"Yes," I said.
"Then you didn't fail."
Outside the clinic's window, Charleston was doing its slow, quiet thing in the dark. The harbor. The gas lanterns. The church bells somewhere counting an hour I'd long since lost track of.
I was in a surgical suite in a mansion I didn't understand, with a hole in my leg and a man holding my hand who had twenty brothers and a father he'd thought was dead and an FBI deputy director somewhere in the city and two men on a boat in the Intracoastal who had photographs of me.
I thought about Dolly walking out of the mountains with nothing but her voice and her nerve.
I thought:at least, it's a story.
I closed my eyes.
31
TOMMY
Ileft Rebecca sleeping.
The doctor walked me to the door of the clinic and gave me the medical handshake of a man telling me, without making a thing of it, that the next four hours were ours but the next twenty-four were his. I told him to come find me, anyway. I told him that the woman in the bed wasthewoman, full stop, and any change in any direction at any hour was a change I wanted to know about. He nodded the way doctors at Dominion Hall apparently nodded—once, sharp,understood, no further explanation required—and I walked out.
The corridor at the bottom of the service stair was quiet now. The crisis on the lawn had settled into the second phase of every crisis I'd ever worked, which was the work that happened after the work.
The fire was out. The pier was being assessed. The men on the perimeter had relaxed by half a click and tightened by another half a click in a different direction. Somewhere in the front of the house, men I had not yet been formally introduced to were gathering in a room I had not yet been formally invitedto, and a man who looked like an older version of me was already there, waiting.
I climbed the stairs.
I crossed the foyer.
The viper did its tongue thing at me. I did not return the gesture. The viper and I had a relationship now, and I respected the viper's place in it.
I'd just gotten to the corridor that led to the parlor when the front door opened behind me.
Two men came through it.
I turned.
Grant. Wyatt.
Grant was first through the door, shoulders coming up, the open spread of his arms before he'd consciously decided to spread them. Wyatt was a half step behind, slower, the more reserved of the two by a long shot, but his face had done its own thing and the thing was a thing I recognized in my own chest.
I crossed the floor.
We met in the middle.
Grant got me first and he got me hard, both arms around my back, the heavy, hard hug of a brother who'd been worried and had decided not to say so because the saying was not how we handled it. Wyatt came in a beat later, hand on my shoulder first, then the embrace, shorter than Grant's, but the same temperature underneath.
"Brother."
"Brother."
"Glad you're vertical."
"Gladyou'revertical."
I laughed into Grant's shoulder.
We stood back.
