“Chloe,” I say. “It’s through.”
“Please,” she cries. “We have to fight. We can’t let it end this way.” She’s crazed, wild and demented. Hysterical. But for some strange reason I’m calm.
Maybe because I knew all along that sooner or later it would come to this.
A moment passes between us. I watch her eyes. They’re crushed and defeated. She’s crying. Her nose runs. I don’t know how much time passes. Ten seconds. Ten minutes.
“I’ll do it myself,” she says then, incensed. She’s pissed that I won’t do it for her. I watch the way the gun shudders in her hands. She can’t do this. And if she tries, she’ll get herself killed. And then under her breath, she says, “But your aim...”
She lets the words hang in the air. I read her expression: hopelessness. Desperation.
“Never mind,” she says after time passes. “I’ll do it myself.”
But I don’t let her. I nod. “Okay,” I say. I reach out and take the gun from her hands.
I can’t let it end like this. Not with her begging me to save her life. And me refusing.
Floodlights pour into the cabin. They blind us. We’re standing before the window, completely exposed. I stand with the gun in my hands. My eyes are composed though hers are wide with fear. The light makes her jump and she falls into me. I step before her to hide her from view. I raise a hand to shield the light.
The hand with the gun.
Gabe
Christmas Eve Hammill calls to say his guys have been made.
“What do you mean?” I snap.
“He heard us.”
“You get a good look?” I ask.
“It’s him, all right,” he says. “It’s Thatcher.”
“No one shoots,” I say. “No one moves until I get there. You hear?” He says okay, but deep down I know he doesn’t give a shit.
“I need him alive,” I say, but he doesn’t hear. There’s a lot of commotion on the other end of the line. Hammill sounds like he’s a mile away. He says he’s got his best sniper here. Sniper?
“No one shoots,” I say over and over again. Getting my hands on Thatcher is only half the job; finding out who hired him the other. “Hold your fire. Tell your guys to hold their fire.”
But Hammill’s too busy listening to the sound of his own voice, he doesn’t hear me. He says it’s dark in there. But they’ve got night vision. They got a visual on the girl. She looks terrified. There’s a pause, then Hammill says, “There’s a gun,” and I feel my heart drop.
“No one shoots,” I say as I make out the cabin, buried in the midst of trees. There are a gazillion cop cars parked outside. No wonder Thatcher heard.
“He’s got the girl.”
I skid up the drive, throwing the car into Park when it becomes apparent I’m not going to get any farther in this snow. “I’m here!” I’m screaming into the phone. My feet sink in the snow.
“He’s got the gun.”
I drop my phone and keep running. I see them, lined behind their vehicles, every single one of them waiting for a shot. “No one shoots,” I say when the distinct sound of gunfire stops me in my tracks.
Eve
After
I’m not sure what I had expected to happen upon our return to the cabin. At the airport, I had listed for Gabe all of the worst-case scenarios I could possibly conceive in my mind: that Mia would remember nothing, that weeks of therapy would be undone, that this would throw Mia over the edge.
We’re all watching Mia as she eyes the inside of the tiny cabin, a shanty in the middle of the Minnesota woods. Mia gives the place a once-over. It doesn’t take long for her memories to come flooding back, and as Gabe asks for the umpteenth time, “Mia, do you remember anything?” we realize that we should be careful what we ask for.
The sound that emerges from my daughter is one I’ve never heard before, a sound akin to an animal dying. Mia falls to her knees in the middle of the room. She is screaming, an incomprehensible language I’ve never heard before. She is sobbing, a wild outburst I never knew my Mia was capable of, and I, too, begin to cry. “Mia. Honey,” I murmur, wanting to gather her in my arms and hold her.
But Dr. Rhodes warns me to be careful. She holds a hand out, refusing to let me console Mia. Gabe leans in close and whispers to the doctor and me that this, this spot on the floor where Mia has collapsed in hysteria, is where, less than a month ago, a bloody corpse had been.
Mia turns to Gabe with anguish in her pretty blue eyes, barking, “You killed him. You killed him,” over and over and over again. She’s crying, delirious, saying that she sees the blood, pouring from his lifeless body, seeping into the cracks of the floors. She sees the cat running away, tracking bloody footprints across the room.