“I feel pissy about it. About the whole shagging thing. I don’t sit easy when people I care about are in this kind of turmoil, and it’s fucking frustrating to be picking my way through the holy mess of those units working toward retrieval, and to be doing that, spending my time there instead of spending it finding out exactly who was responsible for what happened in Dallas.”
A small, hard ball of ice dropped in her belly. And there it was, the big, glowing elephant in the room she’d hoped to ignore, and it was trumpeting. “That’s what’s under it, isn’t it? All of it.”
“Aye, that’s under it and over it, it’s around it and through it.”
“I want you to put it away.” Her voice stayed calm even as her belly clenched. “I want you to put it aside before you cross a line I can’t ignore.”
“I have my own lines, Lieutenant.”
“That’s right, that’s right. Lieutenant.” She picked up her badge that lay on the dresser, and slapped it down again. “Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD. You can’t stand there and talk about doing murder to a murder cop and expect me to ignore it and pretend it’s nothing.”
“I’m talking to my wife.” He slammed the bottle down so water sloshed out and onto the glossy surface of the table. “A woman I vowed to cherish. There’s no cherishing, there’s no living with myself if I stand back and do bloody nothing. If I fold my hands while those responsible for what happened to you go on with their lives as if that was nothing.”
“Their lives don’t matter to me. Their deaths, at your hands, do.”
“Goddamn it, Eve.” He spun away from her and dragged on his shirt. “Don’t ask me to be what I’m not. Don’t ask it of me. I never ask it of you.”
“No.” She steadied herself. “No, you don’t. You don’t,” she repeated, very quietly as that one point struck her as truth, inarguable truth. “So I can’t talk about this. I can’t think about it or fight about something we’ll never come close to agreeing on. But you’d better think about it. And when you’re thinking, you should remember I’m not a child like Marlena. And I’m not your mother.”
He turned slowly, and his face was cold, and set. “I never mistake who you are, or who you’re not.”
“I don’t need your kind of justice because I survived what happened to me, and made my own.”
“And you cry in your sleep, and shake from the nightmares.”
She was close to shaking now, but she wouldn’t cry. Tears wouldn’t help either of them. “What you’re thinking about won’t change that. Bring in whoever Feeney agrees to. I have to work.”
“Wait.” He walked to his own dresser, opened a drawer. He was angry, as she was, and wished he knew how they’d so seamlessly turned from intimacy to temper. He took out the small, framed photograph he’d placed there, then walked over to hand it to Eve.
She saw a pretty young woman with red hair and green eyes, healing bruises on her face, and a splint on the finger of a hand she held against the boy.
The gorgeous little boy with the Celtic blue eyes who had his cheek pressed against the woman’s. Against his mother’s.
Roarke and his mother.
“There was nothing I could do for her. If I’d known… I didn’t, so that’s that. She was dead before I was old enough to fix her face in my memory. I couldn’t even give her that much.”
“I know it hurts you.”
“It isn’t about that. They knew about him. The HSO, Interpol, all the global intel organizations. They knew about Patrick Roarke long before he traveled to Dallas to meet with Richard Troy. But she, the woman who birthed me, the woman he murdered and tossed away didn’t even merit a footnote in their files. She was nothing to them, as a small, helpless child in Dallas was nothing to them.”
She hurt for him, for herself, and for a woman she’d never met. “You couldn’t save her, and I’m sorry. You couldn’t save me, and I’m not. I’m good at saving myself. I’m not going to argue with you about this because it doesn’t fix anything. We’ve both got a lot of work to do.”
She set the photo on his dresser. “You should leave this out. She was beautiful.”
But when Eve left the room, he put the photo away. It was still too painful to look at those images for long.
They gave each other a wide berth, working in their separate areas late into the night. Sleeping, for once, with a sea of bed between them and neither attempting to bridge it. In the morning, they circled around the distance that had spread between them, carefully avoiding each other’s territory, and cautious of their moves when that territory overlapped.
She knew Reva Ewing and Tokimoto were in the house, and was leaving them to Feeney while she bunkered in her office, waiting for Peabody and McNab to get in.
She could focus on the work at hand for long periods, running her probabilities, then sifting through data to create other scenarios. She could study her murder board, and reconstruct the crimes, the motives, the methods from what evidence she had and begin to see a picture.
But she only had to shift that evidence to one side and a different picture formed.
And if her concentration wavered, even for an instant, there was yet another image. One of herself and Roarke on opposing sides of a bottomless chasm.
She hated that her personal life interfered with work. Hated more that she couldn’t stop it from creeping into her thoughts when she needed to train them on the job.
And what was she upset about, really? she asked herself as she stalked back into the kitchen yet again for coffee. That Roarke wanted to hunt up and bloody some HSO agent she didn’t even know? She was fighting with him, and just because they weren’t yelling and slamming around didn’t mean they weren’t fighting still.
She’d figured out that much of the marriage game.
They were fighting because he had a rage like a trapped tiger about what had been done to her as a child. Layered over it, sharpening the claws and teeth of the trapped tiger was the rage over what had happened to his mother.
Brutality, violence, neglect. Christ knew they’d both lived with it and survived. Why couldn’t they live with it still?
She shoved through the kitchen door to stand on the little terrace beyond, and just breathe.
And how did she live with it? The work-and, yes, sometimes she used the work until it dragged her down to exhaustion, even misery, but she needed what it gave her, through the process, through the results. Standing not just over the victim but for the victim, and working to find whatever balance the system allowed. Even hating the system from time to time when that balance didn’t meet her own standards.
But you could respect something, even when you hated it. The nightmares? Weren’t they some sort of coping mechanism, an unconscious outlet for the fear, the pain, even the humiliation? Mira could probably give her a whole cargo-load of fancy terms and psychiatric buzz on the subject. But at the base they were just triggers, for events she could stand to remember. Maybe a few she wasn’t sure she could stand. But she coped.
God knew she coped better with Roarke there to pull her out of the sticky grip of them, to hold onto her, to remind her she was beyond them now.
But she didn’t deal with what had been done to her by meeting brutality with more of the same. How could she wear her badge if she didn’t believe, at the core, in the heart and soul of the law?
And he didn’t.
She scooped a hand through her hair as she stared out over the riotous late-summer gardens: the full green trees, the sheen and sparkle of the world he’d built, his way. She’d known when she met him, when she’d fallen in love with him, when she married him, that he didn’t, and never would, have the same in-the-bone beliefs as she had.
They were, on some elemental plane, opposite. Two lost souls, he’d once said. So they were. But as much as they had in common, they would never meet smoothly on this one point.