Secret Keeper

by La Guera

In the aftermath of Angell's death, Don Flack became who he hated, and then he crawled into himself. When he came out again, he found himself with so much to fix. A Flack/OFC cracknum opus.

SPOILERS: HP through HBP; CSI:NY through S6, especially "Pay Up" and "Cuckoo's Nest."

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.

All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: Set immediately after "Skin" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.

When Don Flack was twenty-four, he'd met his wife on Thirty-Fourth Street. He'd quite literally run into her as he'd pursued a perp down the crowded sidewalk. He'd bellowed for people to get out of the way, dammit, and she'd tried, but her chair was slow and he'd been fast, and he'd run headlong into her, stumbling and staggering and sending her ass-over-teakettle onto the filthy pavement as he'd blundered on in search of his quarry. The collision had broken her wrist and left a deep, horizontal bruise across his thighs where quadricep had met titanium and plastic.

He'd been breathless then, winded and sweating and light-boned with adrenaline as he'd straddled his prey and wrestled him into cuffs that had glinted in the weak, winter sun. He'd spared little thought for her in those first hectic moments after the chase, but had thought instead of the dangerous, drawn-bowstring thrum of the man beneath him, the thrashing, impotent anger of a snared cur. The man would have wounded him if given the chance, would have bucked and twisted and sunk his rotten, junkie's teeth into his forearm in a final, futile act of defiance. The collar wasn't good until the perp was in the cage, and so he'd ignored the press and swell of the crowd around him and the low, furious mutter of suppressed pain and focused on the grotty, uncharitable business of survival.

It wasn't until later, when the suspect had been locked securely in the squad car and he'd been waiting for the adrenaline to ebb from his veins, that he'd begun to worry about the squawking blur that he'd trampled in his pursuit of justice. He'd stood on the sidewalk with his hands on his hips and surveyed the aftermath. Her wheelchair had lain in the center of the pavement, one wheel bent and the spokes a warped, flaccid muddle of useless steel. The gawkers that had gathered to watch the spectacle of the chase had begun to mill and drift like dissipating fog, and as he'd watched, a thin man with chapped cheeks and a grey, woolen overcoat had carelessly stepped over her chair as though it were of no more consequence than a crushed insect. It had looked flimsy and pathetic amid the indifferent bustle of the city, and guilt had slithered into his gut like the onset of nausea. He'd grimaced in regret and moved to set the chair to rights. It had sat, but badly, listing drunkenly on its warped wheel, and when he'd chanced an experimental roll, he'd been greeted by an anguished, atonal keening from the abused wheel.

She had been in the ambulance, small and vulpine between the two white-shirted paramedics who'd hovered over her and bombarded her with questions and prodded her with the invasive tools of their trade. Tired and disheveled, she'd been, pale and slumped, her golden hair tousled and framing a thin face white with pain and wan with exhaustion. Their eyes had met briefly as he'd peered into the ambulance, and he'd seen contempt and frustration.

He doesn't know why he went to the hospital that evening. He supposes he'd been driven by conscience, by the kerchief-wearing Boy Scout that lurked beneath his smartass New York skin. He'd become a cop to help people, to protect the weak and unwary from the ravenous, disease-jawed thugs who bullied and raped and murdered for the sheer, ugly pleasure of it. There had been other motives, of course-his father's vaunted legacy had loomed large over his childhood and influenced his boyhood dreaming, an unseen yet tangible force that had steered him down the inevitable, predestinate path to the academy and away from the sweeter, more innocent dreams of becoming the next Wolfgang Puck-but in the end, the choice had been his to make, and he'd made it because he'd wanted to be a light in a city of shadows and streets that led to nowhere and squalid, lonely nothingness. He'd wanted to be a knight in blue with a shield of gold, a protector of the kingdom, and of maidens even if they weren't the fairest in the land. He supposes he'd gone because knights didn't knock maidens from their chariots and leave them in the dust. Such was the way of the knave, and he'd been determined never to wear such an ignoble mantle.

So he'd gone to the hospital to apologize and retain his standing as a knight of good grace, to reassure himself that he was a good guy and not a thoughtless brute who trod on helpless damsels and left them to lick their wounds. He's sure that if he were ever to confess this to her, she would roll her eyes and laugh and leave the needling promise of her teeth on the delicate flesh of his heart with an acerbic barb. Or maybe she wouldn't be so delicate now; maybe in the shadow of Angell's death and all of the terrible things that have come tumbling after, she would be crueler, would bite, not to mark, but to rend and tear and bruise. Perhaps even break, tooth on bone and sinew pulled from muscle and marrow slurped with greasy, blood-flecked lips. He wouldn't be surprised. She is different now, and so is he, and so is everything else.

It had been stupid, absurd, really, to think of her as weak, but he hadn't known her then, hadn't understood the fierce heart that had beaten behind that fragile, birdbone chest. Then, he'd seen only her tiny body and rounded shoulders and the loose, madcap joints fashioned by a clumsy, idiot hand. He'd been just another ignorant fool who'd seen only the least of her, her flaws and her odd, non-Euclidean angles. It wasn't until later that he would come to his epiphany and behold the unlikely greatness of her, the undimmed glory hidden beneath the dirt and bitterness and unceasing rage that so often bound her to herself. That night, she'd been just another-hard luck soul in need of a helping hand.

He'd learned better, though, in the days and weeks that followed, when he'd called her to discuss reimbursement for the damage to her chair. He'd discovered a spine of tempered steel beneath that pale skin and a will to match, a stubbornness deep enough to propel her through the world's merciless waters. She'd had a brilliant mind and a rapier wit and a serrated tongue that could cleave through the bullshit with a single, disdainful snap of her jaws. She'd been a crystal chandelier in a tinpot outhouse, such a marvelous incongruity that he could only marvel, the receiver of the precinct phone tucked in the hollow of his shoulder while he doodled on a legal pad to give the impression of industry.

There had been an indefinable sweetness behind her craggy, aloof exterior, a sense of wonder that he had long counted as lost in this city of cynics and survivors. She'd hated society with the pucker-mouthed bitterness of the perpetually-wounded, but she'd loved the world and embraced its wonders, its miracles and its ironies. She could make him laugh until his stomach was sprung and hot, could seed humor into her wry musings with an expert's hand, sugar cast carelessly atop a field of ash. She had lost her innocence long ago, sloughed it as if it were a skin too tight for her warped bones, but she hadn't surrendered her hope. It had burned less brightly than her anger, but no less fiercely, and he'd been in awe of her.

Soon, he'd found reasons to call her from home, stretched on the couch they would later share, the ugly, brown sofa on which his wriggling infant son would one day shit with gummy, gleeful gusto. He'd called to hear her voice and to coax that elusive sweetness to the surface with a prospector's infinite patience, sifting carefully through the hard, stony sediment of her heart to find flecks of gold and diamond dust. And he'd found it, more than he'd ever expected, a rich, untapped vein of it that he suspects no one before him had seen, much less touched with wondering, reverent hands. She'd guarded it jealously at first, had hidden it behind the rapier and the barbs and the brutal frankness that willed her out of bed and marched her through the unceasing grind of her days with the jut-jawed defiance of the damned, but he could be stubborn, too, a trait he'd earned from his parents and their hard-scrabble Irish and Italian roots. His mother had been a tough Italian beauty who'd come up the hard way in the Bronx, working two jobs by fifteen and helping her own parents with the upbringing of her three younger siblings. His father had been a bull-headed shanty Irish boy from Yonkers with a smart mouth and a burning desire to wash the mealy, soapscum taste of watery potato soup from his mouth, and they'd raised children cut from the same cloth, tough and ambitious and smart enough to get where they wanted to go. He'd wanted her, and he'd pursued her with the same single-minded determination he'd applied to junior college and the academy.

Eventually, she'd let him catch her.

When Don Flack was still twenty-four, he'd fallen in love at a Yankees game, as going, going, gone as the Derek Jeter homerun that had arced high over the stadium wall and disappeared into the night. Wish I may, wish I might, he'd thought as he'd watched her watch the ball drift across the sky like a falling star, and he'd wished that she would love him, invite her into her secret garden and create an Eden with him there. He'd watched her watch the ball, and when it was gone, he'd kissed her, had tasted mustard and relish and sweetness on her tongue.

Going, going, gone.

When Don Flack was still twenty-four, he'd stolen her virginity, twisting and writhing atop the rumpled bedsheets of his narrow bachelor's bed. He'd claimed her with a grunt and a sigh, eyes screwed shut against the hot-bellied, delirious pleasure of it, and she'd gasped and mewled and gritted her teeth against the pain of tribute, and she'd bled on his sheets. Blood had been smeared on her thighs when they'd parted, and her sweat had been sticky on his thighs and the coarse thatch of hair between his legs. It had been a mingling, an exchange, the signature on an unspoken covenant. She was his, and he was hers. She'd lain with her legs parted, spraddle-legged and shivering, exposed and vulnerable and helpless, and for a moment as he'd looked down at her, he wondered what he'd done, if perhaps, he'd asked too much. But when the time had come to change the sheets, she'd helped him do it, had winced at the sting between her legs and moved gingerly, but she'd helped him all the same, his partner in the pleasure and in the dirty scut work of living, and he'd known as he'd watched her struggle to slip the sheet over the corner of the mattress that it was going to be okay. He'd helped her back into bed and soothed her shivering with kisses and caresses, and when she'd stilled and surrendered to sleep, he'd curled around her in the dark and felt her breath tickle his throat.

When Don Flack was twenty-five, he'd asked her to marry him. He'd sat across from her at Delmonico's and slid a small, velvet box across the white linen. His heart had been a timpani drum against his ribcage and his balls had been small, hot stones inside his pants. His sly, smart mouth had been suddenly stupid, and he'd mumbled and fumbled and bumbled his way through a proposal that had borne little resemblance to the one he'd practiced in his bathroom mirror, and then he'd lapsed into miserable silence, hands clammy and mouth dry and belly a knotted burlap sack beneath his flushed skin.

She had stared at the box that held his heart in silence, fettucine dangling from the tines of her fork, and then she'd put down her fork and picked up the box and wrestled it open with her spidery, palsied, recalcitrant hands. She'd surveyed the contents in silence, and for a terrible, swooning moment, he'd thought he'd miscalculated, misread the signs. Her eyes had been dark and her face had been white, and her breath had been a reedy whine.

"Is this what I think it is?" she'd asked, as though she dared not trust her eyes.

"Yeah, well, I just thought-," he'd said, inarticulate when it had counted most, a bite of osso bucco a hard, dry pebble that threatened to lodge in his airway.

She had been fluent in his language even then, conversant in the tongue of a blue-collar kid with stars in his eyes and a worthless juco diploma lost in the jumble of his life. She had understood what his imbecile's tongue couldn't say, and she had smiled at him. The bright, feral child who trusted no one had trusted him, had pressed three cool fingers to his bumbling, burning lips and followed them with a kiss and a quiet, "Yes."

He'd slipped the ring onto her finger and the check onto the table, and then he'd bade her follow him into the frigid February night. She'd followed him without a backward glance, and she's followed him ever since, hand in hand and full of love's unshakeable faith.

He wonders now if she regrets it, if perhaps she wishes she'd laid a trail of breadcrumbs to find her way back. He wonders if she lies in the dark and hates him for a liar. He wonders if she wishes she'd been smart enough to love someone else.

When Don Flack was twenty-six, he'd married her in St. Patrick's Cathedral, smart and crisp in his dress blues and giddy inside his skin. She'd been lovely in her wedding dress, a china doll in white lace, and he'd marveled at her as they'd knelt before the altar and Father Carmichael. She'd knelt beside him despite the excruciating protests of her bony knees, lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line and blue eyes fixed on the cross above the altar as if to challenge God to deny her this moment of the sublime in an otherwise hard, ugly life. Her hand had been soft in his, but her spine had been ramrod straight. She'd been an angel unashamed in the presence of the Lord who had so thoughtlessly dashed her upon the earth, and he'd loved her with a ferocity that had teetered on the cusp of mania.

She'd hesitated when the father had asked if she would and did. Not long-a heartbeat and an indrawn breath-but long enough to squeeze the air from his chest and grey his vision at the edges. He'd frozen, sure that she had realized her mistake at the last instant and had decided to rescind her invitation to build his home inside her heart. He'd braced himself and waited for her to turn that defiant gaze on him, contempt and pity and recognition of her folly and relief that there was still time to retreat from the brink, but she had just stared at Father Carmichael, eyes wide and bewildered, a woman who had awakened from a pleasant daydream to find herself crouched before the jaws of a predatory beast.

He'd swallowed his triphammering heart and squeezed her hand, whether to awaken her from her nightmare or coax her over the precipice, he hadn't known. She'd startled and blinked and offered him a sidelong glance and a shy smile, and then she'd squared her shoulders and stepped over the precipice with an "I do" that had resounded through the cavernous, white-marble vault of the cathedral like the clarion of a bell. His insides had turned to wax and water and his lips to fire. He'd raised her veil and cupped her cheeks, which, for once, had been warm and rosy with happiness. He'd tilted her chin and bent his head, and there before God, His emissary, and five hundred people, he'd drunk deeply of her, his second hope and living font of grace unbidden.

When Don Flack was twenty-eight, he had nearly widowed her, traded the joyous white of her wedding gown for the austere black of mourning. It had been the last thing he'd intended to do that Sunday morning in May, when he'd slipped from their bed and her embrace and into his armor. He'd left her with a kiss and promised her that he'd be back soon. The next time he saw her, it had been eight days later and her heart had been as broken as his guts as she'd sat beside his hospital bed and held his limp hand to keep him from slipping into the cold, dark waters of eternity.

He thinks of that kiss often now, wishes he'd held it just a few seconds longer, had treasured it a little more. Maybe if he'd lingered, had taken the few precious seconds to cradle the thin cup of her skull in his hands and seek out the sweetness behind her teeth and beneath her tongue, if he'd kissed her as he'd meant it and not as duty had demanded it be, then he wouldn't be here now. Maybe that inconsequential delay would have meant that he would have missed his date with a plummeting Xerox machine. Maybe he would've gotten stuck in traffic, or maybe he would have been three steps behind Mac instead of ten ahead. If had had only kissed her as he ought, then he might have emerged with little more than ringing ears and a dirty face and skin scraped raw from the shrapnel of flying concrete. He might've come home to her with nothing more than dust in his mouth instead of the blood and poison and the cursed, too-sharp teeth with which he'd let the poison in.

When Don Flack was still twenty-eight, still a straw man with guts held together by thread and modern medicine, he had bitten the hand that had reached for him, bitten through flesh and blood to scrape bone and score raw, bleeding wounds in her tenderest places. He hadn't meant to hurt, only to deflect, to stay the constantly-grasping, hands that had clutched his arms or slithered around his neck or fluttered around his wounds like a panicked hummingbird, cool and solicitous and tender and strangling as ivy. He'd wanted peace, just five goddamned minutes to let his body be his own, to slip away from the gnawing pain of internal reconstruction.

But he'd been pain-rabid and tired and frightened, and the nip he'd intended had become a mindless snap of jaw. He'd had the fortune of the damned that miserable, weltering summer, and his teeth had battened onto her deepest wound, had tasted the sweet, high, pork-fat rot of her insecurity, the ugly, rancid meat of her loneliness and shame and heartbroken fear.

"Why don't you entertain yourself for a while? You've done enough damage," he'd snarled, exasperated and breathless with the pain she'd inflicted with an errant touch of her hand. Hurt and tired and cat-shit mean and possessed of the shameful urge to spread the wealth.

And his china doll had fractured, suddenly soft and frangible beneath her skin. He hadn't heard it, the grinding shift of grit and porcelain shards refashioning themselves into a new, unimagined whole, but seen it. It had been in the stiffness of her body, the shocked, inflexible spasticity of her arms as she'd fought the urge to curl them tight against her chest, the shriveled, atrophied forelimbs of a velociraptor. In the set of her jaw and the dimness of her eyes. Something vital and precious had failed catastrophically in that moment, had shorted and snapped and collapsed into rubble and left nothing but dust and negative space in its wake. It should've been fatal, should have brought her to her knees there beside the bed, but his china doll was greater than the material of her forging, and she had found the strength to drag herself away and leave him to his petty victory and his coveted rest.

He hadn't realized what he'd done, of course, not then. He'd been too tired and drugged and enamored of his righteous pique to notice, too drunk with pain and Vicodin to see that the fracture was no mere hairline fracture to be buffed away with an apology and salved with kisses and a candlelit dinner at Salvatore's, with the music slow and low and the garlic heavy and a bustling Italian nona in the miniscule restaurant kitchen, but a gaping fault that reached its jagged, pernicious fingers through flesh and bone and into her battle-scarred heart. It wasn't until later, when his belated apology had fallen on indifferent ears and the days and weeks and months had stretched into brittle silence that he'd begun to comprehend the extent of the damage, and when he had, he'd been rendered stupid and impotent in the face of it, boneless and powerless and inert, a blast-rattled survivor gazing gormlessly into the crater left behind by a speeding meteor.

He had tried to mend the damage then, but it was too late; the fracture had calcified and set and trapped the hurt inside, where it had simmered and festered and darkened her eyes. Her lips and her arms and her cunt had forgiven him, and maybe her heart had, too, but it has certainly never forgotten. It quails at the slightest shadow, and she freezes, eyes wide and teeth bared, ready to shut him out before he can hurt her again with his promises that break as soon as they leave his mouth, fragile as glass blown from sugar sand. The past looms large in her memory, and he has done precious little to make her forget it.

He knows now that he waited too long to salve that wound. He should have apologized the instant the words left his mouth, neutralized them with an "I'm sorry. I love you." He should have dragged himself out of bed and pursued her into the living room, teeth clenched against the agonized, diseased-gum throb in his mending guts and swallowed his pain as she had swallowed hers for eight long days and seven long nights. He should have reached for her, drawn her in, and never mind if she snapped at him in a moment of blind heartache, returned a portion of the favor with a flash of teeth and cutting tongue. He should have loved her until her rage was spent, loved her anyway. It was how she had loved him until then, until that irrevocable moment when he'd chosen himself over her, let go of her hand and watched her drift away.

If he could go back now, he would, but he can't, and so the knowledge is useless. It burns and shifts in his belly, a fragment of masonry that Dr. Singh's keen eyes and nimbly-plucking fingers missed. Sometimes, when he is alone, in the stationhouse bathroom or crammed into a squad car and watching some derelict storefront for signs of the human cockroaches that skitter within its crumbling walls, he feels it stir, a momentary flutter behind his navel that reminds him of his son's quickening inside her belly, a purposeful, exploratory tap beneath the skin. It's the nucleus of something terrible, as alive and aware as his son had been as he'd bobbed and drifted in the warm, sheltering waters of his mother's womb. He can't see its face. It's turned from him, the dark side of the moon, but he can see its soul, and that's worse. He would tear it out if he could, reach inside himself and yank it out by the roots, but it's too late for that. It's too far gone, and he's too afraid.

He wonders what it will look like when he finally sees its face. Part of him thinks he already knows, thinks he saw its profile in the dim, infernal light of a boiler room where a bad man went to die, saw its eyes in the glare of the muzzle flash in the instant before his bullet slammed into Simon Cade's bastard, Jess-murdering head and left flash burns on his soul that still prickle and smart and burn even though he bathes them in Beam and the cold, silver waters of the moon.

Sweet child o' mine, he thinks, and he grimaces as his belly cramps and rolls, trying, he supposes, to wrap its strangling fingers around his heart.

When Don Flack was twenty-nine, he had sat at this very table and poured salt into the wound that had never healed. He had hated himself for it, but he had done it all the same, because he was a knight in blue, and his kingdom had called him to arms. He had sat in this very chair with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other and sunk the latter into her unsuspecting back. He can still remember the way she'd looked at him when he'd opened his mouth and slid the knife home, the terrible stillness when she'd finally understood.

He'd expelled her from the Eden he'd offered her when he'd slipped a small, golden band onto her trembling finger, turned her out and barred the gate against her in the name of jewelry stolen from rich, Manhattan socialites who were too busy to miss the things they'd lost. He'd turned her out because the department asked him to, and because he'd been too much a coward then to refuse. He'd only been back on the job five months when the order came down, and he'd been afraid that if he turned down the assignment, then the brass would mark it as weakness and him as damaged goods and quietly shuffle him off the promotion grid. Disappointing them had been the greater of two terrors for him then, and God, that makes him want to laugh and cry at the same time, makes his gut roil with a shame that tastes like Beam and blood.

She, he'd told himself as he'd stepped out with a female undercover on his arm and ground his love's heart beneath his heel with every traitorous step, would forgive him. The job wouldn't. No choice, he'd reassured himself as he'd eaten shrimp canapes and oysters Rockefeller off polished silver trays and tried not to think of his apartment, empty and dark and dead as a deconsecrated church without her to light it. There had been no choice.

Oh, but there had been a choice. Always. He'd just been too much of a coward and a selfish bastard to make it. He'd gone on swilling hundred-dollar wine and dusting his skin with designer gowns and left her with a knife in her back and no place to crawl inside and lick the wound. He would laugh if it didn't hurt so much.

She had been the one with no choice, and she had gone without a word, gone to her exile while he'd slept. She'd left not a trace of blood behind, had held in her guts until she was too far away to stain him. She had left only a single word scrawled on a black-and-white photograph and a letter entrusted to a witless hotel desk clerk. He's not sure which had hurt worse, the letter, redolent with sorrow and confusion and hurt and a love so deep it cut his insides, or that single, scrawled word, an open-mouthed howl of rage that even she could not contain. The letter had driven him to drink and the roof of their building, where he had jumped rope until his knees had throbbed and burned and screamed in sympathy, ground glass in his joints, but the word has never left him. It burns at the base of his brain like an incipient tumor, and sometimes, he sees it when he sits on the edge of the bed in the middle of the night and watches Rebecca sleep, too afraid to touch her, lest he leave yet another bruise. It flutters behind his eyelids like a dust mote and etches itself into the random tussocks and whorls of bedsheet. It scores and brands and sticks to his skin like a nettle, burrows deeper with every move he makes. He'd thought it meant for another, then, that terrible word, with its indictment and its hatred, but after last night, he wonders. Wonders and aches and wishes he'd been more careful with the miraculous gift he'd been given.

She had cried out only once, and then only because he'd asked more of a heart already straining beneath the burden he had asked it to bear. It had been a cry, not of rage and defiance, but of simply agony, of fragmenting bone and splintering heart, of blood oozing between clutching fingers and teeth stained plum with blood and lungs that cannot breathe with the weight of the world on their encapsulating chest.

You promised, she'd breathed into the phone, returned to the simple fairness of childhood in her disappointment. You promised me. And then when he'd remained sadly, steadfastly resolute in the face of her hurt, buffered from the stark, naked ugliness of it by the mercy of distance, you bastard. The dull, nasal whine of the broken connection in his ear, a child not too proud to cry.

And he had promised, had sat and this very table with steak cooling between them like a body and held her hands and told her that it wouldn't take long. Two weeks top, and then they'd take that vacation that he'd been promising for years and on which he'd never delivered. Just two weeks of spitting on the most sacred vows he had ever made in exchange for ten rushed days in whatever pisspot hotel and resort his ever-dwindling civil servant's salary could afford. She hadn't wanted the trade, had turned her face from it like a child from the bitterest of medicines, but in the end, she had opened wide and swallowed it down because she was a good wife, and because by then, she had known that she could expect no better, and even a mouthful of gall was better than the yawning nothing he so often offered her.

He had overestimated his skills, had been too stupid and too brash, and two weeks had spun into one hundred and seven days. One hundred and seven days adrift, with only her rage and her determination to bind her. One hundred and seven days of tears that he hadn't been there to wipe away, and Rebecca, that unearthly child of no wasted motion, had simply let them run. By the time he'd crept to the airport with his heart and a bouquet of wilting flowers in his sweating fist, they had carved deep grooves around her eyes and mouth and caused her mouth to buckle. She'd been bent and haggard beneath the weight of those one hundred and seven days, and when she'd looked at him as she'd rolled grimly down the concourse, she'd seen not her loving and remorseful husband, but a man come to lay another burden across her trembling, broken shoulders.

She said she'd forgiven him, had said it with lips and tongue and teeth and the greedy, lascivious, wet suction of her mouth as she'd hollowed her cheeks and swirled her tongue around his bucking, blindly-thrusting prick in a motel room that had stunk of musty sheets and melting filament and wet phonebook. Because even then he could not take her home and reinstall her upon her domestic throne; he had wanted to, had longed for it with a desperation that had made his muscles ache and throb and turn to taut cords beneath his flushed skin, but the department had insisted he stay the course, remain in the yoke it had so rudely thrust upon him even if he died in it, even if everything good and sweet in his dirty, grimy, monochromatic life of blood and bodies and squirming dead things died in it. He had stolen that night from its copper-toothed jaws in an act of petty defiance, had cradled her to himself until the sweat had dried on their bodies, had pressed his nose into the golden fall of her hair to smell clean skin and peaches and the heady odor of freshly-scythed wheat. And when sleep had taken her into its clutching depths and hidden his shame and cowardice from those lovely blue eyes, he'd taken up the yoke and abandoned her a second time.

And she had forgiven him a second time, had said so by the same means in their bed three weeks later. She had imparted her forgiveness with her cunning mouth and cool, splay-fingered hands and the wet, sucking warmth of her spasming, spastic cunt. She had kissed him and loved him, and she had cried out with a sound not born of pain, had shuddered and gasped and exacted what penance she would with short-clipped nails that raised red weals down his back. Forty lashes rendered in lines of four and soothed with her pliant, drowsy mouth.

She had forgiven him, perhaps, but she has never healed, never regained the sense of sure and equal footing that she had enjoyed in this apartment once upon a time, before his superiors had come with their badges and their self-importance and their need to play the political game and kicked her beloved castle to dust. Before he had shown his belly and betrayed her and stood aside to let them do it. Once upon a time, she had considered these walls, drab and cramped and insufficient to her needs as they are, her home, the secret place that the cruelties of the world could not violate with their thieving fingers and rapacious, devouring jaws, the one spot of cement earth that his job could not sully with its endless bowing, withering need. Once upon a time, she had thought him worthy of her devotion, a son of Helios and a prince among men. She had been proven wrong on both counts, and the knowledge had lain heavily upon her, had made her stumble where once she had sat tall and proud, to flinch at the rap upon the front door and to shy from his touch whenever it comes with tidings of which she is sure she cannot be glad, with another shameful humiliation that she can but endure.

He has seen these changes, has noted them with a hollow-hearted despair, but like most cowards who cannot bear to face the truth they have wrought, he has turned his face from them and told himself that they aren't as bad, as damning, as his smarting conscience deems them. Before he had drawn the bourbon curtain over his eyes and gone blind to everything but the echo of gunshots in his ears and the dusty, acrid taint of cordite on his hands and face, he had watched her creep warily through her home, fearful to tread too heavily, lest a hand snatch the ground from beneath her unsteady feet, watched her hunker on the couch and huddle in the wan yellow light of her designated corner of the living room and cling to her domesticity like Gollum crooning to his beloved precious deep in the belly of the Misty Mountains. No madness in her eyes, thank God, but something just as unsettling-a flat, calculating, reptilian gaze, as though she were measuring the distance between herself and the fragile flesh of his throat or belly. He had watched her adoration for him sour into confusion and sorrow and sullen contempt.

He had seen it all and done nothing, because it was easier, and because he was convinced that it had not yet grown too late, that he still had time to tend and mend the wounds he had inflicted. She was strong, and she would wait, he had told himself as his workload increased and his always-divided attention had drifted further and further from her ebbing light and closer to the grey and sepia and blood-smeared colors of his waking world. There would be a better time for the vacation he had promised, a more convenient time when the names of the dead didn't litter his desk like drifts of ash-smeared snow. But there never had been. One victory had been offset by another senseless loss, and for every name he had cleared from his desk, another had taken its place, and another, and another, until a week had become a month and a month had blurred into a year, and the IOUs had outstripped the "I love yous" in the lightless vault of her broken heart.

Oh, but he knows better now. The hour has grown very late, indeed, perhaps too late for him to save his neglected Wonderland, and like the white rabbit who had run to beat the devil and meet her at the other end of the winding rabbit hole, he can only play beat the clock and hope his furious queen remembers mercy before he loses his head. Rebecca has been slow and forebearing in her march to anger, but now that she has succumbed and tasted of it, she intends to let him have its fullest measure, to pour it over him like anointing oil gone rancid and black with flies. Why shouldn't she when he who pledged to love her best has shielded her from nothing, has left her for the piercing, glutting beaks of the carrion crows that tear her to pieces one disingenuous expression of gratitude for her sacrifice at a time? Her sacrifice. As if she'd ever had a choice in any of it. He had given her no choice, and she who had had no choice had chosen to hold her tongue because she had loved him in spite of her anger, but now the love that had bound her tongue is dying, and every curse she has ever swallowed is poised on a tongue honed sharp as a killing blade.

What? Hm? What? I've done everything you've ever asked of me. I've swallowed my pride and turned my head while you swanned around the city with a prissy debutante cunt on your arm and pissed on our marriage for a fistful of jewelery and a useless, paper 'atta boy' in your personnel file. I've supported whatever lie you've had to tell for the sake of your sworn duty, no matter how painful or humiliating, no matter how many scores it leaves on my soul. I've come when you called and left when I was no longer convenient. I've kissed the mouth that told me I'd done enough damage; I've held your hand through three IAB hearings in two years. I've surrendered my job, my independence, and my entire world so that you could be someone else's hero. And for four months, I've watched you mourn your dead whore in our home and never said a goddamn word. So what could you possibly ask of me now?

The words burn in his ears and bubble on his skin like sulfur and lye, an indictment hurled from the burning lips of an infuriated goddess who will brook no more excuses from the puny mortal who has paid but pitiful obeisance at her feet for these seven years, who will extend no more favors but mete out a righteous justice befitting his crime. And he can only cower and prostrate himself before her because she has spoken no falsehood, and because he knows that it is but a thimbleful of the rage that roils and seethes behind her lips like the restless, lifeless waters of a dead and poisoned sea. He is late, so very late now, and if he does not repair the divide he has so long ignored, then she will drown him with but a parting of her lips.

When Don Flack was still thirty, still treading carefully on the loose and shifting ground of Rebecca's slowly-mending graces, he had gifted his goddess a child, had conceived a son in the back of a departmental SUV. It was a gift he had not intended, but in which they had both reveled, and for a time, the sun had returned to his castle in the clouds and the light had returned to Rebecca's eyes. She had been uncharacteristically daunted by the task set before her, demanded of her small, frail body, and for a moment as she'd sat on the sofa, small and light and huddled in his embrace, she had doubted herself. He had kissed her hair and stroked her pinched, pale face and promised her that it would be all right, though he had been just as frightened. And then his goddess had lain on the ultrasound table with a useless sheet of half-ply butcher paper over her belly and a magic wand jammed between her spraddled, resisting legs and a grainy image on the oscillating screen. His goddess had looked upon the image, the castor-bean outline of the miracle that would become their son, and she had forgotten her fear. She had roused herself from her long sleep and accepted the charge lain before her with dignity and grace and a quiet glory that made his eyes prickle and throb with unshed tears. She had turned to him with the half-ply on her belly and the wand shoved indecorously up her twat and smiled. And then she had taken his hand and squeezed it, glory, glory, allelu, absolution at last. He had held on as tightly as he dared and told himself that he would be more careful, would be a more conscientious tender of the gifts that he'd been given.

When Don Flack was thirty-one, with five years of marriage and four weeks of 2008 behind him, he had sat behind his desk in the precinct and watched his heretofore unassuming wife draw the mantle of a warrior around her bony, sagging shoulders and murder a man with a point of her scrawny finger and the speed of a striking serpent. There had been no doubt of her godhood then, when she'd loomed over her fallen enemy and radiated a power that had made his mouth turn to ash and his knees turn to water. He'd sagged in his office chair with the sad remains of his anniversary grinder forgotten on the edge of his desk and beheld the face of his goddess in full splendor. Wan and thin and wet with tears, but her hair had been a golden diadem from which he could not tear his disbelieving gaze, and her eyes had blazed with a might beyond reckoning, far greater than the meager weapons with which he had thought to protect her.

She'd had four months of his unborn son in her belly that cold February evening, and yet he hadn't recognized her as she'd seized the body sprawled on the floor and shaken it like a terrier flaying a rat, fists clenched and eyes wild and belly tightening dangerously. Fury and hard angles and a raw power that had swirled around her like the anticipatory breath before a storm. He'd feared her in that moment, relearned the true meaning of awe, that unfortunate, emasculated word stripped of its glory and used to extol the virtues of energy bars and hair gels. He'd feared to touch her, lest the power rattling through her bones and surging through her veins like ungrounded electricity reduce him to bits of bone and smoldering ash and burnt hair, but he had also feared for his sleeping child, fragile and preoccupied with the business of becoming, and so he had swallowed his terror and sought out his wife inside the fury who had stolen her skin. And Rebecca, his obdurate changeling child, had answered.

He'd taken her home, knuckles white on the steering wheel and mind crowded with images of death rushing from her pointing finger in a flash of red and hissing from her mouth like Charon's lullaby, booming as thunder on the mountain, and sibilant, a blade drawn against a whetstone. That dreadful, alien word that had passed her lips with the terrible ease of long familiarity. The inexplicable gaping second mouth that had appeared below her attacker's chin and spilled his blood onto the floor of the precinct in a spreading crimson pool, the iron and cordite reek of it amid the heat of adrenaline and clustered bodies. The whiteness of his hair, a blond so light it had verged on silver, as though he'd been a child of midnight and moon dust. The faces of his fellow detectives, writ large with emotions that mirrored his own-confusion and fear and a primitive awe. The rustle of heavy, snow-dusted parkas as officers from a precinct of which he'd never heard had trooped through the stationhouse with sticks in their hands and snow on their shoulders. The hush that had fallen over the bullpen as two of them had disappeared into the captain's office. The thin, Hispanic officer who had introduced himself as Officer Tony Ramirez and interrogated his wife in a language he could not speak, could scarcely comprehend. Watching he and Rebecca speak had been dizzying, like eavesdropping on angels, and he'd fought a dull, tight-bellied nausea that had made his scar throb and burn and closed his eyes against a wave of vertigo.

What he'd remembered most on that interminable, solemn, silent ride home-what he still remembers-had been the faces of his fellow officers as they'd emerged, in ones and twos, from the captain's office. They'd been slack and bewildered, as though they'd glimpsed eternity behind the closed blinds and had surrendered their minds to the outstretched hands of a judging angel. They'd tugged absently at their clothes as though they had never seen them before and wished each other "Happy Thanksgiving" and "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year" and inquired after birthdays and anniversaries that had come and gone a season before. They'd moved with the drowsy slowness of people roused from deep and troubling dreams, and he had watched them in silent dread, a man thrust unawares into a dream of another's making. He'd looked to Rebecca for explanation and solace and a mirror of his own confusion, but Rebecca had not been there, only the strange, pitiless dybbuk that had borrowed her skin. His skin had prickled into hard knots of gooseflesh, and he'd fought the nigh-overwhelming urge to cram his knuckles into his mouth and flee to the sanity of the outside world, with the bums and the sidewalk preachers and the end-of-the-world evangelists in their suits of cardboard armor.

He'd learned to live with the truth he'd discovered that cold February night because he'd loved her fiercely, but it had terrified him, too, this new facet of his china doll. Everything he'd thought he'd known about her had been rudely redefined. Curves had become planes and angles had had become unyielding lines and every softness had become hard and cutting as flint beneath his groping hands. The topography of their relationship had turned upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye, and he could only cling to the certainty of his love for her and hope the world righted itself before he lost his grip.

His hopes had been answered in the end. She might not have needed him to protect her from the murderers and the rapists and the myriad horrors that lurked outside her doors, but she had needed him in other ways. She had still needed him to kiss her good morning when she staggered to the toilet with Morpheus' dreaming dust falling from her blearily-blinking eyes, and to card his fingers through her freshly-washed hair as he drank his coffee and flipped through the delivery of bills the night before. She'd still needed him to massage the knots of tension from her neck and shoulders at the end of a long day and whisper that he loved her while she splayed limply against his cushioning chest. She'd still needed him to clip her toenails and shave her sex with his old Remington, the guard set to its lowest setting and tufts of lightly-curling down drifting to the towel spread beneath her ass. She'd still needed him to consecrate her bare cunt with long, lazy strokes of his tongue, needed him to flick its practiced, wet blade against the swollen nub of her clit until she cried out and rose up beneath him, fingers tangled in his hair. She'd still needed him to enfold her in his arms when it was over, to keep the chilling sorrow of alone at bay. She had still needed him to love her.

And love her he had, blindly and wholeheartedly. For one precious season between her fourth month and her ninth, he had installed her upon her rightful throne as the undisputed queen of his heart. She had come first unequivocally, with neither peer nor rival for his attentions and affections, and she had blossomed, flourished along with the child in her belly. For once, he had been the Prince Charming she had believed him to be that long-ago day at St. Patrick's when she'd dangled one dainty foot over the riser of the snow-dusted front steps and trusted him to keep her from falling. She had rediscovered her lost and broken faith, and the fractures in her heart had begun to heal.

But he hadn't been perfect for long enough, and in the end, his china doll had shattered in his stupid, clumsy hands. Now, he's bleeding from a thousand wounds he never knew he had, and there isn't enough hope or willpower or make-up sex to make it stop. He's bleeding to death at his kitchen table, held upright by the desire to see her one last time before her red lightning flashes like overdue judgment and shatters him into a million pieces.

When Don Flack was still thirty-one and she was happy and in love and nine months gone with his firstborn child, the prince had stumbled from his pedestal and reclaimed his pauper's clothes. Heavy with child and never at ease with gravity's relentless tug, she had nearly fallen in the bathroom and only his reflexes and adrenaline-fueled grace had kept him from losing them both. Frozen in his improbable fencer's crouch with his heart lodged in his throat like a strangling clot and eyes fixed on her gravid belly, he had taken it into his mind to betray her, though that wasn't what his triphammering father's heart had called it. No creature is more adept at necessary delusion than a frightened man, and so, he had steadied her and helped her back into bed, and while she had slept beside him, trusting and swaddled in dreams of cradles and blankets and bassinets lined with blue bunting, he had silenced his conscience with images of his child's head jutting from between her blood-smeared thighs as she bled to death on the bathroom floor and he drowned in the ever-spreading pool of her blood or throttled on his umbilical cord. There in the bed, with her dreaming breath a sussurating rush in the humid, summer silence of their small bedroom, he had watched the steady rise and fall of her domed belly and plotted his treachery.

He had sprung his trap the next morning. She had resisted, but terror had made him ruthless, and he had spared no weapon in his campaign to keep her safe. He had pleaded and justified and issued husbandly fiats, and when each had failed, he had stooped to his cruelest tactic. He had raised the specter of death in the line of duty, had implied that if she refused to surrender her pride and spend the remainder of her pregnancy in the impersonal confines of the hospital, that way station for the dying, then she was exposing him to the risk of death by lowlife's bullet or the whicking, quicksilver bloodletting of a knife or the deadly flash of a straight razor across his jugular, that she would be the fatal distraction his mother had always believed her to be. He'd used her guilt and fear against her, indicted her for her pride, and he'd hated himself for it, had felt ugly and mean and unworthy of her, but enlightened civility had collapsed in the face of the biological imperative to protect his offspring and his mate, and he'd become a caveman. He'd broken her to save her, and he'd told himself that later, she would understand, when she was delivered of their son, and he slept, pink and healthy, in his bassinet. She would understand, and forgive him this trespass.

And Rebecca had heard his accusations and doomsday predictions and wept in terror and a child's naked misery, because she had loved him, and because, deep in her heart, she had believed the worst suppositions of her mother-in-law, who thought her a burden and a mistake made in a fit of noble, blind charity by her kindhearted, idealistic young son, her only son, who would save the world because he could not save his baby sister. She had raised her voice to heaven in protest, and when heaven's doors had remained shut against her, she had wiped her eyes and squared her shoulders and been the good wife one more time. She'd packed her suitcase and swallowed her fear and outrage and submitted to his paranoia, let him lead her from the safety of their apartment and pile her into the car like so much inconvenient bric-a-brac to be stored out of sight and out of mind until she was no longer such an imposition.

She had been stony and silent during the drive to the hospital, and the faceless, grasping child had stirred in his belly, had reached up and squeezed his guts with slick, burning fingers, and guilt had tasted like coffee and bile as he'd tried to distract her from his treachery with bright, empty chatter and the sad bribery of breakfast at a greasy spoon in exchange for her freedom. But Rebecca had never been easily swayed, and she had just shaken her head and clutched her suitcase as though it had contained the last remnants of her kinder life, and looking back now, with the unflinching clarity of hindsight, he thinks maybe it had. Maybe those clothes and those cheap sundries and the clutch of tattered, secondhand paperbacks had been mementos, artifacts from a dead life, a life before she knew that he could betray her so abjectly and finally. Here in the gloomy solitude of his kitchen, waiting for her key to turn in the lock and watching the clock and the lazy dance of the dust motes in the close, unclean air of an apartment in need of airing, the memories are clearer and sharper and cut so much deeper with no blood or flashing lights or screaming, vengeance-swearing criminals to distract him. He remembers now the expression in her eyes then, the anguished bleakness of a survivor returned to the place of her greatest torment. A survivor who knows there will be no more miracles.

He'd swallowed his guilt and gabbled uselessly at her and made promises to himself as much as to her, promises in which he would fail as he had failed in so many others, and then they had been there, and it been too late to do anything but help her out of the car and deliver her unto the birthplace of her darkest terrors.

Just for a little while, he'd sworn to himself as he'd pushed her through the sliding glass doors that had opened up to swallow her whole. Just until the baby comes. I have to keep him safe, too, now, right? As if he were nothing but a concerned father, and not a faithless husband deserting his wife in the loveless halls of the witch king. He still remembers the unexpected heft of the pen in his hand as he'd filled out the admission forms, and how small Rebecca had looked in her chair, cowed and shrunken and defenseless and pleading with her eyes even as her mouth remained resolutely shut. Love me enough to bear me away from here, she had silently begged, and he had hardened his aching heart and convinced himself it was for the best and concentrated on the paperwork balanced on his knees.

She had borne up until the blue, plastic ID bracelet had cinched around her wrist like a manacle, and then all her childhood nightmares had slipped their fraying tethers and run, screaming, from her mouth. She'd forsaken her cherished dignity then, had cast it aside like a millstone from around her neck and begged him not to leave her there, stripped of everything but her name and warehoused like so much damaged freight beside bodies wracked with cancer and the obsolescence of age. She had sobbed and pleaded and tangled her fingers in his shirt, had clung to him as if he were her only salvation.

It had frightened him to see his customarily-poised, proud wife so unmanned, lost in the throes of hysteria, and he had nearly relented, but the image of his son dead and blue between her cold thighs had welled to the surface of his mind like a pustulent boil, and he'd quashed the impulse before it could take root and damn his son to death before he'd drawn his first breath. He'd soothed and murmured and coaxed her into her room, and then he'd eased her into the bed that would become her prison with the gentlest of hands and tried to ignore the yellow, porkfat stink of death wafting from the wizened, pain-wracked form in the next bed.

Only a little while, he'd told himself over and over again as his terrified wife had hiccoughed and sniffled and clung to his hands with panicky tightness. Only a little while, as she'd shuddered and keened and gazed at him with a feverish mixture of shame and terror and a dreadful awareness. The terror would but endure for a little while, and then they would have a son, and the terror would dissipate like smoke in a heavy rain, displaced by the joy of family. Only a little while, as she prostrated herself before him, thrown herself upon his mercy and begged him to shield her from the monsters that waited for her just beyond his field of view.

She had been so persistent in her terror that the admitting nurse had offered to sedate her. A finger of unease had crept along his spine then, cold and unhurried as the slither of a garden slug, because she had told him this would happen, his hunched and beseeching prophetess. She had foretold it as she'd sat at the kitchen counter and enumerated the horrors to be found within a hospital's sterile, loveless walls, an apocalyptic Cassandra with truths black as pitch upon her tongue. She had told him, and like Ramses II, he had stoppered his ears and ignored the evidence of his heart, the recognition of truth beneath the mindless fear.

But unlike the luckless Pharaoh of Egypt, who ran his empire to wrack and ruin rather than concede defeat, it had not been he who had suffered for his intransigence. It had been Rebecca, his helpless prophetess unheeded. He had bid the voice of unease be silent and abandoned her there, had prised her clinging fingers from his hands and the fabric of his shirt and told her that he would be back tomorrow, and left her in the care of the monsters she so feared. He had left her there and congratulated himself on making the hard choice and told himself that thinking of her every moment of their necessary parting would be enough.

He thinks that if he could go back in time and meet himself in that hospital corridor, he would punch himself flat in the smug face, punch until the lip split and the knuckles bruised and the blood flowed down his chin in a warm, wet freshet, until his thick head had dislodged itself from the snug bower of his self-absorbed ass. He would seize himself by the collar and drag himself back to that hothouse death room and force himself to look into Rebecca's lost, heartbroken eyes until the truth struck home like a breath-stealing fist. He would sit himself down in an unpadded chair and watch as the minutes bled into hours with the torpid slowness of fluid through a saline drip and the night drew down and the sounds of the dying sharpened as light-blinded eyes grew more acute with the coming of the dark and they saw the shadows rising from the corners and floors like fleshless fingers rising from the River Styx. He would watch as she lay in the dark without the pitiful solace of his arms and listened to the breath wheeze and rattle from the body in the next bed like the autumnal wind soughing through the cornsilk and called for the bedpan and the glass of water that never came. He would force himself to watch as she counted the hours until he graced her with his attentions for a few hours in the early evening and left her again, his mind already turned to his caseload. He would make himself watch her face crumble as the fear closed in around her like a suffocating cocoon. He would make himself bear witness as she curled in on herself as best she could with her distended belly and sobbed into the thin, shabby hospital linen. He would make himself watch as she left calls for him that went unreturned because he was busy with someone else's life or death, and because it broke his heart to hear her small, sad voice on the other end of the line.

And he would make himself watch while she lay neglected, panting for want of water because the Nurse Ratchett in whose care he had left her was too busy to bring her the bedpan every few hours. He would watch as they left her on a diaper pad because it was easier than helping her relieve herself with a modicum of dignity.

And he would force himself to watch as they tied her to the bedrails and left her to stew in her own piss like a chained cur, drugged and thirsty and robbed of her voice by the Haldol they pumped into her veins when she dared resist. He would watch as her eyes rolled in their sockets and drool rolled down her chin and piss sluiced down her slack thighs in a warm rush. He would watch as everything that was her-her wit and intellect and shrewd awareness of the world through which she moved-drowned in a narcotizing tide of manufactured indifference. He would watch all that of which he had been blessedly, blissfully ignorant. He owes her that and then some. If he is honest, he owes her a debt he has no hope of repaying, a debt he cannot calculate in dollars and cents or hugs and kisses or dinners and candlelit backrubs. He owes her more than he is or could ever be, and the enormity of the debt makes him feel weak and small and ashamed.

It wasn't supposed to be like this, so one-sided and grossly unfair. When he had slid that small, black velvet ring box across the crisp, white linens of Delmonico's, he had thought he was offering her a place in an equal partnership, that the yoke of marriage would fall upon them both in equal measure. He would be a cop, and she would be a professor of mathematics, and they would walk through life on equal footing, hand-in-hand and heads bent against the wind. She would wash the laundry and fold the clothes and pay the internet and light bills, and he would vacuum and fix the leaking shower nozzle and pay for the groceries and the credit cards and her subway pass. She would rub his neck and his feet and make him homemade soup when he was sick, and he would clip her fingernails and toenails and set up the heating pad when the cramps laid her low. When adversity struck, they would meet it together, linked by love and common purpose, and weather the storm with heads and hearts held high.

He had promised himself that he would be a better husband than his father was, a better father, if the opportunity arose. He would love and honor and cherish her, would shield her from the predations of the job and establish limits it could not breach, no matter how insistent the clacking of its claws outside his door. He would not forget her, lose her in the blinding, blurring, dizzying shuffle of his superhero's life. She would always be venerated, a goddess among mortals who had chosen to walk with him alone, and he would never allow her voice to be lost amid the din and cacophony of his beloved city.

All the loftiest of intentions. He had held each of them beneath his tongue as he'd recited his marriage vows on his knees before the cold, imposing altar of St. Patrick, had tasted them on his tongue like Communion wine. He had held them as sacred as the vows he had made before God and five hundred people. He had been cocky and young and sure of his limitless capabilities, and he had wanted to be worthy of her whom he so blindly adored. So he'd taken her in his arms and velcroed her feet to his and waltzed her across the smooth, polished reception-hall floor, and later that night, he'd consummated his marriage and his unspoken promise in their bedroom, ardent and desperately in love and mercifully unaware of how long and winding their road would prove.

One by one, those lofty intentions and his unspoken vows had come crashing down and been trampled beneath reality's shattering heel. He had never forgotten her, no; to this day, she is the first thought on his mind when he opens his eyes and the standard he holds before him when he marches off to war in a city gone mad, more precious and talismanic than the St. Michael's medals he wears beneath his shirt and his Kevlar vest. But he has lost sight of her in the mad rush to snare madmen and murderers and uphold justice, has succumbed to the tunnel vision of the chase and let chances to demonstrate his devotion slip through his fingers. He has canceled dinners days or weeks in the planning, postponed vacations and aborted romantic evenings to race to a stranger's rescue because duty declares he must. He has left her far too alone for far too long with nothing in return save for useless apologies, and he has missed so many precious moments in her life-award banquets honoring her achievements as a molder of minds and leader of tomorrow. Hell, he'd even missed her transformation from mousy, unassuming mathematics professor into a preeminent mind in her field. While she was busily reshaping the world from behind a table in an NYU lecture hall, he'd been across the city, slurping bland canapes and playing young, dumb, and hung with a vapid undercover named Devon Maddox.

In three hours, his wife had changed the world; in three hours, he'd changed his bisque-stained shirt. She had performed her miracle without him there to see it, though not for want of begging. She had pleaded with him to come with her, to serve as her proud escort on this, her night of nights. Surely the city could spare him for one night, she had reasoned; surely, he could be her Prince Charming for a few hours while she put on a smile and hobnobbed with faculty members, fellow mathematicians, and glassy-eyed philanthropists who had understood nothing of her presentation but who had sensed the opportunity to be a part of history. Just a few smiles, a sip or two of cheap champagne, and a few aimless circuits around the room to nod and shake hands and exchange business cards and empty pleasantries, and she would release him with a kiss and her gratitude, free to return to the company of his duty. Hadn't she earned the right to ask this favor of him?

Yes, she had, a thousand times over, earned it with infinite patience and endless forgiveness and cool, soothing hands whenever he dragged himself home, battered and bruised and dragging his lank Superman cape behind him. With all the rebukes she had never uttered and all the fond endearments she had. With the suppers she'd left to warm in the oven and the two Saturdays of each month she lost to the kids at the youth center. She had every right to ask this trifle of him, this one moment when he put the husband before the cop.

And he had refused her. With boundless regret and a shame so deep and bilious that his guts had cramped and ached and roiled with the greasy, loose-boweled threat of revolt, it was true, but he had refused all the same, had denied her the simplest of requests. Not because he wanted to; indeed, he'd wanted nothing more than to stand beside her and watch her shine as he'd done on their wedding day, when she'd smiled so sweetly at him in absolute, blind faith and the snow had fallen on her thin shoulders like stardust, but because his oath to duty had given him no choice. To accompany her to the lecture would have meant leaving Maddox alone on their assigned surveillance and exposing his face to the glare of reporters' flashbulbs. It would have blown his cover as the hot, young cop who'd shed his crippled wife like an unwanted skin and lost himself in the hedonism and excess of Manhattan nightlife and put both his and Maddox's lives at risk. It would have meant another Jessica Angell.

And so, he'd steeled himself and forced himself to meet her wide, hopeful, desperate gaze and told her no. He would not be her Prince Charming, not when he was needed by another.

He will never forget they way she'd looked at him then, in the darkness of the squad car in which he'd picked her up from the airport. An indrawn breath, and then her face had wavered and crumpled, a reflection cast upon a lake's restless mirror. Another indrawn breath, and another. A cough, and then her face had hardened, grown smooth with steely resolve and the recognition of futility. She'd stared at him with wet, scornful eyes, and then she'd scoffed and shaken her head in disgust.

Fuck you, Donald Flack, she'd said dully. Fuck you and your precious thin, blue line. She'd stared out the bleary windshield, her chin set, and one hand had scrabbled listlessly at the car door like a dying spider.

Rebecca, doll, he'd murmured, heartsick, and reached out to caress her cheek, but she had rounded on him with the fury of a wounded animal, lips pulled back from her teeth in a soundless snarl, and he'd thought she was going to snap and lunge and sink her teeth into his consoling fingers.

No, she'd hissed furiously, and silenced him with a sharp slice of her palm through the air between them. Then, more quietly, No. No sound then save for her deep, shuddering breaths as she'd fought to maintain her teetering composure and the hiss of rubber on rain-soaked asphalt. No single syllable had ever spoken so eloquently to the storm behind her stony face and tightly-clenched fists, and he could only nod and hang his head and slink out of the car to retrieve her wheelchair from the trunk.

She hadn't spoken as she'd swung out of the car and into the chair and settled into the seat. Not a word as she'd straightened her clothes and smoothed her skirt and wrangled her twitching feet onto the footplates. When she'd finished, she'd straightened and swept loose strands of hair from her forehead with an irritated flip of her stiff, splayed fingers, and then she'd simply looked at him, eyes red and mouth a thin, grim line as she'd struggled against the choking, crushing swell of her hurt and tightly-bridled anger.

Her expression, mulish and mutinous and heartbroken, had twisted his churning, uneasy guts, and he'd wanted to comfort her, enfold her in his arms and stroke her hair and whisper that it would be all right, but she had been rigid and trembling, glass on the verge of shattering, and so he'd stuffed his hands into the pockets of his chinos and rocked on his heels.

I'm sorry, doll. So sorry. Lump in his throat and knot in his stomach and smoke in his eyes and hands fisted in his pockets.

Thank you for the ride, Detective. If he would not confer upon her the rights and courtesies of a wife, then she would not treat him as her husband. She'd swallowed and cleared her throat and blinked back tears, and then she'd spun away from him with a snap of her wrists and wheeled resolutely toward the bright, artificial light of the hotel lobby, where Charlie Eppes had waited with their luggage and their room keys.

He had watched her until she'd gained the safety of the lobby, and then he'd tottered to the driver's seat on legs gone wooden and dead. It had taken him two tries to start the engine, and he'd made it less than three blocks before he'd pulled over and heaved his guts into the rain-swollen gutter, hands on the rough, wet asphalt and squashed cigarette butts. He'd stayed there until his knees had been bruised and his stomach had been as empty as his heart, and then he'd wiped his raw, saliva-slick mouth with an unsteady hand and gotten back into the car and watched the windshield wipers flick desultorily across the windshield, smear the world into distorted incomprehensibility. When he trusted himself to drive, he'd driven to the stationhouse. It was the only bridge had had not burned.

When he thinks on it, which isn't often because it's a hard, sharp spear into the tender, battered flesh of his conscience, he thinks that it damns him to Hell as surely as his failure to stop his baby sister from going ass over teakettle down the stairs of the Whisper House when he was sixteen, as surely as those poisoned and poisonous words he had flung so carelessly at an unsuspecting Rebecca, those dreadful words that had lain her bare and let the rot set in. Those words that had shattered his china doll with the pulverizing efficiency of a closing fist. He's been thrice damned, and there can be no redemption for him now.

He'd left her then, and he'd left her at the hospital. And just like his wedding day, he'd had the best of intentions when he'd consigned her to the care of nurses in the Greatest City in the World. He'd thought she would be safe, warm and snug and unencumbered by the responsibility and worry of caring for herself and fighting her overburdened body for every tortured movement. He'd wanted to protect her from her stubborn pride and pathological need to prove her mettle to a ruthless, merciless world that would countenance nothing less than steel-spined perfection from a body inherently imperfect, to give her the reprieve she refused to grant herself. He'd wanted to give her the chance to rest and prepare for the grueling rigors of childbirth and the sleepless nights that would follow. He'd wanted, in his bumbling, graceless way, to provide for her, to love her as a good husband ought.

And let's not lie, boy, his father grunts in the enveloping silence of the kitchen, you wanted a reprieve for yourself, a chance to catch your breath, and one night of unbroken sleep, uninterrupted by her moans as the baby turned and writhed and kicked inside her with his healthy boy legs or by her insistent tug on your shoulder whenever her shrunken bladder began to complain beneath her distended belly. You knew it wasn't her fault, that she was doin' the best she could in this undiscovered country of late pregnancy, but you had hit the ground runnin' the day of her first ultrasound, and you hadn't drawn an easy breath since. In fact, you felt the flutter and settlin' weight of every breath since, as though God had reached down and wrapped His hand around your lungs. You were breathin' that mystical, magical, miraculous breath of life, and it scared the shit out of you. Fatherhood had been a happy daydream until Rebecca wandered into the living room with that positive pregnancy test in her cold, spasmin', disbelievin' hand. Eight months on, it had been a firm reality whenever you touched the swollen dome of her belly or saw her milk-swollen breasts as she struggled in and out of a bathtub that now held the potential to kill her and the precious gift she carried. Eight months on, and you were strugglin' to wrap your mind around the fact that you were someone's father, the guiding light and gold standard for a life that had not asked to be, but been drawn from heaven and created from love and wish and the urgent motion of two bodies joined at the hip. You were terrified and exhausted and crazy with nerves and anticipation and the daily threat of death by dirtbag, and you just needed a chance to lose your shit without feelin' like you were lettin' her down.

You needed a taste of normal, and in those days, before Junior brightened and broadened your horizons, normal was the precinct and the cramped bullpen and the fat desk sergeant who chewed his pencil erasers to ragged nubs and Detective Scagnetti and his chronic pants hitchin', as though he were genuflectin' before a forgotten god of haberdashery. Normal was fillin' out an endless stream of DD-5s and reviewin' witness statements and makin' follow-up calls about current cases. Normal was chasin' mooks and skels and mutts and scarfin' a loaded dog from the cart just outside the precinct or the modern nest of your beloved lab rats. Normal was stridin' down the halls with Mac or Stella or Danny and talkin' shop about the monster of the week. Normal was the job, and you wanted-fuck, you needed-to wallow in it while you could, before baby made three and turned your well-ordered world upside down and inside out.

So, you put your frightened, weak, defenseless girl in the in the belly of her green-walled beast and dove headlong into the chase. Just a little taste of as it should be, you told yourself, just a taste, and I'll be fine.

But you ain't never done anything half-assed, and the chase can be intoxicatin'. Like Pooh with his goddamned honey pot, you gobbled it up, the taste of life as you knew it sticky and sweet on your tongue, and it wasn't long before you were neck-deep in the job and sinkin' lower all the time. It wasn't like fatherhood, with its unknowable mysteries and unknown terrors, but familiar and comforting and safe despite the dangers waiting behind every unfamiliar face. The job you understood. The job you could handle, so you gratefully lost yourself to its lulling, slaloming rhythm, and you lost track of how long until visiting hours ended at the hospital. You'd look up from your desk and realize that your shift had ended two hours ago, and when you realized that you wouldn't have time to eat and shower and make it to the hospital, you felt a dirty, shameful relief because you wouldn't have to look into her sad lost face and tell her to be brave and strong for just a little longer. You promised yourself that you'd make it up to her on the next visit, or the next, or the one after that. Except that time always got away from you, and there never was a next time.

And then you got assigned to that serial task force, and it was down the rabbit hole. You got so blinkered by the chase that you rarely went home, let alone to the hospital. There wasn't time when there was a monster on the prowl, claiming daughters and sisters and wives. You crashed at the taskforce stationhouse, showered in the precinct showers and slept on the break room sofa or the grotty little rack room, with its scavenged steel prison bunks and thrift-store sheets and bolted soggy dogs and scorched coffee while you gathered around the conference table with your fellow detectives and thumbed through witness statements, crime scene photos, and suspicious persons reports. You worked your precious gumshoe hoodoo, the strange, inert magic you learned from life with me and from the instructors at the academy, the inorganic, safe magic of police reports and leads and suspect pools and the stale, close humidity of surveillance in a departmental sedan, so unlike the livin', fearsome magic the roiled around your girl and wept from her pores like musk and the ends of her fingers like bursts of static electricity. Your work in the taskforce stationhouse was for the greater good, for the protection and salvation of other men's wives and daughters, and besides, Rebecca was safe and sound in her not-so-gilded cage.

And then the call came while you were immersed in your precious routine. Your girl had slipped her cage and fled, drugged and weak and so heavily-pregnant that she could scarcely move, and the greater good was reduced to so much empty puffery. She was gone, and the focus of your world, so broad and grand and lofty that morning, when you'd been swillin' coiffee and cuttin' up and pattin' yourself on the back for what a noble, self-sacrificin' guy you were, was reduced to a population of one: the tiny, broken, unbreakable woman who carried your cheap ring on her finger and your priceless son in her belly. All talk of serial killers and predators was so much irrelevant quackin', and you left it behind without a pang of regret, and never mind Greene and Stabler's useless bleatin'. Your ears had ceased to work properly the minute the phrase, wife has gone missin' had reached them, as though the nurse's soft-spoken words, hissed through static like a confession amid the flames of Hell were such a thunderous indictment of your ultimate failure that they had rendered you deaf, and anyway, what were other men's wives when yours was alone and vulnerable and weak in a city without conscience? So much incidental chaff to be swept aside. So you left them behind. You would have left your phone, too, that strangling electronic leash, but you kept it just in case she called, in case she forgot your betrayal and summoned you to her side, reached out with that still, small voice that was so easy to lose amid the babble of the city and called for her knight errant.

And summon you she did. She scarcely had the strength to hold the phone, but the power in that tired, slurred voice could have summoned you from across the world, could have brought you on the run with glass in your soles and ribs in your lungs and blood in your mouth. Sweetheart, I need you. A plea stronger than any oath to the city of New York, the reminder of a promise forged by meeting lips and joined hearts and rolling, loose-jointed hips. You would have forsaken the citizens of the city to a thousand rapacious predators to answer her call.

You found her in Grand Central Station with Gavin, wan and exhausted and holding on by a thread. She was so drawn, with cracked, parched lips and greasy, lank hair, bird-boned and hollow-eyed, and you'll never forget the way she smelled, like stale sweat and unwashed skin and old urine, like the bums who stewed in the drunk tank on Friday nights. She'd been rough-skinned and feverish, had burned with a diseased, banked-ember heat that spoke of too long in the weltering heat of the city and unchecked infection ragin' in her blood. A year before, she had revolutionized the world with the wonders of her peerless mind, confident and poised and beautiful in her tailored blouse and skirt, and now, she sat before you, a dull-witted, stinkin' ruin. It was you who'd brought her so low, you and your benign neglect and your woefully-inadequate policeman's love.

And yet, the first words out of her loose-lipped, sprung-tongued mouth had been, There you are, love, as though you were a cherished gift for which she had been searching. She'd collapsed into your arms with a sigh of relief, and you could only bury your head in her musty hair and blink back tears and promise her that the worst was over.

And though she had no reason to, had no precedent for her faith, she had rested in the bracing circle of your arms and chosen to believe.

And in his typical and spectacular fashion, he had failed her again.

When Don Flack was thirty-one, Rebecca had delivered unto him a son, had willed him into the world with a straining, rippling heave of her belly and a defiant, warrior's cry. Junior had screamed his arrival into the face of a beaming Dr. Fiorello, and with his son's first breath, Don's life had ceased to be solely his. He had been seized by awe and a blind, all-consuming love that had threatened to tear his swollen heart from his aching, constricted chest right there in the delivery room. The severing of the umbilical cord hadn't severed the immediate, primordial bond between them. That had pulsed and roared in his veins like Greek fire, and he'd sworn as Junior had squalled and squirmed on his mother's belly and mouthed instinctively for her breast that he would gladly die for him, this flesh of his flesh, so helpless and fragile and tiny and unmistakably his.

And he'd sworn to die for her who had delivered him, who had bequeathed him this eternal and most precious gift. He had bent his head over her trembling, sweat-wreathed body as she lay, splayed and bloody, on the delivery table, and wept softly into her matted, sodden hair, anointed her with love and gratitude and an inexpressible devotion. The tears had been exultation and terror, the basis of a covenant that far surpassed the feeble power of words. He had resolved, as he'd let his tears fall onto her flushed forehead, that no one would come before her again, that she would stand forever without equal in the pantheon of his heart. She would be adored and venerated and duly worshipped. He would die for her without hesitation or regret, and every day that he lived, he would remind her of his devotion.

And he had tried to honor that promise, as he had so desperately tried to honor the vows he'd made five years earlier, when he'd slipped a ring onto her finger at the altar of St. Patrick's. He had cosseted her as she'd recovered from childbirth, and done patient, ceaseless circuits around the living room as Junior had howled in the throes of colic. He had bought diapers and changed them in the middle of the night so that she might sleep a little longer, and he had sometimes brought her baubles to remind her of his love-combs for her hair and lotion for her hands and heat wraps for her knees and back. He had doted on her, lavished her with the affection and attention for which she had so clearly been starved. And she, his rare and wondrous midnight sun, had blossomed. She had remembered her smile, and laughter, and she had unfurled from the tight, protective ball into which she had curled when he'd left her in the clutches of Nurse Ratchett. She had opened her arms and her legs and her heart, and he had found his way home.

He'd been determined to stay there, but the job is a relentless taskmistress, and when Junior was almost four months old, it had pulled him headlong into the harness, had beckoned him to the chase with the specter of haunted, hunted, abused children bought and sold like sweetmeats to perverts and predators without conscience. He had tried to resist, but their small voices had been loud in his ears, and he could not turn away, not when he'd started to see their snaggle-toothed faces superimposed over Junior's grinning, toothless mouth. So he'd gone, heart heavy and legs fleet, and told himself that she would understand.

She had, but she had also seen, and when she had seen him through the window of a Manhattan eatery, sitting at a table and pretending to be someone else's love for the sake of someone else's children, all the wounds that he had sunk deep into her soul during the Maddox assignment had opened anew, opened and spilled their black poison into her cool, clear waters. She had retreated into herself and fled from him, face blank and eyes dead as the corpses he fished from canals and pulled from public restrooms. She had left him, not with a wail, but with stony silence, broken but unbent, and duty had forbad him follow. She had been all but gone that dismal autumn afternoon when she'd seen him there with his hand in another's and his anguished heart in his throttled throat, and only the timely intervention of his father had kept her from disappearing through the concrete looking glass and leaving him with nothing but bittersweet memories and hollow bones.

His father had been her knight in creaking, departmental armor that night, and he's never forgotten it or forgiven himself. He was supposed to be her Prince Charming, just as she'd thought on that cold February day when she'd clutched his arm and swayed on her small, fragile feet and trusted him to anchor her while she defied God and gravity and tottered down the cathedral steps to her waiting wheelchair. Instead, he'd been the same screw-up he'd been at sixteen, when he'd let his baby sister, Diana, tumble down a rickety wooden staircase and headlong into that good night. His old man had cleaned up his mess and added another grain to the immeasurable weight of filial gratitude that he could never shed, and he'd been a two-time loser. He'd failed Rebecca again, and there had been nothing to do but open his arms and kiss her upturned lips and draw upon the wellspring of her forgiveness even as the silt had scraped his teeth and tickled his tongue.

Rebecca had never dwelled on his failure, had never so much as mentioned it when he'd come dragging home with his tail between his legs and stupid, useless platitudes on numb lips, but he is a seeker of truth by trade, and he had seen it in her eyes and the unfamiliar hardness of her thin face. She hadn't been angry then; his old man's visit had dampened those white-hot embers, but she had been disappointed, and that had been worse. Anger fades and cools, a pain but dimly remembered after the hurt that inspired it has been stitched and salved, but disappointment is neither so fleeting nor so shallow. Anger is a scrape cooled by a kiss, but disappointment is a scar, long and deep and indelible, and it tugs and pulls and throbs until the end of days, when the blood grows black and dead in decaying veins and blind eyes fill with spidersilk and curdled milk. She had kissed him and twined her spindly arms around him and told him that she loved him, and she had meant it, but there were things she hadn't said, and she'd meant them, too.

Life had gone on, a parade of shifts and diaper changes and love under cover, but a part of Rebecca had never returned from her silent retreat down a dirty Midtown sidewalk. He has no doubt that it is still there, buried deep within her fortress walls and surrounded by the coldness that sometimes radiates from her like a merciless, killing affliction, but he suspects it is lost to him forever. She has realized the folly of her youth, when her belief in him had been absolute and she had surrendered it along with her name and her maidenhead, and she had reclaimed it. Its light is cold and pitiless and biting as an arctic wind, but it is also bright, bright enough to make his eyes water and squint. It is her life spark, the seed from which the rest of her springs, and once, perhaps, he could have touched it, could have cupped it in his palm and watched it pulse and shimmer in his hand like an unborn dream. But no more. If he reached for it now, it would cut and burn, reduce his hand to bloody tatters and ash like an angel's holy fire.

He'd thought he could live with the loss of such a gift; it had, after all, been a fearsome dowry, as terrible as it was beautiful. He had seen its power but once, when she had loosed her fury upon a grey-eyed urchin in the precinct bullpen and slit his throat with a point of her finger and a sibilant hiss from between bared teeth, and he'd had no desire to see it again. In fact, he'd felt stunned and fortunate as he'd gaped at her across the flimsy barrier of his desk, as though he'd awoken from a deep and pleasant dream to discover a live wire in his hand. Just a glimpse, and it had still been too much. So he could have lived with the loss of that awesome and dreadful gift, and he might have done if that had been his last failure and her last disappointment.

When Don Flack was thirty-two, he had performed CPR on Kyle Sheridan in an interrogation room, on his knees on the dirty floor and acting as an artificial heart for a kid who was already gone. He'd done compressions until his arms had throbbed and burned and his own breath had grown shallow and ragged, had pumped and willed divinity into his trembling human hands. But he was no Prometheus, and Sheridan had remained a lump of unresponsive flesh beneath his hands. He'd pumped until Angell had prised him away, sweet in his nose and hard as steel beneath her clothes. There had been pity in her eyes and iron in her grip, and she'd held him fast as the paramedics had rolled Sheridan away.

It hadn't been Angell with him when the IAB had mounted their witch hunt and pinned him beneath their hot and baleful scrutiny like a moth beneath a hot magnifying glass, but Rebecca. He hadn't wanted to tell her, had wanted to hide his shame, but she had known him too well and smelled the secret on his skin, read it in the slump of his shoulders and the tight line of his jaw as he'd struggled to keep it behind his teeth. She was a reader of bone and muscle, his sharp-eyed girl, and she had come to him as he'd skulked in the bathroom and drawn the truth from him, had drawn the poison into her own mouth and rolled it on her tongue like soured wine.

She had never questioned his innocence. She had believed in him, quietly and unreservedly. She had listened to his truth and accepted it as the only one, and then she had cupped his cheek and kissed his mouth and gone to fix his dinner. She had gone on cooking his dinners and washing his clothes and folding his underwear and going to his bed, and when the IAB had summoned him to One PP to render their findings, she had bundled Junior into his snuggest romper and accompanied him to that great and terrible land of Nutcracker Oz, where the wizards of Gotham wielded their merciless powers. He'd held her hand until they'd called him into their office, and the memory of it had clung to his fingers long after, a lifeline that had bound them together even through the barrier of an oak-paneled steel door. That touch, cool and thin and fierce, had reassured him as he'd sat in an uncomfortable chair and listened to a smug suit pronounce his soul and his hands clean in the eyes of the department.

It had been Rebecca who had been waiting when he'd emerged. She'd been parked resolutely beside a bench in the lobby, Junior squirming and grizzling on her lap as she'd held him there with her graceless, spindly arms and stared at the top of the receptionist's head as she'd bent to the task of consulting a day planner. Her gaze had been stony and inscrutable, and she had reminded him of a lioness surveying a hapless ibis across an arid stretch of grassland. The comparison had startled and unnerved him, and he'd approached her cautiously, lest she turn and close crushing jaws around his outstretched hand. She'd looked up at his approach, and eyes that had been cold as her hands had warmed instantly, had suffused with a light that had made her lovely, his glorious china doll. She had known the verdict before it had tumbled from his lips in a jumble of relief and belated indignation, and she had offered him a broad, brilliant smile and plopped a squealing Junior into his arms. She had reclaimed his hand and led him from the building as though he were a conquering hero, and then she'd taken him to their favorite deli for a pastrami on rye with slaw and a pickle. He'd eaten with the relish of the pardoned while Junior had wriggled and bounced in his high chair and she had watched them both with pride and unabashed affection.

Later that night, when their son was tucked and dreaming in his crib with a belly full of milk, she'd ridden him slow and dirty in their marriage bed, knees clamped against his ribs and teeth gritted against the ground-glass protests of her joints. She had let him curl his broad hands around the sharp, fragile spars of her hips and drive into her with relentless, hot-bellied need, possessive and atavistic and grunting, and when he'd spent himself with a final hoarse cry and convulsive surge of his hips, she'd slumped atop him and mouthed his sternum until his hammering heart had slowed and she had grown heavy and pliant with the temporary release of sleep. He'd cradled her to him until the sensation had bled from his shoulder, and then he'd eased her onto her side of the bed and crooned inarticulate reassurance while her stubborn limbs had jittered and spasmed and gone rigid in an effort to reset her startled nerves. She'd settled quickly, comforted by the familiarity of his voice and his body, and soon, she'd been deep in Morpheus' bottomless sand.

He'd lain in bed and watched her eyelids flutter as she'd chased the tatters of her dreams, and he'd breathed deeply of their commingled scents and told himself he'd found an absolution the department could never grant.

When Don Flack was still thirty-two, he had been the subject of yet another IAB investigation, had sat in the same chair in the same office. He had answered the same questions. Only the face across the desk had been different, another IAB officer with the same dead eyes and the same cutting, predatory mouth with a tongue probing for wounds in the chink beneath his battered armor. Rebecca had occupied the same spot in the IAB offices, had parked herself in the same spot and folded her hands in a lap devoid of struggling infant. He isn't certain-so much is blurred and indistinct from the early days of his waking nightmare-but he thinks she had even stared at the bent head of the same harried receptionist.

The verdict of that inquest had been the same as the one before, and the one before that, and just as before, Rebecca had greeted his pronouncement of innocence with the same serene assurance, the same absolute faith in his innocence, in his goodness, in his ability to be the white white knight she so obviously thought him. She had led him to the same deli, and he had eaten to please her, but it had tasted of ashes and gall in his mouth. She had led him home and offered herself, her precious absolution, and he had wanted to accept it, had needed it so badly that he'd been cramped and nauseated with longing, but there could be no absolution for the undeserving, and no matter how tightly he had gripped her hips or how deeply he had thrust, he could feel nothing but emptiness, and when he'd disentangled from her, sweaty and spent, there had been no peace, no afterglow, just a sense of loss and hallucinatory distance, as though he were roaming an endless hall of funhouse mirrors, fingers outstretched to find, not smooth, cool glass, but mirrors of water and quicksilver and blood.

Everything had been the same, but everything had been different. He had been a liar then, a liar and a murderer. He had sat in that familiar chair in that familiar office and gazed into the familiar face of the IAB puppet while Rebecca had sat in her familiar place, and he had lied. He had done it with the peppery tang of cordite in his nostrils and the gelid, tacky glue of Angell's blood forever drying on the crisp, starched fabric of his dress shirt, and he'd clung, not to the cool, fierce reassurance of his wife's fingers, but to Jess' delirious, too-slack fingers as they'd screamed through the streets in the back of a speeding cruiser. He'd clutched them as he'd spun his truth from the whole cloth of cowardice, and he had had to smother the urge to flex and shake his fingers.

He'd crossed the line and become what he had most despised, and no one had been the wiser. To his mother, he'd been the same good boy, the same selfless son who pulled children from the grasp of monsters and helped old ladies across the street. To his father, he'd been just a chip off the old block, the guy who had gotten the job done and taken down a scumbag cop killer. To Jess's family, he'd been an avenging angel, wielding a nine-millimeter sword of fire and justice. To Rebecca, he had been her husband, battered and haggard and unnecessarily haunted by a necessary death. The IAB hounds hadn't been sniffing that hard, had possessed no interest in the shooting of a cop killer, and so, they had taken his statement and looked no closer than the lines on the page and clapped him on the back and sent him home to deal with his restless conscience and the images that stuttered and flickered behind his eyelids like a ragged filmstrip.

They hadn't seen him for what he was, what he'd chosen to become with the pull of a trigger. He had stood over Simon Cade in that boiler room and blown out his brains, had locked eyes with the piece of human trash that had struck an angel from the firmament and squeezed the trigger. There had been no hesitation, no still, small voice of reason and goodness and mercy. There had been only rage, white and hot as phosphorous beneath his frozen skin. The lethal plastic in his grip had surged with a blind, sniffing bloodlust, and the only clear thought in his mind as he'd exhaled and squeezed the trigger had been of Angell's mindlessly-rolling eyes and lolling, broken-doll neck as he'd cradled her in the back of a cruiser and bellowed for the white-knuckled uniform at the wheel to floor it. He had been weightless when his finger had twitched on the trigger and sent a slug into Cade's worthless brain, weightless and formless, transformed into a creature of clawed fingers and bared teeth and and the blind, savage need to crush his enemy and balance the scales with blood for blood and life for life. The muzzle flash had been bright as a falling star, and for reasons he cannot explain or understand, he'd thought of a Derek Jeter homerun as it had arced across the sky one sticky August night when everything had changed and the axis of his world had realigned.

He hadn't felt the copulatory buck of the pistol in his hand as it had extinguished a life and obliterated the moral high ground upon which he had stood for most of his life. He had felt the backspatter of blood and gunpowder against his face, so like the mist of blood that Jess had coughed into his face as he'd cradled her in the back of a speeding patrol car and felt her life sluice between the ineffectual compress of his fingers. He had felt it and gasped because it had been like waking from a nightmare, and then he'd trudged up the boiler room stairs and told Danny the first of many lies. He'd left a piece of himself behind along with a spent shell casing, left it to mingle with the spreading pool of Simon Cade's brains.

When Don Flack was still thirty-two, he had sat in a church pew beside Rebecca and clutched the pew in front of him with gloved hands while a priest ushered Jessica Angell's soul to the Lord with the words from his prayer book. Old, brittle, stale words as dry as the Communion wafer the priest had pressed to his tongue at service's end. Words that had nothing to do with the vibrant, tough woman he had known. He had sat with the itch of wool against his skin and breathed the smell of wool and old lace, so like gunpowder in the still confines of the church. Dust and grief had tickled his throat and burned his eyes, and he'd longed to let go of the pew and find the comfort of Rebecca's hand, but he had been ashamed and afraid, and so he had gripped the thick slat of polished wood in his hand instead and told himself that the eyes of the stained-glass Jesus couldn't see his sin. He'd stared at the runners of Jess' casket and listened to the endless drone of Mrs. Angell's wailing and told himself that it was worth it even if He could.

And he had been afraid of Rebecca. The legacy he had glimpsed in the precinct bullpen one February night when she'd stretched forth her hand and let death and vengeance spill from her pointing finger had stirred and seethed beneath her skin and rattled inside her small frame. It hadn't made her bigger, that terrible dowry, but smaller and tighter and harder. She had been all pale skin and bloodless lips inside her prim, black mourning clothes, her hands fisted in the sagging canopy of the skirt she hated to wear and cheekbones in stark relief against her skin. Too many angles and not enough flesh, and when she'd shifted in the pew, he'd heard the click and creak of bones, as though she were undergoing a terrible transformation. He'd been afraid to look at her, lest he see the shift and ripple of realigning bone. Only her hair had been the same, burnished gold that had burned brightly in the somnolence of the church.

She'd shifted again, had grabbed his knee as she'd groped for leverage and support, and her hand had been freezing even through the thick fabric of his dress pants, so cold that he'd almost winced. Rebecca's fury has always burned cold, and she'd been frozen there beside him in that lonely pew, as cold and dead as Jessica Angell in her bower of mahogany and white silk.

He had thought he'd understood her anger, the reason for her bloodless face and frozen hands. He'd thought her angry because of his failure, because she had realized that her darling Gryffindor was nothing but a badge baby dumbass from Yonkers who couldn't be Superman when it mattered most. He had thought her ashamed of him for his weakness, and of herself for her misplaced faith. And why shouldn't she have been? Her beloved Prince Charming had failed to slay the dragon and save the lady fair, and she had been forced to bear his shame and the weight of the surreptitious stares from the rest of the congregation. Just another sip from the bottomless cup of dishonor from which he had so often asked her to drink over the long and turbulent course of their marriage. He had resolved then to ask no more of her, to force not one more bitter drop past her lips, and so, when the service had ended and the assembly had streamed from the church and into the warm spring sunshine, clustered in blue-black knots of shared grief, he had told her not to come to the wake.

Oh, but looking at Rebecca is like looking at a reflection in fractured glass, and he had been wrong again. What he had thought a kindness, she had interpreted as yet another rejection, another exile from his clannish, secretive world of guns and blood and no room for her at her own table. While he had sat in the pew and relived the warm rush of Angell's blood through the ineffectual compress of his fingers and the stuttering flutter of her labored breathing beneath his pressing palm, Rebecca had thought him imagining illicit trysts in squad cars and at Jess' apartment, love under cover while his service Glock hung from the headboard or rested on the nightstand. Perhaps she'd even imagined the glint of his wedding band from behind the jar of Vaseline. While he had mourned his failure, Rebecca had torn off the skin grafts and tourniquets that had held her together for all these years and let the rage and hurt sluice from her badly-mended wounds. All her stitches had come undone, and while he had lost himself to guilt and self-pity and the anesthetizing burn of bourbon in his throat and belly, she had knitted herself back together again, had sloughed the stifling weight of forebearance and mercy and become a creature of tooth and bone and pitiless survival.

Part of him bridles at the unfairness of her dark surmises. He's loved none but her since that August night when he'd tasted spicy mustard on her lips and taken her maidenhead with a forward thrust and an unsteady breath. He's looked-he's only human-but the swaying curves of the women he passes are forgotten as soon as they are out of sight, and it is Rebecca his heart seeks when the day is done and the city air is lodged in his lungs like phlegm and all he can feel are the beginnings of the bruises from gripping his gun tightly enough to numb his fingertips. She is his God-given solace and his saving grace, and he wants to grab her by her fragile shoulders and shout that truth into her astonished face until the absolute truth of it sinks into her delicate skin like salve.

But then, why would she believe him? He isn't responsible for all the cuts and bruises that seethe beneath her skin, but there are more than he would like that bear his name, and he suspects that they are the deepest. He has asked her to do with less for the sake of those who have more than most, for those who look upon her as God's error, a trial to borne by the rest of the world and a test for the selfish and hard-hearted. He has left her alone when she needed him most, and he has profaned that which she holds most sacred. He has profaned their marriage, treated it as an inconvenience to be ignored whenever the job demanded. He has demeaned it, demeaned her by swanning about the city with empty-headed dream girls unworthy of even her scorn while she languished in her gilded cage across the country and clawed the talc and graphite consolation of numbers from the whiteboard in her borrowed office. She'd come home to off-the-rack wine and hothouse sunflowers, and just when she'd dared to draw an unhurried breath, he'd gifted her a child and asked her to devote herself to seeing him into the world healthy and strong. Not not three months after she'd dutifully wrought his miracle on demand, she'd rolled past a Midtown eatery and seen him tread their union underfoot again, this time in the name of someone else's children. Like Saint Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, he has betrayed she whom he loves most in order to save himself and called it his only choice.

How she must have hated him then, sitting in the middle of the bustling sidewalk and watching him kiss another woman's hand as he so seldom kissed hers. But she had never said a word of her hurts; not then, with nothing but the thin pane of glossy plate glass between them, and not later, when he had locked himself inside a cramped hotel bathroom and tried to soothe them from afar. She hadn't even spoken of them when he'd come home three days later with bags of takeout in his hands and his thudding heart in his mouth. She'd simply smiled and swallowed her sorrow behind a gentle kiss, because that was what she had always done, his uncomplaining beast of unseen burden, his perfect little sineater who closed her mouth and opened her legs and asked for nothing in return save the meagerest of affections-a kiss before work, an absent stroke of her crown as he passed her with his morning coffee or post-shift beer, a warm embrace in which to be enfolded when her body revolts and wracks her with a pain that pulls her lips from her gums in a savage, canine sneer and wrenches breathless, agonized cries from a throat bent on throttling her as she writhes in her rapidly-cooling piss.

She has reached her limit, his perfect, sinless sineater, and all the sins and private hurts she has swallowed in order to preserve their most imperfect union have begun to come up, forced from her belly like bile and spilling from her lips in black profusion. She had delivered but a small measure of it yesterday, had brought it forth with the cold pitilessness of an avenging angel, and it had burned his skin like lye and threatened to crush his aching heart in its merciless fist. I have done everything you've asked of me. What could you possibly have to ask of me now? Raw with hurt and cutting as the knotted lash, an indictment whose truth he cannot protest.

Now Don Flack is thirty-two, and he sits in his kitchen and tastes fear on his tongue like black currant wine and prays for her to come home. It's quarter-past six, and the hallway beyond their door is still silent. No whetstone hiss of skin on rubber grip as she approaches the door. No jingle of keys as she jabs the apartment key at the dumb pucker of the deadbolt's disapproving mouth. No defeated click as the tumbler retreats. No quiet inrush of air as she pushes open the door with her spidery, splayed fingers and slips inside, a fox casting about for the scent of danger as she enters her den, eyes sharp and expression sharper still as she surveys her surroundings. The fifteen bleeds into sixteen, and the door remains firmly, shut, and his heart sinks lower inside his chest.

He has no reason to believe that she won't come home, won't push through the door like a crowning life. Traffic can be hell in Midtown this time of day, and it's possible that there was no room for her on the overcrowded commuter train and she was stranded on the platform, fighting for a seat on the next and hoping for a patient conductor. She had kissed him goodbye when she left for work this morning, and last night, when he'd woken from a doze to find himself on his knees with his arms wrapped around her legs as she sat in a rocking chair with Junior dreaming in the shallow crook of her arm, she had let him put Junior into his crib and carry her into their bedroom and arrange her among the pillows and blankets. When he had slid into bed beside her and brushed the hair from her face and rubbed the stiff coil of knotted muscle between her bony shoulderblades, she had not shied from his reverent touch, had, in fact, pressed into the warmth in the center of his palm and bid him bury his face in the deep hollow of her shoulder, but she'd been drowsy then, half-lost to the temporary respite of sleep, when her tortured, recalcitrant muscles finally slacken their cruel grip and let her drift upon oblivion's blessed currents. Maybe her acceptance of his tremulous touch had not been an act of love, but the startled, last-gasp reflex of the small part of her he has not corrupted with his failures. Maybe in the cold light of day, with the sleep washed from her eyes and without the weight of Junior's diapered bottom on her lap to distract her, she had recognized the pauper beneath the prince's clothing and recognized the taste of gall and bile in her throat. Maybe cold rationality had reasserted itself as she'd rattled and rumbled to work beneath the city, and she'd washed her hands of him, of them. Maybe she'd checked into a hotel after work-perhaps the Radisson to which she'd fled when he'd unceremoniously ousted her from the place she called home with no notice and the sad excuse of justice on his apologetic lips; Rebecca had a fine appreciation for irony, particularly that of a darker vintage, and if she chose to twist the knife on the way out the door, then she would have no qualms about sinking it deep. The outside to match the inside, and tit for tat.

There would be no way of knowing. She could go where he could not follow, could slip between the walls and disappear forever. She had offered him the chance to follow her once upon a time, to follow her beyond the wall and partake of the wonderland that she had once called home, the strange, Dickensian New York of panting Victorian novels, where hansom cabs idled at the curbs and steaming piles of horseshit had disappeared without a trace, but he had rebuffed it, rebuffed her in a moment of panic, and she had never offered him the chance again. That world is closed to him now, as alien as the plains of Leng. It is hers and hers alone. If she has returned to it, he will never find her

She wouldn't abandon the baby, Gavin points out, and God, he wants to draw comfort from his gruff pragmatism, the pragmatism of concrete and graphite and gun oil, but each time he tries, he sees Rebecca's finger extending to hurl red fire from its bony tip, sees a dirty, wild-eyed man with impossibly blond hair fold silently to the floor with the mute grace of a falling leaf. Brimming with malignant life one instant, dead as a begrimed, alabaster statue of a toppled leader the next. He sees his colleagues emerging from the captain's office with blank faces and aphasic voice, reeling on their feet and planning New Year's parties a month in the rearview mirror. He sees the sharp-mouth dybbuk who had reached over the side of her chair and shaken the body, a terrier with a rat in its bloody, vengeful jaws. His girl isn't bound by the bloodless, crumbling laws of concrete and steel and graphite. If she wants her son, then she will have him. He remembers the hard, pitiless, seething creature beside him in the pew while they had offered Jessica Angell and their useless prayers for her soul unto a dead god of plaster and acrylic paints, and imagines his mother sprawled and lifeless in the splintered wreckage of their home, blood pooling beneath her head like a halo and drenching her doughy bosom in a tacky bib. Imagines his father stiffening in his easy chair, head lolling at an unnatural angle and pages of the sports section draped over his legs like a shroud.

He tells himself she wouldn't, that Rebecca would never-, but he has broken too many promises to be blindly assured of her fidelity to hers, and fear greases his suddenly-constricted throat, tallow and cold, rancid gristle. He's tempted to call his parents, but what would he say? That he has sinned too deeply in the name of the job and now an avenging angel with his wife's face will come to collect wages long overdue? That she carries bloody justice in her spindly fingertips and rage without end within the swollen, infected cockles of her heart? They don't know, his greying, quietly-fading parents; they hadn't seen her slip her fragile human skin and become a goddess without mercy in her sizzling veins. If he called them with stories of magic and Jedis and X-men, they would think his mind had finally buckled beneath the strain of too many losses and too many disappointments.

So he remains in his chair and watches the pot of French-onion soup and the clock and rubs his palms together with the dry, furtive rasp of turning pages.

Finally, the scrape of plastic on steel, a sword being drawn from a scabbard. The phlegmatic rustle of plastic bags and the surprised jingle of keys. The clack of turning tumblers, and then the dull scrape of her footplates against the door as she nudges it open. They play hell on the paint, those footplates with their scouring kiss, and more than once, he and the super have squabbled over the grooves and marks those squares of cheap plastic leave on the door. The super calls them acts of negligence and carelessness; he calls them the price of life with his improbable queen. He suspects it's a battle he's going to lose and he'll pony up for the installation of a kickplate, but he doesn't care. He just wants her to keep coming through that door at the end of the day.

It's her toes he sees first, the unblemished toes of sneakers she bought years ago that have yet to be bruised by the relentless scuffing and pounding of city streets. They may never be. She stands only when she must, and she wears shoes only because they disguise the thin, purple-skinned frailty of her flat, untested feet. The pristine toes are rigid heralds of her arrival, jutting stiffly from her footplates and twitching and flexing as though casting for his scent.

Her hair comes next, a soft, golden fall that obscures her pale face save for the tip of her nose and the glint of blue that marks her eyes. Her hair is thick and glossy, and he longs to card his fingers through it, to let it drift through his worshipful fingers like spun silk. He knows how it would smell now, like lavender and peaches and wild oats, conditioner and the simple human warmth of her.

He knows how the rest of her would smell, too, like talc and slate and ink and the queerly-ozone tang of fluorescent lighting. Like textbooks and wooden lecterns and snatches of stolen perfume left behind by inquisitive or brown-nosing students. Like the dirty ball-bearing stink of a subway-car support pole and the threadbare nylon of fraying tiedowns. Like trenchcoats and messenger bags and hot brakes and sun-warmed vinyl. Like the commute, the rattling rumble of coming home.

The rest of her comes into view. Aside from her customary messenger bag, which sags heavily from one push handle, she's freighted with several plastic bags crammed haphazardly into canvas totes and hanging from the drooping back of her chair like fetishes. Another plastic bag rests uneasily on her canted lap and threatens to spill its contents with every snap of her arms. One arm rises from the wheel and yanks irritably on the sliding bag, an agitated cat swatting an impudent mouse.

"Shit," she hisses, and the strain in her voice jolts him from his paralysis.

"Hey, doll," he says, and rises from his chair and hurries forward to lift the bag from her lap. "Anything I can do?"

"Can you grab the keys?" she asks from behind her hair, and propels herself into the kitchen, where she sets her brakes and twists her torso at an impossible, tortured angle to reach the bags that sag from her push handles like a gangrenous scrotum.

He wordlessly retrieves the keys from the lock and closes the door, and then he sidles from foot to foot and rolls the keys from hand to hand. "What's all that for?" He nods at the bags.

"It's the ingredients for a salve to help your bruises." She wrestles a bag free with a pained grimace and heaves it onto the counter.

"Aw, doll, I don't need it. I figure I deserve 'em for being a jackass the last few months."

"Then it'll be for the next time," she retorts, and it's perilously close to a snarl. She frees another bag from its impromptu hanger and bucks it onto the counter.

Probably figures you're rejectin' her again, Gavin grunts inside his head, and the keys in his incessantly-turning hands develop a reedy, asthmatic wheeze.

"Where's Junior?" She brushes the hair from her face and looks towards the nursery. On the rare occasion that she comes home after Don does, the baby is usually to be found playing happily on the nursery floor or wobbling gleefully underfoot while Don washes dishes or surfs the couch. He never fails to come running at the sound of her voice, chubby fists outstretched and diapered ass crinkling triumphantly as he thunders across the living room like a miniature Godzilla, stepping on Duplo blocks or teething crackers as he comes. If he were here, he would be jabbering at her in his strange, cawing, pidgin language and trying to climb her bony legs.

"He's with my folks for the night. I thought it would be easier for us to talk. Plus, I thought it might be good for them to spend a little time with him just in case."

"In case what? In case I wash my hands of this and walk out?"

"Yeah." He swallows with a click and quashes the urge to rub his nape. "Don't worry, though. I'm not tryin' to keep him from you or anythin' like that."

She pauses in her excavation of the bags' contents, and an unpleasant smile twists her lips like a cramp. "If I wanted him, I could have him." Flat and reptilian, the cold, atonal burr of a predator with blood in its teeth and no room for regret in its heart, and he thinks again of a blond lunatic who had gone to his death without a sound, a windup man whose key had been ripped out, and of his parents, old and powerless and without even the memory of former kindnesses with which to blunt her terrible vengeance.

He flounders, momentarily stunned. "I know. I'm just sayin'." His heart flutters greasily in the back of his too-tight throat, and he nearly fumbles the keys.

"Mmm." She smiles that lightless smile again and pulls a bunch of unfamiliar herbs from the depths of the bag. "Besides, I'm not going anywhere."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that," she thunders, and slaps the counter. "I have always known that. You're the one who's never believed it." Her eyes narrow. Or maybe you do know. Maybe that's why you keep standing on my throat every time the department tells you to step lively. You know I won't leave, so what does it matter if you kick me in the face?"

"Just like you refuse to believe I love you?" he shoots back. "Well, I guess we're fuckin' even, huh?"

She stares at him in silence. Her eyes are bruised and hollow and red-rimmed, as if someone has fetched her a blow to the face. He supposes maybe someone has. She hollows her cheeks in contemplation, and then her shoulders slump. "Point taken."

It's the first time she's ever acknowledged the secret fear of his heart, and for a moment, he forgets to breathe. His heart stutters and stills inside his chest, and then it drops like a stone into his feet, where it settles beneath his sole. He opens his mouth, but all thought has fled, and there is only the hurt, smothering and ravenous and without end. He closes his mouth to keep it from tumbling out and carrying his innards with it. There's no shock; he's too much an observer, too much of a detective, for that, and he's brought this on himself, he knows, but hurt is hurt, for all that it is deserved, ugly and weeping and gnawing as cancer in his churning guts.

"And so now here we are," she says matter-of-factly, and shrugs, eyes dull with truth a long time coming.

He goes to her on wooden legs and drops to his knees before her chair. He's grateful for the support of her armrests because he's not sure he has the strength to hold himself up. Even though his chest has been unzipped and emptied of its contents, it feels so heavy, a wet sandbag beneath his shirt, and he suspects that without the support of her armrests, he would simply sprawl bonelessly to the floor at her feet, another windup doll robbed of its animus by a flick of her wrist.

How long? he wants to ask, but self-preservation won't allow his tongue to slit his throat. The hot, ragged mouth that sleeps just above his right hip stirs into sudden, gleeful consciousness and buries its needling, infected teeth deep into his roiling guts. Nausea rises like bitter pitch in his throat, and he grits his teeth against a grunt of pain and an acrid belch. Do you still love me? he thinks, but that question, too, threatens to lay him bare. He would touch her if he could, but when he raises his hand, a dead, hard stone at the end of his wrist, he sways wildly and nearly sends them both sprawling to the floor. So he replaces it on the armrests and racks his brain for something to say.

His mouth works, but nothing emerges except breath stale with confusion. Her face is impassive, but her eyes are filled with a terrible pity, a priest offering useless comfort to a grief-stricken widower. He tries to force them, those magic words that will-must heal this dreadful wound, but nothing comes, and she slowly shakes her head as though to say, There's nothing to say. Go with God and be at peace, my wayward son.

"I'm going to take a shower," she says, and backs away from him.

It feels so much like goodbye, and he can barely speak when he asks, "Can I give you a hand?"

"If you want," comes the reply, the indifferent whisper of rustling pages in an abandoned room.

He stands, winces at the creak and pop of bones that have never felt so old, and steps around her to fiddle blindly with the knobs on the stove. The conscientious cook in him wants to keep the soup at a simmer, though Christ knows who's going to eat it now. There is a hot pebble of anguish lodged in his throat, and his mouth feels numb and toothless and oddly disarticulated, as if a sadistic perp had reached inside his mouth and torn out his tongue at the root. Even if he could force sustenance past dead teeth and nerveless gums and a throat clogged with words and cries he cannot expel, his stomach is a hot, cramped ball behind his bellybutton. His stomach has always been his conscience, and right now, it's too full of guilt to accept anything else.

She's in the bedroom by the time he gives up the pretense of checking on the soup, parked beside the laundry hamper and wrestling with her shoes. She's half-naked, shirtless and braless, and there are too many curves and too many angles. Her shoulders aren't so much rounded as collapsed, as though bowed by a great weight, and her scapulae are harsh, bony ridges beneath translucent skin. Her plucking, tugging, prodding fingers are fleshless twigs on the end of her hands. Her face is hard and angular, almost craggy, and as her lips pull from her teeth in a lupine grimace, he thinks of pictures he'd once seen in his history textbook, of haggard, leather-skinned women gazing at the dust-ravaged prairie with lifeless eyes. They'd been hard and spare, those women, stripped of everything but the will to live, creatures who had dispensed with dreams and all their pretty trappings and exchanged them for the grim, unadorned truth of life without pity or kindness or the weakness of faith in a better tomorrow. For them, there had only been now and the unforgiving reality of barren fields and unfed children and unmarked wooden crosses behind the outhouse. Looking at their gaunt, dust-grimed faces, he'd seen the unglamorous face of the survivor.

He wants to reach out and smooth the lines from her face, to fill in the hollow of her cheek, but he senses a terrible sharpness beneath her skin, the promise of blood and tattered flesh, and so he shuffles past her to the bed and drops to one knee to retrieve her bath seat from beneath the bed. There's a fine layer of dust on it when he pulls it out like one of Hammerback's autopsy slabs, and he wonders how long it's gone unused. She'd smelled of soap and and warmth when he'd knelt before her, so she had clearly bathed recently. He furrows his brow and tries to remember if she bathed this morning, but all he can remember is the heady, delirious relief he'd felt when she'd kissed him goodbye on his way out the door. He purses his lips and wills himself to recall, to feel the dampness of her hair beneath his fingers as he'd brushed stray strands from her cool temple and the humid, astringent whiff of soap on the air, but nothing comes except the memory of his heart triphammering unsteadily inside his chest as his lips had met hers. It shouldn't matter, this fine layer of dust, but it does, and he swallows a sour pang of unease and carries the seat into the bathroom and settles it into the tub, aligns it in the center of the tub and carefully tightens the anchoring clamp. He'll never hear the end of it if he cracks the goddamn fiberglass. He turns to the sink and opens the cabinet beneath it and helps himself to the baby wipes Rebecca uses for her hands and Junior's ass, and then he returns his attention to the tub and dusty bath seat.

He wipes it down with scrupulous care, and then he reaches for her shower wand. He plucks it from its plastic wall bracket, and then he shifts his weight to his toes and leans forward to turn on the tap. He manipulates the knobs with practiced familiarity. One twist cold and three twists hot is what she prefers. He tests the water that sloshes from the tap anyway, a protector to the last, and when he is satisfied he's not filling her bath with scalding water, he shakes the water from his fingertips and rocks back on his heels and rises from his crouch and returns to the bedroom.

She's conquered her sneakers, which lay in front of the hamper like a brace of dead hare, but now she's wrangling with her socks, which obdurately refuse to yield the scrawny atolls of her heels. She's jammed her spindly index finger into her sock and pushed the thin, white fabric down, and it squirms and twists like a turning worm. She curses, and breath leaves her in a plosive, ragged gasp.

"You want some help?"

She struggles for a moment more, and then she sits up and jabs her feet at him.

"I'll take that as a yes," he says drily, and tugs absently on the fabric of his pants before dropping to one knee again.

He gently peels off her socks and tosses them into the hamper, and then he cups her cold eggshell feet in his palms. They're cold and mottled and flex and tremble spasmodically in the cups of his palms, and when he draws his thumbs over her fallen arch and the tops of her swollen, purple toes, he feels the noisome grit of dead, dry skin. The skin of one toe is raw and scabbed, as though she'd caught it beneath a bedframe or smashed it into the door or the back of a subway seat, and when he probes it with a cautious finger, she startles and tries to withdraw her foot.

"That hurt?"

She snorts and favors him with an incredulous look. What do you think, o, Master Detective? It would be funny if he weren't so terrified that he's losing her. "I'm doing the best I can," is all she says, and her jaw works in quiet defiance as she stares at a point far above his head.

"I know. "I'm not- I just want you to be okay, that's all." He massages the soles of her feet and discovers more grit, as if she'd crossed the desert in bare feet, and he watches her toes curl and fan and flex. "I know it might be too late for that to matter anymore, but that doesn't mean it isn't true."

She lowers her gaze to meet his, and her face softens. "Always the cop." She reaches out to stroke his cheek, and he turns into her touch, light and spidery but warm and alive and unmistakably his Rebecca.

There you are. Don't leave me, Rebecca. Please hang on. Don't give up on me. Please. He presses a feverish kiss to the heart of her cool, dry palm, and like her toes, her fingers close reflexively around his mouth for an instant, the fleeting brush of an anemone. "Not a a cop, dammit," he murmurs into her puckered palm. "Not because I'm a cop. Because I'm your husband."

Soft, mirthless laughter. "Are you? Sometimes it's impossible to distinguish one from the other."

It cuts him to the quick, and he would argue if he could, but the proof is etched in the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth and in the bruised, distant melancholy in her eyes. Neither had been there before, when he'd been so besotted with her that he'd pushed duty aside for the first time in his life and courted her with reckless abandon. Her face had been unlined when he'd brushed the rice from her hair and the fabric of her wedding dress from her narrow shoulders, and when he'd helped her down the snow-slick steps of St. Patrick's, her eyes had been bright with future's rosy promise.

He's not sure when the lines began to appear, but he he's watched that glorious light fade ever since some nutjob named Lessing had opened a hole in his guts and his world courtesy of a bomb and a plummeting photocopier. It had merely been obscured at first, dimmed by exhaustion and worry as she fretted at his bedside and bargained with God to keep his feet planted on her side of the river, but then he'd opened his idiot, pain-wracked mouth, and it had dimmed in earnest, smothered by hurt and old insecurities and wounds he could feel but had never seen.

She's bounced back so many times, has fanned and fed the dying flame of her quiet admiration with reserves hidden deep within her heart. The light has returned again and again, only to be stamped out by the relentless demands of a city that neither sleeps nor remembers its gratitude. The uniform he swore to serve has been stitched into his skin since he was crawling across his parents' living room in short pants and investigating the shiny bauble of his old man's badge with his toothless mouth and chubby, clutching fingers. Being a cop is a part of him, encoded into the immutable helices of his DNA, and he could no more forsake the compulsion to serve and protect than he could escape his blue eyes or the New York embedded in his tongue. His badge is an extension of his heart, and not so long ago, she had washed pieces of his guts out of its crevices with a damp cotton swab. He could no more live without it than he could live without his heart. Hasn't he told her as much, admitted the sorry, addict's truth of it with his traitor's mouth?

He has been a cop always but a husband when he could, and the master he serves too often bids him break his mistress. He has ignored her dreams in favor of a stranger's pleas and left her to celebrate joint milestones alone. He has denied her what he freely gives to others, and he has done it all in the name of a greater good in which she never seems to share no matter how quietly she accepts her place in the gilded cage of second place.

And it is second place. He has denied it to himself and to her, but she has always known the truth. Your second place is better than a lot of men's first, she had told him once upon a time, when the light in her eyes had been bright and the ties that had bound them had been unsullied by so many broken promises and empty IOUs, and maybe she had believed it then. She isn't a liar, his china doll-secretive and brusque and a keeper of her own counsel-but never a liar. Her tongue cuts, but it does not fork.

There is no light in the eyes that look down at him while he kneels with her fragile, dying feet in his hands, only sorrow and unwanted knowledge and smoldering ash where love had once burned so brightly.

Is love still there? he wonders as he lowers her feet and rises to his. Is it still there, buried beneath all those disappointments I swore I couldn't help and fighting for the breath necessary for one more resurgence? Or has it finally succumbed, smothered beneath the cloying weight of not right now and I'm so sorry and I know I promised, but...?

"I'm gonna make sure the bath is ready," he says, and turns away. He draws a breath and waits for her to tell him not to come back, but there is only stony silence and the dismal echo of her humorless laughter, and so he rolls up his sleeves and toes off his loafers and shuffles into the bathroom to turn off the water before it sloshes over the side of the tub. He carefully avoids his distorted reflection in the cold steel and the mirror mounted above the sink.

He turns to go back for her but finds her waiting for him, parked a foot from the bathroom with her footplates swung wide like a broken hangman's scaffold, half-naked and barefoot and withered in her chair. All that remains of her clothing is her skirt, and she raises her arms and waits for him to lift her to her feet.

He bends at the knees and waits for her to rest her hands on his shoulders. "Ready?" he asks when her palsied, groping grip settles, and when she nods, he stands and brings her with him, hands on either side of her ribcage. She sways drunkenly, right hip sagging with the effort of compensating for a leg two inches shorter than its counterpart, and he steadies her, acts as her center of gravity until she lurches into her own. "I got you," he murmurs as she twitches and spasms, and a strangled laugh escapes her.

Her jittering legs fall still at last, and she sags against him, her face buried in the fabric of his shirt. "You said that once before," she mumbles into the thin cotton, a voice from beneath the loose earth of a freshly-dug grave. "On our wedding day. "Do you remember?"

"Of course I do," he replies thickly, and cups the delicate curve of her skull. "I haven't forgotten a single thing about that day, not one. And I meant what I said."

"I know you did." She presses her cheek to his heart and wraps her arms around his hips.

"Do you still believe it?"

No answer comes, and the heart lodged firmly in his soles spasms in unnameable anguish. She is boneless and heavy and inert, and he suspects that if he were to let go, she would simply crumple to the floor and splay there, legs akimbo and eyes open and unblinking and chest rising and falling like a punctured bellows. She would lie there and let the world roll over her in its cruel tide while she withdrew into herself and shut it out, and when the world had passed, she would gather her strength and rise again and march onward with those unblinking eyes.

She is, after all, a survivor.

He holds her until her legs begin to jitter and shake again, this time from fatigue, and then he reaches behind her and unclasps the magnetic snap of her skirt. It falls to the floor with a sigh of relief and puddles around her naked feet as though to hide them from judgmental, scornful eyes. Then, he hooks his thumb into the frail waistband of her panties and eases them down. They're thin and insubstantial in his grasp, almost threadbare, and as they slide down her wobbling, coltish legs, he wonders how long it's been since she's treated herself to a new pair.

Like it matters. Even if she could, the Kmart panty three-pack is all she could afford. Dying housewife panties. Just one of the perks of being a civil servant's wife. The voice sounds inexplicably like Scagnetti, he who sports a brushcut like a badge of honor and hitches his khakis in a sign of respect whenever Rebecca makes an appearance in the precinct. He finds himself thinking of sitting in an unmarked car with Angell and listening to a spoiled editor named Amber Stanton sneer down her reconstructed nose at his "civil servant's salary." The wide, black brim of Stanton's hat as she leaned jauntily through the window to sneer at him through a cloud of high-end perfume and Angell's tight, sardonic grin as she swanned down the sidewalk. Grief joins guilt in its torment, and the cramp that seizes his roiling belly is so intense that he nearly cries out. He presses his lips together until he can feel bone and breathes through his nose until it passes.

Mourning Angell with Rebecca in his arms strikes him as yet another betrayal, and so he closes his eyes and buries his nose in her hair and wills her scent to flood his nostrils and fill all his empty, lonely places. I'm sorry, he thinks, and the guilt is so heavy inside his chest that he feels like he's drowning in it, hot and thick and sweet as nectar. 'M so sorry, but she's dead because of me. Maybe if she hadn't been flirtin' with me and chasin' somethin' that was never gonna be, she woulda seen it comin'. Maybe she woulda seen that armored car barrellin' toward the diner a second sooner and found cover before that son of a bitch, Cade, ever got a draw on her. Maybe she and that snot-nosed punk she was savin' from bein' caught in his own dirty laundry woulda made it out the back before those bastards ever made it out of the truck. Maybe she coulda called for closer backup. But she was on the phone with me, playin' it cool and coy because she thought there was heat between us. Now she'll never be warm again, never have the chance to find what she was lookin' for with me with someone who could give it to her, and that's on me. Not even splatterin' Cade's brains all over that boiler room is gonna change that. That stain is forever, and I still haven't figured out how to live with it.

He tightens his hold on her and trails his fingertips down the sagging, uneven ridge of her spine. There should be more flesh to cover it, but the job has demanded so many pounds of flesh over the years that there is precious little with which to dress her misaligned bones. She is hard and spare beneath his hands, a stripling eking life from the stingy soil of a rocky hillside. So different from the pale, eager young girl who had so innocently gone to his bed and the fierce, healthy young woman who had carried his child and grown into the enticing, voluptuous curves of a woman in full splendor, with ripe breasts and curvaceous legs and taut thighs and a soft, yielding belly that spoke of a life of, if not plenty, then of comfort. He lets his stroking hands dip to the meager swell of her buttocks, and her shanks are flat beneath his palms. They've always been long and compressed from hours of sitting with no respite from the pressure save her sporadic attempts to shift in her seat, but they've never been so lean, so small.

He cups them to balance her, and then he nuzzles her temple and the sensitive nautilus of her ear. "You need to eat somethin'," he whispers. "I made a pot of soup for supper. French onion with lots of cheese, just how you like it."

She tenses immediately, and his stricken heart cries out again, though he can hardly fault her. Too often, food has come as a final mercy to the condemned, a last, sweet morsel before the end. He has offered her food because he can think of no words with which to comfort her as he issues the department's edicts and strips the flesh from her bones. Words are so much oral flatulence when you're being set upon the road to nowhere. At least food offers nourishment and fleeting solace.

He tightens his grip and presses his lips to her clenched jaw. "No! No," he hisses. "Rebecca, I swear, this isn't another last supper, another last meal before the department comes to shake my hand and kick you in the ass as they drag me out the door. It's just- I know you don't believe it anymore, but I love you. I love you, and I want you to be happy like you used to be. Just...please."

For a moment, she remains stiff as a board, and all he can hear is her rapid, shallow breathing, a small, dangerous animal trapped in the hunter's strangling snare. Then she goes slack and sags against him, and she turns her face to mouth the fabric at his sternum.

"All right. All right," he croons, and he's so relieved that his vision swims.

She raises one small foot and paws arrhythmically at the floor, a foal taking its first uncertain steps. It's Rebecca-speak for My legs are giving out, and so he carefully lowers her into her chair again and watches in silence as her legs shudder convulsively and she grits her teeth against the spasms that threaten to wrack the rest of her. It's a spectacle to which he's borne witness a thousand times in the privacy of their bedroom, his proud, brilliant queen shamed by the vicious vagaries of her warped body and misaligned nervous system, and it never fails to cleave his heart in two. It's not fair that someone so fierce and redoubtable and unrivaled in her field should be reduced to twitching in her chair like a drooling electroshock victim and fighting tooth and claw for the simple dignity of upright. He watches her struggle to achieve the latter, feet thumping and scrabbling for the purchase of footplates that aren't there, and he reaches out to brush his fingers over her flustered, exertion-reddened face.

Her legs continue their uncontrolled, insectile dance, the skin of her quadriceps rippling and puckering with its nervous energy, but the rest of her stills. Her contracted, wildly-pitching arms and clawed fingers unfurl and sink to her lap, where they dangle limply from her weakly-pumping knees, and her torso ceases its restive, agonized torsion. She closes her eyes and sighs at his tentative touch, and the tension drains from her face as his fingertips ghost over the tip of her nose and graze her parted lips and narrow chin. The chair hisses and squeaks as she shifts to achieve greater contact, and he obliges her unspoken need, presses the ball of his thumb to her lower lip and lets a tremor that has nothing to do with exertion or unruly muscles prickle against the gun-callused skin. Her longing for contact is palpable, and a fanciful part of him swears that he can see her pores opening to drink him in, never mind that he can scarcely see for the tears in his eyes.

I wonder if she'd be so damn eager for your touch if she knew that thumb that was just strokin' her lower lip belongs to the hand of a murderin' bastard who spread some merc's brains all over the boiler room floor. Wonder if she'd think it was so damn sweet if she could taste the blood it's covered in, sneers a mocking, cold voice inside his head, the voice of Shane Casey and a thousand other skels whose ranks he'd joined the moment he'd squeezed that trigger and left his oath to act as the city's conscience in a lazily-swirling cloud of cordite and dust.

The thought inspires another cramp and the urge to withdraw his hand, but he understands that to do so would destroy the last, fragile thread of chance that dangles before him, and so he resists the impulse and instead repeats the motion, retraces the unhurried, reverent movement of his fingers over her upturned face. She sighs as though the weight of Sisyphus has been lifted from her bowed shoulders, and his heart trembles in recognition. Somewhere behind this thin, alien face with its dead, baleful eyes, his Rebecca stirs.

Still here, he thinks incredulously. She's still here somewhere.

Yeah, but how long you think she's gonna stick around once she knows the truth? the voice needles. She signed on for a choirboy, not some hypocritical waste of air who blows a guy's brains out in the heat of a tantrum and then drowns his sorrows in cheap hooch because he can't stomach the truth. Why should she stay? Look around, Detective . This isn't exactly the Waldorf-Astoria, and these days, you can't even be assed to throw a fuck into her. What's left for her here except another twenty years of almosts?

Dull panic cramps his aching gut, and he emits another acid belch. "You ready?" he asks when the tremors have stilled, and bends to slip the slack puddle of fabric from her feet. He bunches it in his fist and tosses it haphazardly at the open hamper. The skirt flares and catches on the edge, but the panties land atop her shoes in a rumpled, white clot that reminds him of Jess' intestines pulsing and fluttering against his hand, and his mutinous gorge rises. The guilt rises, too, and he's not sure which is making it so damn hard to breathe, like gasping for air through a layer of mud and dead hair.

Haunted, he thinks dumbly as Rebecca's slender arms reach for him and hover in the air before his eyes like beseeching revenants. I'm haunted.

He reaches for her blindly. It's a ritual as old as their union, and he works on muscle memory. One arm around her shoulders. One slipped behind her stringy, too-straight knees. Lift from the knees, not the spine. Hold her close so that she does not slip from his arms on an errant spasm and tumble to the bedroom floor, all pained groans and panicked breathing as her stunned nervous system processes the pain of sudden, unceremonious impact and struggles to catalogue bumps and bruises that blossom beneath her skin. She curls her arms around his neck and tucks her head in the crook of his shoulder, and it should feel good, this moment of absolute trust and familiar intimacy, but all he can feel is Angell's lolling, dead weight in his arms as he'd pulled her from the back of the squad car and raced into the emergency room. He remembers the limp, listless swing of her arms the most, how their slack swing had perversely mirrored the urgent stride of his legs as he'd burst through the lethargic sliding doors and screamed for help into the morose and jaundiced silence.

No swinging arms, thank God for small and useless mercies, just her bobbing feet, mottled, purple flashes on the periphery of his vision. It should ease the grip of this memory, this intrusive anomaly, but it doesn't. It only intensifies it, and though he knows he's holding Rebecca, who is wounded and irritable and brittle, but blessedly alive, his tortured conscience screams that it's Angell, motionless and heavy with Charon's mantle and slipping through his fingers no matter how fast he runs or how tightly he holds her.

(soheavyonygodshe'ssoheavyholdonholdon) his mind howls even as his eyes register that it's Rebecca he's holding, Rebecca of the golden hair and mouth full of serrated blades. Rebecca, whose breath is plosive and warm against his neck, and whose arms tighten reflexively around his neck in response to his wordless terror. She clings to him as he scissors through the bathroom door on legs gone numb, and she stiffens spasmodically when he lists unexpectedly to starboard to spare her outthrust feet a painful meeting with the doorjamb. She turns into him, and her breasts graze his sternum with every rise and fall of her chest. Alive, alive, yet his mind insists that she's nothing but a handful of blood and blind eyes and unmitigated failure.

The cognitive dissonance between what is and what so recently was is so great that he nearly topples headlong into the tub when he bends to lower her into it, but his muscles remember to love her when his mind cannot, and he holds his feet as he lowers her into the water toes-first.

And now I lay my burden down, he thinks, and hates himself. This is not a laying down of imagined burdens, but a sacrament, a sacred baptism. And he anointed her head with oil.

"Too hot?" his mouth asks when she hisses. He doesn't proceed until she shakes her head, and then he slowly sets her on the narrow, padded strip of plastic and vinyl. She releases herself to the water at once, lets the tension ebb from her body and into the water, and her limbs float to the surface and bob like bits of driftwood. It's the picture of serenity, a rare chance to see her as she was before he'd caressed her face and left hollows and lines in his wake. Unblemished and lovely and adrift on blissful, painless tides, and he should savor it, especially now, especially after his renewed acquaintance with death on a lonely, rattling subway car. But all he can see when he looks into the tub is Angell's still, white form in the hospital morgue, her eyes closed and her lethal wound tastefully hidden beneath a thin, green sheet the color of early decomposition, a free preview of what awaited her after her star turn on the mortician's table.

He drops to his knees, grateful that the linoleum floor will bear him up, and turns the plastic crank on the bath seat until Rebecca's breasts and belly disappear beneath the water. "You want some bubbles?"

A languid shake of her head, and the ends of her hair undulate with the clutching, illusory grace of kelp. He finds himself at loose ends. He has promised her a confession, and so he must give it, but he doesn't want to disturb her rare and precious peace, to see the serene softness of her face harden into damning scorn. He doesn't want to see the feral changeling behind his maiden fair's face, and so he busies his hands with useless movement, scoops water into his cupped palm and tips it over her head; it sluices down her face, drips from the tip of her nose and beads in her eyelashes like dew. There's a melancholy beauty to it that soothes him, and so he repeats the act, a vassal attending to a sleeping goddess.

"Enjoying yourself?"

"You remember when I did this for you in the hospital? Washed your hair?" It isn't what he'd planned to say, what he needs to say, but they are the only words that he can find.

"Mmm." It's a soft hum, almost drowsy, but he knows that she's listening intently behind those half-lidded eyes, mind as sharp as her expression is logy. "'S when I knew I was safe."

A strangled noise escape him, and he struggles to breathe around the sudden ache in the center of his chest, a wave of emotion so huge that it threatens to swamp him. Oh, Christ, he thinks, and clutches the side of the tub to keep himself upright.

Her eyes remain heavy-lidded, but her head turns, and she raises her hand from the water and rests it on his wrist. A faint smile, and she draws light, lazy circles on the spar of his wrist with the gibbous crescents of her nails. They're far longer than she usually keeps them, and jagged where she's caught them on a door opener or the fabric of Junior's clothes, and he makes a mental note to trim them once she's warm and dry. They scrape his skin in a loose, wavering circuit, and his skin prickles at the contact, as though someone has blown on it.

It's Jess, he thinks with the stuporous lucidity of the mad. She's come to haunt me for not gettin' to the diner in time, for not savin' her. He blinks, and suddenly, it's Jess in the tub and her hand on his wrist, cold and white as bone and bloated with water and decomposition. Her fingertips are pruned and perversely soft, like the rotten, gelid heft of overripe nectarines, and she floats in a wash of blood and tiny clumps of tissue. Her wet hair is matted to her scalp and water runs down her face in pale pink rivulets. The ends of her hair squirm beneath the befouled water, grave worms and bits of blackened entrails, and his gorge rises and spasms.

You called me baby, she croons in a glottal, gargling voice, as though she's speaking through a mouthful of black and clotted blood. Do you remember?

He didn't, but he does now, oh, yes. Baby, hey, hey, baby, I'm here. Can you see me? Broken glass crunching beneath his feet and his tie dangling over her dazed, slack finger like a lifeline as he'd bent and scooped her from the floor and the rapidly-spreading pool of blood.

He's comforted far too many people in their last moments, leaned over too many contorted, frightened faces while the life ebbed from their eyes and lips and fruitlessly-flaring nostrils and spun his merciful lies. He's appeared in their fading vision like an angel from on high to offer powerless platitudes and to coax dying declarations from numb lips, He's used countless endearments and honorifics-buddy, sweetheart, kiddo, kid, lady, miss-but he's never called any of them "baby". He doesn't know why it should have fallen from his lips in that moment, a rare and precious gem passed to the wrong outstretched hand.

You were panicked, that's all, offers the thin, uneasy voice of his overburdened conscience. The adrenaline was off the charts, and she was your friend, bleeding there on the floor, and it was the first word that came to mind.

Or maybe, pipes up Shane Casey, slouched in his corner with his greasy hair in his eyes and his Cheshire-cat grin looming out of the shadows like a malignant moon, maybe your heart isn't as faithful and pure as you want to believe. Maybe you wanted a slice of that Angell food cake, after all, and just never got the chance to get yourself a taste. How about it, detective? Maybe your wife isn't as dumb as she looks.

Fuck you, Casey, he snarls. I love her. I wouldn't do that.

Casey crosses his arms and shrugs. You never thought you'd ever blow a man's brains out just because you could, either, he points out with malevolent pragmatism, and sweeps the hair from his eyes with stout, graceless fingers.

The hand on his wrist tightens and grows heavier, and he nearly screams, sure that Angell is going to yank him into the bloody tub to lie with him in a lovers' embrace. What has cast its shadow over your heart? she asks, but it's Rebecca's voice that comes from her lips, and when he blinks again, it's Rebecca he sees, weary and watchful and adrift in blessedly clear water. "Hmm?" she persists, and brings her warm, dripping hand to his cheek, and he presses it into the soft wetness of her palm and reminds himself that it's water, just water, that's running down the side of his face. "What made you crawl into a bottle and as far away from me as you could?"

He doesn't answer her, but sits back on his socked heels and rolls up his sleeves. "I thought I was that guy," he tells the cheap, plastic button that serves as a cufflink. "The guy you thought you were sayin' yes to in church that day. The boy scout who caught the bad guys and helped kittens out of trees and helped little old ladies across the street. I tried to be that guy every day, and most of the time, it was so easy to be the good guy that I thought that's who I really was."

"But you're not?" No condemnation. No surprise, either, no confusion. Just curiosity.

A helpless shrug. "I don't know. I want to be; God. I want to be that guy. For you. For everybody. I want to be the kind of guy Junior can look up to, you know? A stand-up guy who makes the world a better place than it was when he came into it. But how can I be when I shot a guy in the head?"

"The Cade shooting?" Puzzlement now. He can hear the furrow in her brow that he won't let himself see. The water sloshes as she shifts in the tub. "Honey love, the IAB cleared you. They called it a good shoot."

His anger at himself boils over, spills onto her like hot oil. "That doesn't mean it was a good shoot," he snaps. "It just means they can't find proof it wasn't. 'Sides, it's not like they looked that closely. They usually don't strain themselves when a cop killer goes down." His anger has vanished as quickly as it came, and now he's hollow and sick and ashamed.

She's silent, and he's not sure if it's anger or forebearance or the sting of another unexpected and undeserved lash that holds her cutting tongue. Another splash, the furtive plip of an alligator slipping below the murky waters of the bayou.

He clears his throat and shifts, and the joints of his knees creak and groan in protest, and Christ, when did he start feeling so damn old, hunched and stooped and painfully contracted inside his skin? "I lied." The simple utterance is a verbal clean-and-jerk that he feels in his jaws and throat and chest. The pain of it even reaches between his shoulders and squeezes with relentless, hot-nailed pressure. It settles at the base of his spine like an incipient cramp, and he's sure it will still be there tomorrow and for several days thereafter, the hot, bruised-muscle memory of deadlifting a body off a filthy diner floor. "I lied," he repeats, and it hurts just as much the second time.

Nothing this time, not even a stealthy plip., and he chances a quick glance at her. She's supine in her bath seat, toes and breasts peeking above the water and fingers spread in an amphibious splay. Her eyes are half-closed, but he sees the predatory, avid gleam of them behind delicate, water-dark eyelashes. She's waiting, an alligator watching its unsuspecting prey from the concealing murk of the shallows. Just a little closer. A little closer now...

He drops his gaze before her lips part to reveal too many teeth. "I told them Cade was reaching for his gun and was an imminent threat, but-shit." He swallows with an audible click and scrubs desperately at his nape. "But he was already down. I coulda cuffed him, but I saw his gun, and-" He shifts, twists from the truth as if it were a poisonous nostrum. "You have to understand, doll," he pleads, and Christ, his voice is reedy and pathetic, hardly the voice of the strong prince she'd once believed him to be. "It was the fifty-caliber Desert Eagle, the same gun that killed Jess, and all I could see was her lyin' in that wrecked diner with her eyes rollin' in her sockets. All I could feel was the way her blood kept runnin' through my fingers no matter how hard I tried to keep it in. She was my friend, and that bastard shot her like a dog, and she didn't deserve to die like that." His voice has risen steadily, and his words are a tangled, forlorn wail of jumbled syllables and inarticulate anguish. He takes a deep, shuddering breath and sinks onto his heels and keeps his unsteady, astigmatic gaze fixed on the blank, idiotic whiteness of the tub's lip so that he won't have to see the disappointment blossom in her eyes like nightshade. "He killed her, so I killed him," he croaks. "I stood over him and put a bullet right between his murderin' eyes, and then I walked up the stairs and went on being one of the good guys."

He stops, panting, fists clenched and chest heavy with the certitude that now judgment must surely come, that his avenging angel must rise from her repose and cut him down with a point of her finger, that his punishment will come in a flash of red and a welling of blood or in the stony silence of begone. But nothing comes and nothing changes, and when he tears his gaze from the safe blandness of the tub, she's lying in the same position, toes flexing and curling helplessly and fingers splayed atop the water. She blinks indolently at him, beaded water dripping from her lashes like tears, and then she opens her mouth and laughs.

It begins as a low. sporadic rumble in her belly, the uneven, coughing sputter of a reluctant engine, but soon it is a full-throated cackle, and she throws back her head and closes her eyes as though it were delicious. It's a queerly orgasmic posture, eyes closed and mouth open and breasts swaying with the force of her laughter, and it would be erotic if her weren't on his knees beside the tub with his bewildered, murderer's heart lodged in his throat. He doesn't understand. He had imagined many reactions to his confession, but never this one, never this cold, dark amusement.

"You were afraid I'd leave you because you stepped on a maggot?" Soft and incredulous, and she laughs again.

"Goddammit, Rebecca, I killed a man. I shot him in cold blood, just because I could. Just because I didn't ever want to imagine him sittin' in a cell and jerkin' it to the taxpayer-funded cable. I pulled the trigger and became a murderer."

She sits up so suddenly that water slops over the side of the tub and soaks into the knees of his dress pants, and he recoils in shock. She is seldom so fast, his plodding, deliberate, stiff-jointed girl. "No," she hisses, and her eyes are bright and cold and terribly aware inside her face. "No. You listen to me, Donald Flack, and you listen well. You're no more a murderer than is the exterminator who sprays the deli on 38th once a month. Simon Cade was a cockroach, and you stepped on him. The end."

"Not the end, Rebecca. I shot an unarmed man in the head because he shot Jess. How does that make me any better than the asshole who shoots his wife because she's two-timin' him with the mailman?" he demands.

A scornful snort. "Simon Cade wasn't fucking your wife; he shot a cop and tried to shoot you. He forfeited his right to life the moment he drove an armored car into a diner and opened fire. He earned his death with Angell's and lost any hope for mercy or pity when he shot at you. Perhaps my heart is blacker than yours, but I'll not shed a tear or waste a moment's breath on a man who sought to make me a widow and our son an orphan. Cade deserved to die, whether at the end of a needle or at the end of a bullet. You did the world a favor. I can't ask you to be glad of it; such wickedness simply isn't in your damnably Gryffindor nature, but you have no cause to throw your life after his in a fit of misguided contrition. Nobility is the swiftest road to perdition."

He'd like to say he doesn't recognize the hard, merciless creature before him, but he's caught glimpses of it before in the courtroom at Lessing's sentencing hearing and in the reaction to the Paddy Mc-AK shooting, when she'd said much the same. In the mute, bridling creature that had shifted and seethed beside him in the pew and kept its unkind counsel behind its locked teeth. He suspects that this is the endgame, its final metamorphosis. Very soon now, he will see its true form, and the thought fills him with a mixture of swooning dread and dry-mouthed anticipation. He doesn't want to know, and yet, like Bluebeard's wife before him, he must know, must see what lies behind the forbidden door.

"Would you be here if you'd let him leave that room?" she continues.

He thinks of the hatred in Cade's eyes as he'd lain on the floor with a bullet in his gut and a taunting smirk on his face, thinks of the way his eyes had slid to the gun that had been just out of reach. "No," he says. "I mean, I don't know. He might've just escaped out the back door."

"Bullshit," comes the flat retort.

"Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but it doesn't matter because he was down and I coulda cuffed him. I just- Life just didn't seem fair. Nobody gave Jess her life back."

She snorts. "So much wasted sentiment. You're a survivor, Don. Everyone is, beneath the skin. Self-preservation is innate. Newborn babies who don't yet have the ability to understand fear understand danger. They scream when they're cold and when they're hungry and when the wolf in desperate teenage mother's clothing dumps them into garbage bin behind the Shake Shack. You could abandon a newborn in a godforsaken sewer where no one will ever hear it, and it will still scream for its life, scream until its body arches from the blankets. Life knows the hunger for survival from the moment it awakens. Life is selfish. Life is greedy. Life will destroy another to preserve itself for just one more moment, one more breath. Life will grind the loftiest ideals beneath its heel if the alternative is death, and it will do the same to a human throat if it must. You wanted to live. You shot him. Self-preservation is the most human emotion of all, and there's no shame in it."

She's sitting so far forward now that her bony knees have drawn up toward her breasts in a bid to ease the strain on her hamstrings, and the hand that grips the side of the tub is a livid, batrachian claw, wet and eldritch and perverse as it spasms and pulses. Her wet hair frames her face in thick hanks, and though her face is drawn and taut with the effort of maintaining her mutinous balance, her eyes are luminous, alight with an unflinching resolve that puckers his skin into gooseflesh and raises his hackles. There's even the sharp curve of a smile in the corners of her bloodless mouth. She looks more a child of Innsmouth than of heaven, eternal and inhuman and deathless.

Almost there, he thinks.

She stares at him a moment longer with her piercing, alien gaze, and then she settles in her seat again and brushes a clump of sodden hair out of her face with stiff, splayed fingers. "Nothing wrong with vengeance, either, come to think of it," she murmurs, and lets her head loll against the wall. She laughs, a satisfied chuckle, and closes her eyes.

"Yeah, well, it might be satisfyin, but it's illegal." He's relieved, but he's also afraid and possessed of the urge to flee, to avert his eyes and scuttle beyond her reach. He has his absolution, his impossible pardon, but he's not sure who has granted it and even less sure that he should accept it. Beware the fruit of the poisoned tree, he thinks deliriously, and watches the ripples created in the water by the steady rise and fall of her belly.

A careless, one-shouldered shrug, and water beads in the prominent ridge of her collarbone like a scattering of diamonds. "Doesn't mean it's immoral."

"You sound like a defense attorney."

Another shrug. "Pragmatism sits more easily on my bones, I suppose. Ideals have a way of disappointing." Her eyes cloud with visions only she can see for an instant, but then she purses her lips and turns that unsettling gaze on him once more. "Besides, splitting hairs requires an exceedingly sharp knife-" A fleeting twist of lip. "And I have those in plenty." She smiles, little more than a moist glint of saliva on enamel.

He doesn't find it at all reassuring. "You didn't kill Lessing when he got off with a trip to the rubber room," he points out.

"No. I didn't," she says softly, and when she smiles this time, he sees it in full splendor, the dybbuk that hides behind her face, the crouching, antediluvian creature of yellow eyes and curved, dirty claws that carry suppurating infection and a mouth that holds too many teeth, teeth yellow with plaque and black with old blood

This. This is what they saw when she was seventeen years old and rolling over bodies on some godforsaken moor in Scotland, breathing magic and stuffing black mud into the open mouths of the dying. Sharp teeth and a hard face and dead eyes. It frightens him, but it fascinates him, too, and he finds himself wondering if her lovely, golden hair fell into their gaping, gasping mouths as she stuffed wet earth into them, a final ray of sunshine to accompany them on their descent into eternal darkness. He wonders if it tasted of wheat.

It's a perverse, nonsensical thought, but he can't shake it as he sinks even further onto his knees. "Who are you?" he croaks.

Her answer does not surprise him. "A survivor." Stark. "And so are you."

He can't think of anything to say after that, and so, he sits with his wet hands on his quadriceps and watches her splayed hand bob on invisible currents. He imagines it holding a fistful of dark, squelching mud.

It's she who breaks the silence. "Love makes monsters of us all," she says, and the tenderness in her voice threatens to undo him. "You loved Jessica Angell. I don't want to know why or how; not now, and not ever, but you loved her." A lament, and she turns her head to study the tile wall and hide the tears that spill from her eyes to mingle with the beads of water stippled on her cheeks.

He hears the coda she refuses to add, whether through kindness or exhaustion. The way you never loved me. His heart throbs painfully inside his constricted chest, and he rises to his knees and plucks her hand from the water. He kisses it and threads his fingers between hers. "How long?"

She offers her answer to the wall. "I always knew, you know," she says listlessly. "That I would never ... That you'd never be able to love me more than the job, but you loved me as well and as much as you could, and for a long time, that was enough-more than enough. It was good, and it was sweet, and I felt lucky and cherished because I knew it was me you wanted to come home to, that you were proud of me. I knew you would always make a place for me." She swipes peevishly at her eyes.

"Then Lessing and his bomb happened, and everything changed. There was no balance anymore. Everything you had went to the job, and every time you tried to restore the balance, to offer me a scrap of time or affection, the job came and gobbled it up. You loved the job so much that you let it take our home and make a shame of me. You left me with nowhere to go and no hope of respite, and I hated it, but I didn't hate you. Oh, I was pissed, and I thought vicious, poisonous things, but I still thought you loved me, still wanted to be with me."

"I did, doll. I do." It hurts to breathe, and there's ground glass in his throat in the shape of the words he speaks. "I never meant for things to get so badly out of whack, Rebecca, but I swear to you that you own my heart. Every inch of it." He squeezes her restless fingers.

A soft, strengthless laugh that bears an uneasy resemblance to the death rattles of white-faced victims bleeding out onto the filthy sidewalk or the pristine, white linens of a gurney, and he knows she doesn't believe him. "How long?" he repeats.

She licks her lips and blinks at the wall. "I still thought you loved me, even after that. Even after you called to extend my sentence in that beautiful purgatory. I thought it was just the job being a merciless bitch, playing on your maddening, glorious need to be someone's hero. And then-,"

She swallows with an audible click. "I know I'm not good at much. I'm not good at being a domestic goddess or a master-bedroom porn star, and evidently, I'm not much for being the supportive officer's wife, but I am good at that. In fact, there's nobody better than me when it comes to speaking the secret language of the wordless. Charlie, maybe, but not even he knows all the dialects that numbers speak or how to interpret the stories they can tell with their rigid tongues. I can hear their music."

"I don't get many chances to shine. I'm a research mathematician who spends most of her time breathing chalk dust and wasting her breath on bored, distracted children in adult skins just counting the minutes until class is over. Every now and then, I stumble over a bright mind that wants to learn, but most of my days are spent staring at a sea of bovine faces, proving my worth and intelligence to skeptical parents who can't see past the wheels bearing up my ass, and sitting in interminable departmental meetings wherein Krantz and a member of the Board of Regents bloviates on the government's latest testing mandates. I'm just another dull bead in this country's crumbling abacus. Even when we math nerds gather at conventions, it's usually just an excuse to play convoluted math games and perform the nerdy version of the Venice Beach posedown. Everyone needs what we do, but no one really gives a damn how we do it."

"So, when Charlie and I finished our paper on biomechanical mathematics and their practical applications in the development of restorative medical procedures and prostheses and NYU extended the invitation to present it to a group of botoxed philanthropists and influential laypeople, I was so excited. It was a chance to show off, sure, but mostly, it was finally my chance to show off for you, my one night to make you proud. Math makes me feel alive and beautiful, and that night, at the presentation, my plumage was on full display. What little light I have was shining as brightly as it could. I was as beautiful as I was ever going to be that night, and I still couldn't turn your head." Her voice catches and wavers, a tightrope walker pinwheeling on her narrow nylon ledge, but it doesn't break and neither does the rest of her. Her face remains impassive save for a fleeting, contractive twitch in her jaw and her gaze remains fixed on the tile wall.

He didn't come. He had important things do do, his dead sister tells Gert Rabinowicz and the stupid, bare floor of the P.S. 109 green room, and he's moving before he's aware of it, spinning on his throbbing knees like a crazed Solid Gold dancer and scrabbling frantically for the purchase of the toilet seat. He grips it in numb, frozen hands and heaves himself upright and over the bowl just as the remnants of the pastrami on rye he'd scarfed in a thirty-second lunch outside the precinct puts in an unpleasant reappearance. His nose and eyes burn with tears and bile, and he tastes rye and spicy mustard and the salty, garlicky meatiness of pastrami and the burnt-earth bitterness of coffee. He retches and squeezes the toilet seat in cold, convulsing fingers, and though he screws his eyes shut, he can still see Diana in her recital finery, howling her misery into the protective, encircling arms of Gert Rabinowicz. The anguish in her eyes and the snot on her upper lip and the clawing desperation with which she'd clung to the arms that cradled her. He can still hear her, too, the shrill, wounded-animal keening of her, lost and raw and brimming with a nameless rage that he had nevertheless understood. It had been the cry of the fatally betrayed, equal parts war cry and mournful wail, and as his stomach does its best to turn itself inside out, he wonders if this is who she might have become in the fullness of time, this cold survivor of impossibly-steep angles and fathomless hollows and insufficient soul to paper the holes.

But in truth, he can muster precious little scorn. He remembers himself as well, the seething, atavistic, hatred for his father that had coated the back of his throat like clove honey and gall as he'd lain in the dark beside his feverish, sleeping sister and watched the slumped form of his father on the edge of her unoccupied bed, slack hands dangling between his naked knees and tears carving silver tracks down a face he couldn't see. He remembers the urge to bite and snap and tear his father's indecisively-hovering fingers from his hand. He remembers reveling in his mother's righteous anger as it had wafted through the thin walls of their house like the smoke from a great and terrible fire, remembers how his soul had sung as she'd lain his father bare and called out his sin in a clear, brittle voice of cracked plaster and shattered china. Most of all, he remembers how right he'd felt as he'd curled protectively around his sister and sworn never to be like that, how sure and goddamned holy as he'd stared at his father's dangling hands and hairy shins. He'd laugh if he could, but his spasming throat is choked with burning clots of guilt and slaw.

He is no stranger to failure, or to penance before the porcelain god. He has grieved with his stomach since he was a boy, has knelt here to shed the tears his eyes can never seem to express, but this time, there is no cool hand to comfort him, no brush of his mother's hand over his straining back or clammy brow, no cushioning softness of her housecoat against his burning temple as she croons a mother's solace into his ear. There isn't even the bony, blue-veined comfort of Gert Rabinowicz, that venerable angel in an old woman's skin who had borne his sister up and eased her out of that hard, dead, grey room, stroking her hectic face and muttering Yiddish endearments that had sounded like prayers offered up in God's native tongue. There isn't even the unseen weight of his father hovering just outside the bathroom door with the sports section rolled in one broad, gun-callused hand, a poor substitute for the sure heft of his favorite nightstick.

He retches again and again, retches until his jaws creak and pop and his throat prickles and burns with a thousand hot darning needles. He heaves until his chest aches and his stomach is bruised and sprung and his arms are leaden sticks of soft tallow on the ends of his sore shoulders. I'm not that guy, he thinks as thick strings of clear bile threaten to suffocate him and black spots bloom before his bulging eyes. I'm not that guy.

The fit passes, though the nausea remains, greasy and heavy in the pit of his stomach, and he stays on his knees and rests his forehead on the shelf of his forearm. There is no sound in the room save for his ragged breathing as it echoes hollowly inside the cool, damp cavern of the toilet bowl. There isn't even the sound of Rebecca splashing and scrabbling and flailing in order to drag herself out of the tub and reach him. He takes a deep breath that tastes of Clorox and vomit and turns to look at her.

She hasn't moved, and her face is an inscrutable mask. Only her eyes betray any emotion, and though there is tenderness and sorrow and love, there is also a glimmer of an emotion he cannot quite place, a flicker of something hard and bitter and older than the knowledge of fire. It's the cold, dead, assessing gleam of a predator's yellow eye in the dense, green underbrush, and he can't shake the feeling that she's taking his measure. And oh, but somehow, he thinks she finds him wanting. He gropes for the toilet handle with nerveless fingers, and as the great god Bog consumes his sacrifice, he lets himself slide to the floor and sags dispiritedly against the toilet, a deposed Roman prince in final, disconsolate repose.

"I don't wanna be that guy," he says plaintively.

"But you are," she says implacably, and stirs the water with pale, thin fingers.

Yes, he supposes he is. His head is so heavy, and he lets it droop to his chest and stares at the outline of his toes, which press against the nappy cotton of his socks like hastily-covered bodies. "Why?" he asks. It's an effort, like pushing water from drowning lungs. "Why did you stay if you felt that way? Why stay in my bed? Why did you have Junior with me if you were so damn sure I didn't love you?"

"Because I love you," she answers, and the ferocity of it startles him. He raises his head to find her clutching the side of the tub again, holding herself in some semblance of upright by sheer force of will. "Because you weren't always that guy, and because I want to believe." She collapses against her bath seat with an undignified, bone-rattling slap of wet flesh. More water sloshes over the side of the tub, and the pragmatist in him whispers of mildew and moldy grout.

"Come?" she implores, and holds out her arms.

He goes to her. Of course he does. He has never been able to do anything else. It takes him but a few moments to shed his clothes. Most of them fall into the water on the floor. He finds he doesn't care. He eases her gently forward as he prepares to step in behind her, and he's shocked at the thinness of her skin and the prominence of her scapula beneath his hand. She's stretched too thin, his girl, and he briefly wonders just who is housed in this shelter of flesh and bone. He shifts and lifts and arranges until she's resting on him, her ass settled against his quiescent prick and the fleshy heaviness of his balls and her head lolling against his breastbone. She should be so much heavier, but it's as though her bones have been hollowed, and he loops an arm around her belly to keep her from flying away.

She turns in his embrace, burrows into his warmth, and he wills it into her. She presses her hand to the center of his chest, and for an instant, he's sure she's going to push him beneath the water and hold him there until his hidden sin rises to the surface, a fire-eyed inquisitor intent on rooting out the witch among them. But she does no such thing. She only runs her fingers through the sparse hairs of his chest and plants a soft feverish kiss on his rotator cuff. "I love you," she breathes into his flesh, and it is both blessing and curse.

He reaches up to stroke her hair. "I love you, too, Rebecca. Always. I love you. I love-"

He enfolds her in a reverent embrace. Once, in a land and time ruled by zealots and madmen, the water had carried judgment on its tides. Guilt or innocence had been proven by its caprice. The innocent had sunk to the bottom of the river and gone to God on its slow and steady current. The guilty had remained afloat and gone to their eternal reward on a cloud of noxious smoke and all-consuming flame.

He takes a deep breath and tightens his grip and closes his eyes and waits for the water to decide.