Moments later, the car peels down the street.
"Is he still clean?" Quentin asks.
"Are you asking because you care, or because you don't want that stain on your career again?"
"That's not fair, Tanya-"
"Life never is, Quentin." For the slightest moment, there is a sadness caught in the corners of her eyes, like the seeds of a dream. "Go figure."
She closes the door before he can respond. Moments later Quentin backs carefully out of the driveway.
He drives for a full five minutes before he realizes that he has no idea where he is headed.
Lying on his side, Caleb can see the night sky. The moon is so slender it might not even be there the next time he blinks, but those stars, they're flung wide. One bright beacon catches his eye. It's fifty, maybe a hundred light-years away from here. Looking at it, Caleb is staring right into the past. An explosion that happened ages ago, but took this long to affect him.
He rolls onto his back. If only they were all like that.
All that day he's been thinking that Nina is sick; that she needs help, the way someone with a virus or a broken leg needs help. If something in her mind has snapped, Caleb will be the first to understand-he has come close to that himself, when thinking of what has been done to Nathaniel. But when Nina called, she was rational, calm, insistent. She meant to kill Father Szyszynski.
That, in and of itself, doesn't shock Caleb. People are able to hold the greatest scope of emotions inside them-love, joy, determination. It only stands to reason that negative feelings just as staggering can elbow their way in and take over. No, what surprises him is the way she did it. And the fact that she actually thinks this is something she did for Nathaniel.
This is about Nina, through and through.
Caleb closes his eyes to that star, but he still sees it etched on the backs of his eyelids. He tries to remember the moment that Nina told him she was pregnant. "This wasn't supposed to happen," she said to him. "So we can't ever forget that it has."
There is a rustle of blankets and sheets, and then Caleb feels heat pressed along the length of his body.
He turns, hopeful, praying that this has all been a bad dream and that he can wake up to find Nina safe and sleeping. But on her pillow lies Nathaniel, his eyes shining with tears. "I want Mommy back," he whispers.
Caleb thinks of Nina's face when she was carrying Nathaniel, how it was as bright as any star. Maybe that glory faded long ago, maybe it has taken all these light-years to only reach him now. He turns to his son and says, "I want that too."
Fisher Carrington stands with his back to the door of the conference room, looking out onto the exercise courtyard. When the correctional officer closes the door behind himself, leaving me there, he turns slowly. He looks just the way he did the last time I saw him, during Rachel's competency hearing: Armani suit, Bruno Magli shoes, thick head of white hair combed away from his sympathetic blue eyes. Those eyes take in my oversize jail scrubs, then immediately return to my face. "Well," he says gravely. "I never imagined I'd talk to you here."
I walk to one of the chairs in the room and throw myself into it. "You know what, Fisher? Stranger things have happened."
We stare at each other, trying to adjust to this role reversal. He is not the enemy anymore; he is my only hope. He is calling the shots; I am just along for the ride. And over this is a veneer of professional understanding: that he will not ask me what I've done, and that I will not have to tell him.
"You need to get me home, Fisher. I want to be back by the time my son sits down for lunch."
Fisher just nods. He's heard this before. And it doesn't really matter what I want, when all is said and done. "You know they're going to ask for a Harnish hearing," he says.
Of course I know this; it is what I would do if I were prosecuting. In Maine, if the state can show probable cause that a capital crime was committed, then the defendant can be held without bail. In jail until the trial.
For months.
"Nina," Fisher says, the first time he has called me anything other than counselor. "Listen to me."
But I don't want to listen to him. I want him to listen to me. With great self-control I raise a blank face to his. "What's next, Fisher?"
He can see right through me, but Fisher Carrington is a gentleman. And so he pretends, just the way I am pretending. He smiles, as if we are old friends. "Next," he replies, "we go to court."
Patrick stands in the back, behind the throngs of reporters that have come to film the arraignment of the prosecutor who shot a priest in cold blood. This is the stuff of TV movies, of fiction. It is a story to debate at the water cooler with colleagues. In fact, Patrick has been listening to the commentary on more than one channel. Words like retribution and reprisal slide like snakes from these journalists'
mouths. Sometimes, they don't even mention Nina's name.
They talk about the angle of the bullet, the number of paces it took to cross from her seat to the priest's.
They give a history of child molestation convictions involving a priest. They do not say that Nina learned the difference between a front-end loader and a grader to satisfy the curiosity of her son. They do not mention that the contents of her pocketbook, catalogued at the jail, included a Matchbox car and a plastic glow-in-the-dark spider ring.
