“No…” He drifted off as if trying to formulate the right way to say what needed saying, and unless he’d taken serious acting lessons, he wasn’t faking the distress in his voice. “He’s really fucked up. Bad. You have to see him by tonight, or it might be too late.”
“Too late? What kind of too late?”
He shook his head, and my chest tightened. “The worst kind. I’m sorry.”
“It was routine stuff when I saw him,” I protested.
“It happened fast. Look, I’m going to question you, I promise you that, but I like Jonathan, and you need to see him.”
“Go, Contessa,” Antonio said from behind Daniel. “I have this.”
I couldn’t save Antonio, but maybe I could. I wasn’t powerless. But if I told the truth, that I’d shot Paulie, I wouldn’t see my brother. I could admit to the murder at any time. Tomorrow. The next day. No amount of time would change the facts, but in that time, Jonathan could be dead.
Daniel moved out of the way, and the door started to shut. Antonio was cut into a straight line by the edge, then bisected, then almost gone behind the scratched metal door. He’d be gone in another fraction of a second, cut off from me by rebar and concrete, floors and ceilings, men and women who would become obstacles to my wholeness and safety.
I stuck my hand in the elevator door before it closed, and it bounced back with a rattle. “I’m coming up.”
“Theresa…”
“Contessa…”
I stepped in.
“I was trying to save you from grief,” Daniel said as the door slid shut again.
“Too late,” I said, standing next to Antonio. I watched the red numbers flip as we went upstairs into the belly of the LAPD.
eight.
theresa
ho is this?” Margie asked.
I was hunched in the corner of the precinct bathroom with Daniel’s phone. The first thing they’d done was take Antonio away and put him behind a door, and my sense of orientation went with him, as if I’d been airlifted and dropped into a foreign nation. My ex gave me his phone and told me to call my sister, whose first reaction to my voice had been silence. Her second had been disbelief.
“It’s Theresa, I swear. I—”
“We’re all going through five stages of a loss, here. Mom is still on denial and Sheila’s on anger, and you’re calling me like it’s hey-how-do-you-do time.”
“You’re in the same stage as Sheila.”
“What was Fiona put away for?” she asked.
“What?”
“Prove you’re you. And tell me who she was in with.”
“Oh, please, Margie, we don’t have time.”
The lights buzzed above me, casting the bathroom in a light that seemed to suck away brightness rather than add it. I’d put my family through hell. Avoidance was futile.
“She was put away twice,” I said, resigned to doing this. “Which time?”
“The first time.”
I couldn’t hear her tapping her foot, but I knew she was.
“Fiona went to Westonwood for stabbing her boyfriend. Jonathan was there for suicide. Both were caused by a girl named Rachel, who was my friend. Who Daddy seduced. Enough?”
She paused then spoke quietly. “Thank God. Thank thank thank God a million times you’re not dead. Where are you?”
“I’m at the First Street Station, on the bathroom floor.”
“You know what? I have no idea what’s happening with you, and I’ll care about it tomorrow. You need to be here.”
“I know. I’ll be there, I promise.”
“I’m not trying to be graphic. Just blunt,” she said. “Jon has irreparable damage to his heart. It’s not going to go well without a transplant. And maybe you don’t care. Maybe this new life you have is more important than the old one. That’s fine. But—and this is not for me, it’s for Jonathan—see him. Okay? Just see him. Then go back to whatever it was you were doing.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t make me come after you.”
“I’ll be there. I swear.”
“All right. Then you can tell me why you’re not dead.”