“I broke a promise to her that day,” she tells Tommy now.
“What was the promise?” Tommy asks, his voice breathy, his mouth closer to the phone than it was before. This is the connection Bo was talking about. When two total strangers find something in common, something that will bind them.
“I promised I’d be holding her hand when she went. Whenshe received her diagnosis—it was cancer—she made me promise that she wouldn’t die alone.”
“But you had to work.” He rushes to her defense because in that moment she represents him too. They are united now, just two people who tried their best yet fell short anyway.
“You couldn’t help it. I bet she understood that,” he says. And now he is comforting her, or trying to.
Hope wants to smile and cry at the same time. She won’t tell him that she could’ve helped it, that she could’ve let someone else step in. It is beside the point now. “Just the week before, my mom asked me to take a leave of absence. It was time I had coming to me. I kept telling myself I would. And at the same time I kept assuring myself we still had time.”
“You didn’t want to admit that you didn’t,” says Tommy.
“You’re right,” she says.
Another long silence elapses. Hope stares at the screen until she loses focus. When Tommy finally speaks, his voice is barely a whisper. “My dad asked me to go hunting with him that day.”
Hope bites down on her lip, just enough to feel pain. “And you didn’t go?”
“No,” he says. She is getting used to the little defensive laugh he uses as an attempt to disengage. “I had to work. Sound familiar?” There is a pause, and then he adds, “But that wasn’t even true. I just told him that because I didn’t want to tell him the truth.”
She takes his cue. “And what was the truth?” she asks.
“I couldn’t go because I’d promised my wife I’d spend time with her.”
In the background there is a noise that is a combination of exasperation and frustration. She hears a woman’s voice that could only be Nadine’s growing louder as, Hope imagines, she runstoward him. In the text box on her screen, Hope types,We need eyes on this situation ASAP.
“Tommy!” she hears Nadine say. “Don’t you dare blame this on me! It’s not my fault! I never asked that of you! I would never—” Hope hears a scuffle of some sort, then a loud clatter. And then the line goes dead.
Hope sits there stunned before rising and going into the front of the NOC with everyone else. Though the conversation with Tommy has ended, they can still hear the women and Tommy. (If Tommy was a savvier criminal, he’d have known to check the pizza boxes for bugs, but Hope is thankful it must’ve never crossed his mind.) She smiles as she hears the women’s voices coming through loud and clear. It seems the hostages are ganging up on their captor, berating him for what he said about Nadine. There does not seem to be any danger to anyone, except perhaps to Tommy.
“Well,” says Chris, “I didn’t want to interrupt you since you had a good thing going there, but the dog is here.” He claps his hands together. “So I guess we’d better make a plan for how we’re going to let him see it.”
Hope looks from the team to Bo, then back to the team. She thinks of what Bo said about lady luck, about the parallels between her experience and Tommy’s and the strides she just made as they talked. If Nadine hadn’t intervened, she was close enough that she might’ve talked him into surrendering right then and there. And an idea she’d had—and dismissed—reasserts itself more insistently this time. “I think I know what I want to do,” she says.
Chapter 32
Inside the post office, it falls to Sylvie to try to restore order. She almost feels sorry for Tommy, who, in the crosshairs of Nadine’s outrage, is backed up against a wall as Nadine unleashes months of her pent-up anger. Sylvie doesn’t understand much of what Nadine is saying and doubts anyone else does either. The last thing she fully understood was “Is this why? Is this why?” But Nadine didn’t wait for an answer from Tommy before she ranted some more.
Tommy winces about every fourth word but doesn’t defend himself. He looks around for an escape route, but there is nowhere he can go to get away, as she will surely follow him around the room until she either wears herself out or runs out of words. Tommy is as trapped as they are.
Unless, thinks Sylvie,I offer him an out.
“You could let us go.” She has to raise her voice to have any hope of him hearing her over Nadine. He doesn’t respond, so she says it again, changing one word. “You should let us go.”
“I always start off by simply asking them to let the hostages go,” she remembers Robert saying. All those years that he was a cop, she was a teacher. He had the more exciting job, so his stories shared over the dinner table, riding in the car, or sitting on the beach just a few miles away from here were usually better than hers. She’d listened closely to all of his stories, many more thanonce. Though she never thought she’d have to, today she is putting some of what she’d gleaned to use.
Tommy’s eyes meet her own, and for a moment, Sylvie sees him consider her suggestion. But then he shakes his head no. Still, there was a moment he wanted to let them go. That moment means something. He is getting closer to giving up. She needs to de-escalate the situation, restore calm, and give Tommy the chance to mull over her request a little more. Perhaps Tommy will, with a little more time, reach the right conclusion, do the right thing, and surrender.
She moves closer to Nadine, places her hand gently on her arm. The sensation startles her, and she whips her head around, wild-eyed, until she sees that it is just Sylvie. “Honey,” Sylvie says to her. “I think that’s enough for now.”Sometimes, Sylvie thinks,it pays to be the old lady.
Nadine’s face goes slack as she takes a step back from Tommy, who uses the moment to slide away from where she had him pinned. Nadine tenses, but Sylvie takes her hand and leads her away, back toward the stools. “Why don’t we all just have a seat?” she says.
She poses it as a question, but it is really a command. Sylvie uses her teacher voice, calm but firm. In some ways, she used to tease Robert, their jobs weren’t that far apart. Every day teaching middle schoolers was a protracted negotiation, the siege lasting the length of a school year. Robert liked to joke that he didn’t know which of their jobs was more dangerous.
Sylvie is pleased that Blythe, Morrow, and even Nadine yield to her suggestion. Except for Tommy, everyone moves back toward the stools, the heightened energy in the room dissipating some with the change of location. Once they are perched on their stools again, Sylvie says, “Why don’t we have a nice conversation. Maybe get to know one another a bit better?”
Blythe and Morrow nod agreeably, but Nadine looks unconvinced. She glances over her shoulder at Tommy, who has moved as far away from them as he can get without leaving the room. He has turned his back to them as well.Good, Sylvie thinks.Give him time with his thoughts, time to hopefully form a plan to end this.
