hope there all the time. She hadn’t known—she couldn’t have known, as Alex has pointed out to her again and again—her mother had taken a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse and he was calling to tell her to come if she wanted to say goodbye. Though she neverwantedto say goodbye, she’d missed her chance to say it anyway.
