Chapter 3
October 14, 2014
Dying was just like everyone said, which was weird because Knox had never believed in any of the bright-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel crap. But then he was in a long, dark tunnel, walking toward a pinprick of light. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there or why he was there. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to do. His mind was a blank slate. Behind him was only darkness, so he went toward the light. It went on and on, but he didn’t mind. He felt good. His body didn’t ache. No pain, no headaches, no hangovers, and no thirst. He just . . . was.
Just as he reached the light, the silhouette of a figure emerged. He tried getting closer, but the figure receded.
“Hello?” he called.
The figure turned. He recognized the woman’s face. Dorothy Adams. “You go on back now,” she said.
Knox looked around, but there was only blinding white light. “Where’s Sydney?”
Dorothy didn’t answer. Instead, she turned away and disappeared into the light.
“Where’s Sydney?” Knox called after her.
He cried out once more, but then he was falling, and the light was gone. He could feel himself in his body again—pain, cold, heaviness in his chest. His head felt foggy. He opened his eyes and had to blink several times to get the room to come into focus. He was in a hospital room. There was a woman on each side of his bed. One was black with a short pixie haircut, like Halle Berry’s. She had a massive belly.
“Jynx?”
She squeezed his hand. “Right here.”
On the other side of the bed stood a white woman with long flowing black hair, piercing blue eyes, and sharp features. His daughter. “Bianca?”
“Jynx called me,” she said icily. “Technically, I’m your next of kin. She thought you were dead.” She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. He closed his eyes and focused on the feel of Jynx’s hand on his. Warm, dry, reassuring.
“I called the doctor,” Jynx said. “Now that you’re up.”
“Where am I?”
“Temple University Hospital,” Jynx answered.
He heard footsteps and opened his eyes to see a man in a white coat at the foot of his bed. The doctor. He was young with dark olive skin and thick brown hair. “Mr. Knox,” he said, unsmiling. “I’ve got good news and bad news. Which would you like first?”
Knox stared at the man, uncomprehending. An awkward silence filled the room until Jynx said, “The good news.”
The doctor folded his arms over his chest, much like Bianca, except that he seemed to be hugging himself, bracing himself for something, whereas Bianca’s folded arms were a defensive maneuver. She was guarding herself against him.
Not for the first time, Knox wished he hadn’t fucked things up so grandly.
“The good news,” the doctor began, “is that you survived a heart attack today. You didn’t die. This time.”
Bianca made a noise under her breath and glowered at him. “Jesus Christ. You can’t even get that right. You couldn’t just die?”
If he hadn’t already heard such hateful sentiments from her before, he might have been upset. But this was not new territory, and he knew he deserved it. The doctor and Jynx, however, were taken aback. The doctor stood silent, staring open-mouthed at Knox’s daughter. The guy had a pretty abrupt bedside manner, but even he was stunned by her vitriol.
Jynx leaned over, her swollen midsection pressing against his forearm. With narrowed eyes, she pointed a finger at Bianca. “I may be pregnant, but I will knock you down. You shut your mouth in this room, right now.”
Knox had always loved Jynx’s way of handling people. She never raised her voice, never used a single swear word. But people tended to listen to her. Bianca quieted as Knox waved a hand. It was difficult getting the words out but he said, “It’s fine, it’s okay. Just the bad news then. Doctor?”
The doctor looked back and forth between the women as if waiting for a fight to break out. When neither spoke, he continued. “The bad news is that you’ve got congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, complicated by the early stages of cirrhosis of the liver.”
His lungs, heart, and liver were failing—in concert. “I’ve had those things for a while,” Knox said. “That’s not news.”
The doctor loosened his arms and leaned over the bottom of the bed, bracing his hands on the bedframe. “Yes, and by the looks of your tests, you haven’t been managing them very well. I’d venture to say you haven’t been managing them at all.”
No reason to, Knox almost said. He’d been sick for a long time, but there’d never been a good reason to try and not be sick. Not since losing his family. Plus, he’d never been a health nut and had smoked for most of his life. Even when he was married, his diet wasn’t great. Working homicide made for long hours, during which eating healthy—or at all—wasn’t a priority. Greasy take-out had been a staple of his diet for decades. Then after Sydney’s case, the heavy drinking started. He’d stopped smoking, mostly, but he knew the drinking and his perpetually shitty diet were driving him to an early grave. At seventy-two, he was no spring chicken either.
“Mr. Knox, your lungs are filled with fluid, your heart is straining to—”
Knox held up a hand to silence the doctor. “I don’t need you to tell me what’s wrong with me. It doesn’t matter now. Just tell me: how much time do I have left?”
Jynx squeezed his hand so hard he thought she might break it.
The doctor said, “It’s very hard to predict. There are no guarantees. Based on your labs and scans, I would say four to six months. I’m very sorry, Mr. Knox. I would suggest you do what you can to put your affairs in order.”
His affairs? He nearly laughed. He didn’t have any affairs left to put in order. His own child wished him dead. He could die this very second, and it would not matter.
Except.
“Sydney,” he said, his voice husky.
Bianca growled. There was no other way to describe it. She had done it when she was six years old and didn’t get her way. She threw her hands in the air. “It never stops, does it? On your death bed, all you care about is her.”
She’d said the word “her” with the kind of venom a wife would use to refer to her husband’s mistress. “You care more about dead people than anything else. Why don’t you just fucking die already?”
Jynx looked horrified. Knox had never seen her at a loss for words before. But Bianca was right. For fourteen years, he had been putting Sydney before her. It hadn’t started out that way. At first, it was just another case. A garden-variety random shooting. They happened every day in Philadelphia—then and now. He had never been sure what it was about Sydney’s case that ignited such an obsession in him, except that, ironically, she and his own daughter had been roughly the same age. He hadn’t been able to let it go. His superiors told him to move on, so he started working the case on his own time, which caused fights with his wife. Philadelphia homicide detectives didn’t get much spare time to begin with. That had always been a point of contention in his marriage. He’d started drinking so he could withstand the tension at home, but it only made things worse. By then, he couldn’t stop himself. Then there were the things he forgot, like Bianca’s college graduation, and the things he ruined, like her wedding. He drank through it all. He drank until there was nothing left.