“I am so broken,” I say. “I might never be enough to hold the love you deserve.”
“You are not broken,” she says. “You are grieving.”
“I am not just grieving,” I say, my voice shaking. “There is this void in my, and whenever I close my eyes, it drags me into the darkness with it. I have to fight all the time. I fight to breathe. I fight to get up. Fight to exist. Fight to not get lost in my own darkness. I don’t want to fight anymore. I can’t?—“
“I hear you,” she says. “I really do. But you have to keep fighting. Because one day, you will wake up, you will look out of an open window, a light breeze caressing your skin, and you will fall in love with life again. You will feel something other than pain, you will feel excitement, you will feel joy, you will feel happiness. Until then, you push through.”
She smiles weakly.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
And we just sit there.
Together.
I am not alone.
I am not alone.
EPILOGUE
PLAYLIST: WAIT – M83
Jane
“Reid,” I say when my friend from the FBI’s Art Crime Unit picks up. “Can you meet?”
“Yeah, sure,” she says.
“Like now. I am in front of the office.”
“Ooookay,” she says and laughs. “Give me five.”
We hang up, and I wait.
Reid is one of my childhood friends. We met again during my research on criminal behavior and worked on many, many cases. I consider her a real friend, one of the only ones I have.
Reid, as in Reid Shaw, leads the Art Crime Unit here in New York. She is young, but well-connected, extremely profound, and quick on her feet.
“You look like you are about to rob a bank,” says Reid when she appears in front of me.
“Walk with me,” I say nervously.
“Ooookay,” she says. “Did you rob a bank?”
“Of course not,” I say.
“Tell me what happened,” she says.
“So, hypothetically. If I were to have intel, that a very powerful and influential man with friends in high places is in the ownership of a stolen painting—not just any painting—but a very well-known one, like a…“ I begin hesitantly.
“Rembrandt,” she says.
“For example, yes. And the owner has already managed to evade assault, coercion, first-degree rape, and all other sorts of charges. Would there be a way for you to use the intel on the painting to look deeper, and by deeper, I mean so deep that you find the proof of what was hidden?”
Reid draws up an eyebrow.
