Myka, you need to come home.
Myka, you need to come home.
Myka, you need to come home.
She slept on the connecting flight from Chicago, which was unusual for her. She wasn't a particularly nervous flyer, but there was always work to be done. She couldn't work on classified material in a public space, but she could keep up on trends in the artworld. Knowing which works and which artists were hot commodities might make her extra alert when the Bureau received tips about, say, a potentially fraudulent Artemisia Gentileschi going up for sale. Yet this time she slept, from the moment the plane left the runway at O'Hare to the moment it landed in Colorado Springs. Whether it was exhaustion or escape, she didn't know as she, still woozy from jerking awake as the plane braked to a stop, fumbled for her carry-on in the overhead bin. The man who had sat next to her in the aisle seat helped her to lift it out. "Thought the flight attendant was going to have to poke you," he said, a smile big on his face, signaling that he wasn't complaining, only commenting. "You must've needed the sleep, though, you didn't move, not once, not even when we were jouncing around like holy hell over Nebraska."
"Glad to have missed it," Myka said, setting her bag on the floor. "Thanks."
The train of passengers began moving forward, and she was able to turn her back on him without feeling she was being rude. As she passed one of the flight attendants on her way out, she only nodded at the "Thanks for flying with us. Hope to see you again soon." Maybe not soon enough. Her father's funeral wasn't until Friday, and her return flight wasn't until Sunday morning. She would be in Colorado Springs for almost a week, and there would be no getting away from Warren Bering, his absence no less oppressive for her than his presence. She scrolled through the messages on her phone while she waited in line at the car rental counter. Only Pete and Steve – and Helena – in the office knew that her father had died. Tracy had called her mid-morning, catching her just as she returned from a trip to the coffee shop. Tracy should have been getting Noah ready to meet the bus, but this morning she was telling her sister that their father had died. Their mother had found him collapsed on the kitchen floor. Myka had said little, asking only after their mother. Before she had ended the call, Tracy said, "Myka, you need to come home." She had paused, then added uncertainly, "You are coming home, aren't you?"
Of course she was. She had informed Pete, talked to Steve (not that she had much in the way of cases, other than Burdette, to be looked after), made her flight and car rental reservations, and waited for Helena's meeting with Lee and Jennifer to end. She had done all of it calmly, methodically, accepting Pete's awkward condolences and Steve's sympathetic hug with a composure that had demanded little effort from her. Helena had more skeptically regarded her as she put files away and locked desk drawers. "We'll talk tonight and you'll tell me how you're feeling," she had said softly. "I've been where you are, and though you think you've long since stopped answering to him, the fact that he isn't there, that he can't judge you anymore, it's harder to come to terms with than you think."
Myka's noncommittal grunt had been lost in the putting on of her jacket. She had adjusted the strap of her satchel on her shoulder and let her fingers briefly lock with Helena's as she left her cube.
That all seemed days ago now. There was a text from Tracy, telling her that their mother was at her and Kevin's house. We have room for you too. Myka grimaced and deleted the text. The rest were largely automatic notifications from her bank and credit card lenders and targeted sales announcements from online retailers she had patronized. She supposed one of them could actually be a message from Claudia, but she suspected that Claudia's method of contacting her would be more direct than Fargo's and, to the extent that she could design it so, more malevolent. Wrapping up the details of her car rental arrangement, she grabbed the keys and rolled her suitcase into the car park. Finding her nondescript sedan among all the others only by pressing the remote, she stowed her suitcase in the trunk and left the airport for Tracy's house.
It was in a newish subdivision on the edge of town, a two-story that could fairly call itself tudor, craftsman, mediterranean, any number of architectural styles because it had borrowed a feature from each of them. The overall effect was muted in the twilight, but in full sunlight, it was dizzying. Despite Tracy's invitation, Myka left her bag in the trunk. Her sister opened the door and, seeing Myka, hesitated about what to do next, then opened her arms wide. "This is what normal families would do, right?" Tracy asked softly, wryly. "I'll let you know when I meet one," Myka responded, just as wryly, and stepped into the hug. Looking over Tracy's shoulder, she spied Noah standing well back of them, regarding her uncertainly. He had her and Tracy's hair, thick and disorderly, and his features, not as soft as when she had last seen him, resembled Tracy's. He had her well-defined chin with its incipient cleft, her high forehead, and her eyes, which weren't large or unusually shaped but bright, even startling when she was feverish with a new enthusiasm. Those are the eyes of a cult member, Rachel had said of Tracy, the one and only time that Myka had brought her home, and Myka couldn't disagree.
Tracy motioned to her son to come closer. "Give your Aunt Myka a hug."
Noah shuffled toward Myka and limply put his arms around her waist. She lightly touched his hair, and when he retreated with relief, he hand-brushed his hair back into place. She sympathized; she had hated the annual holiday get-togethers with the Corbett side of the family. Her mother's sisters had always exclaimed, with a faint but unmistakable note of disapproval, about how bookish Warren's oldest was, how shy. Tracy turned him in the direction of the stairs. "Go wake up your grandma and let her know Myka's here." Noah's response was to shake his head and press his face against her leg.
"Let Mom sleep. She must be worn out," Myka protested, wishing guiltily that she could exchange the whiny Noah for Christina. Christina probably would have handled a disruption of her routine and the arrival of virtual strangers whom she was supposed to enthusiastically greet no better, but she loved Christina. Noah . . . he might as well have been one of Pete's sons. She would applaud the recital of triumphs and loyally support the parental pride, but she felt no connection. Familial obligation, yes, connection, no, but that was hard to forge when you visited your family only once or twice a year.
"She said to wake her up once you were here." Tracy impatiently looked down at Noah. "We're going to go up and get her. Why don't you go and veg on the sofa in the family room? You've got to be tired." She detached Noah from her and nudged him toward the stairs. "Kevin had to go into the office for a couple of hours this afternoon, but he's going to pick up something for dinner on his way home."
Myka slumped against the soft, worn leather of the sofa's back with a grateful sigh. A cartoon was on the giant widescreen TV, but the volume was low. In other families, there would have been tears and disbelief, but in hers . . . it was as if they had already passed through that stage, and she and Tracy were onto the practical tasks of contacting friends and far-flung relatives and arranging the service. Voices soon floated down the stairwell, among them her mother's, sounding, as it usually did, as if someone one had interrupted her when she was thinking about something else. The fact that she had just been woken from a nap answered only for the hoarseness. Myka heard her name said a few times, and she left the sofa to greet her mother. Her mother might have held her for a few seconds longer, but it was Jeannie's sole concession to the shock of her husband's death. With a stubborn insistence that Myka resisted opposing, she asked after her daughter's health and job, noting anxiously that she hoped Myka's boss was understanding about her sudden absence. "Of course, he understands, Mom. I can take all the time I need."
Her mother seemed unconvinced. "I'd love for you to stay as long as you can, but if you have to get back soon, you just go. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine." Looking at Myka over the top of their mother's head, Tracy rolled her eyes.
They gathered around the large island in the kitchen, Tracy pouring herself and Jeannie glasses of wine and, with a disapproving frown, handing her sister a can of sparkling water. Noah clamored for "grape juice," and Tracy brought out a bottle of cranberry juice. "Wine, grape juice, cranberry juice, it's all the same to a five-year-old." She firmly pressed a lid into a plastic mug and threaded a straw through the hole. Noah trotted into family room with his mug and plopped onto the sofa. Myka would never confuse her sister with Helena, but the casual deception and the equally casual efficiency with which she ensured that Noah wouldn't stain the family room furniture reminded her of Helena. Maybe every mother had a bit of the con artist in her, and in the con artist . . . well, the parallel let her down there. But in the con artist she most intimately knew, there must have always been the girl who hungered after a family.
"Myka?" She startled. "Myka, would you handle Daddy's obituary? The funeral home will put it up on their website, but if we could get it in the Gazette, that would be nice. Daddy had some longtime customers, and if they saw it . . . they might come to the service."
Daddy, Tracy hadn't called their father "Daddy" since she was a little girl. Myka couldn't ever remember calling him Daddy. "I'll write it, but you and Mom should look it over."
Tracy swirled the wine in her glass. "We have the visitation scheduled for Thursday night and the service for Friday morning, but there's still a lot to do. We've got to notify Daddy's relatives and some of their friends." She said hesitantly to their mother, "Are you up to that, Mom? I don't know the family very well on Daddy's side."
Jeannie's glass was untouched. "Their information is in my address book at home. I'll look it up later tonight and send it to you." She awkwardly patted Myka's hand. "You'll stay at the house with me tonight?"
"No, you're not staying at the house tonight. The both of you are staying here. God knows we have the room," Tracy protested. She said quietly, "Daddy died in that kitchen this morning. I don't understand why you'd want to stay there."
"Because it's my home," Jeannie said, "it's not a crime scene." She turned on the swivel chair to look at Myka. "I didn't hear him. He had started getting up at all hours, sometimes to watch TV or sneak potato chips, sometimes just to sit and stare out the window. Soon I got to where I was sleeping through it since he wasn't out wandering the neighborhood. That's why I didn't find him sooner. I only saw him when I went into the kitchen to start the coffee." At Myka's pained "Mom," she waved her hand dismissively. "I'm not made of porcelain, and considering the future your father faced . . . . Did your sister tell you that the doctors at the hospital think it was a heart attack?"
"He probably wasn't taking his medicine," Tracy said with old aggravation. "He would tell Mom he 'forgot.'"
"He did forget. That's why I would set his pills out for him at breakfast and sit there until he took them." Jeannie chewed her lip. "I think he might have been having chest pains. He was starting to hide things from me. He was afraid I was going to put him in a home." She picked up her glass and sniffed at the wine before she drank it. "Eventually it was going to have to happen, but we couldn't afford memory care." She looked at Myka and Tracy in turn. "You draw these lines in the sand and when you realize just how expensive it is, you redraw them. When he starts forgetting his kids' names or when he forgets our address becomes when he leaves the house naked." Tracy gusted a dismayed laugh. "It happens. I started locking up the car keys not too long ago, just in case."
"We don't have to worry about that now," Tracy said bluntly. She brightened at the grinding noise of a garage door opening. "That'll be Kevin with dinner. I told him to stop by the Olive Garden and pick up some pasta and breadsticks." She slid off her chair and left the kitchen to meet him.
"I called your Aunt Janet earlier. She and Judy stopped over at the house, you know, just to put things back in order." Again she almost furtively patted Myka's hand, as if it were shameful to offer more than one comforting touch. "It'll look normal, not like –"
"Mom, I'm fine staying at the house." I would prefer it. "Don't worry, I don't think it's weird." Death wasn't something she frequently encountered in her work, but it happened. She had had to interview the families of suspects who had chosen suicide over arrest or had been murdered by a partner in a con gone bad. Sometimes she would interview them in the room in which their father or mother or child or sibling had died, and sometimes they would tell her in a seeming non sequitur that they were planning to sell the house, the condo, the artist's studio, whatever it was as soon as the investigation was over. Sometimes they said it only to underscore their innocence, their complete separation from the sin and its judgement that threatened to envelope them as soon as they had let her in, and sometimes they meant it. Myka would hear of the sale weeks or months later. Other times she sensed that the death and the emotions her arrival stirred, or reinforced, were a development in a story that had begun long before she sat down with them and would continue long after she left. Maybe her mother felt closer to her father in the house. Maybe she just didn't like sleeping in a strange bed. It didn't matter why her mother wanted to go home, it was what she wanted, and the least she and Tracy could do for her was to listen to her. Besides, by the time the Corbett sisters got done with the house, it would be cleaner than any hotel room she could stay in.
Myka ended up eating too much, but the five of them had appeared to silently agree that exchanging more than "Please pass the breadsticks" would bring on an awkward family conversation. There was a container of tiramisu among the take-out, and Myka had some of it, too. It tasted a little mechanized, and she had the fleeting thought that an Irene Frederic tiramisu would be a dessert in which the coffee informed every bite, rich and smooth and with a hint of smoke as it went down. It was a strange day, indeed, when she could find thinking about Mrs. Frederic comforting. After she and Kevin put the dishes in the dishwasher, Kevin took her upstairs to his office and logged her onto his laptop. She searched online for obituaries she could use as a model and then started typing sentences in no particular order. She could combine them into a coherent narrative later.
"Thanksgiving?" Rachel echoed incredulously.
"You said you had no desire to spend Thanksgiving on St. Thomas with your parents. You said you wanted to see snow on the ground."
"There's going to be snow on the ground in Colorado Springs?" She asked as incredulously.
"There will be snow on the mountains."
"Do you know parents know I'm your girlfriend, or do they think I'm only your friend?"
Jesus, Myka thought with a flash of irritation, Rachel was born to be a prosecutor. No statement without a rebuttal question. Do you really think that? Is it really so? "My parents know we're 'together.'" Know, yes, accept, hard to tell. Especially over the phone. Her father had only grunted, while her mother had made strange murmuring noises, possibly soothing herself, before she said clearly, "We want you to be happy." Happy was probably too much to hope for, but she wasn't unhappy. She was in her last year of law school and she had decided on a career path. More than decided, she had submitted her application to the FBI. She had yet to tell her parents about that, in part, she recognized, because she had a lot more of herself riding on the success of her application than she did on her relationship with Rachel. She had known Rachel since her first year of law school and liked the pugnaciousness she could display in an argument. She had discovered that she liked her even more when, after a lazily played board game, one that she had nonetheless aced because it was heavy on trivia, Rachel had taken her into a bedroom and, not bothering to make a tease out of it, had lifted her faded Buffy the Vampire Slayer t-shirt over her head and cupped her breasts in invitation. Myka liked their fullness in her hands and how the nipples knotted at her touch. She had thought about women off and on since she was an adolescent but time, place, and desire had never been in synch. Now they were, only the bedroom wasn't Rachel's. Rachel had fixed that by motoring them through the apartment to the door, calling out to their friends that they had somewhere to be. Their friends had hooted, crying "Yah, at the intersection of Lick My Clit Avenue and Two Fingers or Three Boulevard." They hadn't been far off, but it had been Three. Definitely three.
Rachel's main attraction for her was how smart she was, but sex was a very close second. That was why they had decided to stay at a hotel instead of her parents' apartment. It was one thing for her parents to know they were a couple, it was another to hear them as a couple, especially the feral growl that Rachel would let loose just before bringing her to climax. They were at a hotel, because Myka couldn't trust that she would keep her hands off Rachel's ass for the entire four-day stay. Not at all because the apartment looked a nineteenth-century Lower East Side tenement, cheap and jerry-built, no matter how diligently her mother cleaned it, or because the bookstore itself looked no better. The wooden floor hadn't been polished in years, and the once-expensive, albeit second-hand, area rugs laid without plan on the unpolished floors were gray with dirt. Rachel had grown up in Los Angeles, her father a real estate investor, her mother a studio executive. She had gone to high school with kids of celebrities, with kids who had become celebrities. She knew Rachel knew why they weren't staying with her parents, but Rachel would only casually flick her nipple when she was trying to study and promise her, with a campily sultry look, "We'll be working off Thanksgiving dinner all Thursday night, so get your tryptophan-induced nap in early."
Taken from his family too soon, Warren Bering left behind his wife of 43 years, Jeannie, and his daughters, Myka, and Tracy (Kevin) Clausen. Had he been taken too soon? Myka reread the sentence. Many times, especially in high school, she had wished him dead. There must have been times after his diagnosis that her father had wished he were dead. She backspaced through the phrase. The remaining words looked pitifully few on the screen. She typed (Helena) after her own name, then took it out.
Rachel had been at her best during the visit, asking Myka's father to take her on a tour of the bookstore and when he had said with heavy sarcasm, "Because you've never seen a used bookstore before?," disabling it with a cheeky grin and claiming "My father sells used real estate. It's all in how you show off the merchandise, right? How would you talk me into buying that set of Melville I saw downstairs?" Her father sold multi-million-dollar properties. Warren called himself lucky if he could palm off an incomplete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica 15th edition, but they were still talking books when her mother sent her downstairs to retrieve them a half-hour later. Rachel had charmed Jeannie by helping just the right amount, instinctively recognizing when to defer to Jeannie's desire to prepare a dish unaided and when to gently insist. Thanks to Rachel, the turkey had been only slightly overcooked not brought out still pink in the center and the stuffing had been moist and the mashed potatoes silky smooth. Myka hadn't told her that her mother had rarely fixed a full Thanksgiving spread, but Rachel had probably figured that out already. She had been so grateful that the dinner had ended up on the table and not in the trash, that fire extinguishers hadn't been deployed, that her father had been a genial host for the first time in living memory, that when they got back to their hotel, their very expensive hotel (which, because Rachel was picking up the tab, would be a source of guilt but not now, not yet), she feared she would burst into tears trying to thank her. So she had thanked Rachel the only way she could, by straddling her on the bed and saying "Whatever you ask."
Maybe it was better to untinsel the sentence completely. Warren Bering, 75, left behind his wife Jeannie, daughters Myka and Tracy (Kevin) Clausen, and grandson Noah. Born in Portland, Maine, he moved to Colorado to train for the U.S. ski team. He also owned Bering & Sons Bookstore for over 25 years. A public visitation will be held at - on - at - Funeral Home. A funeral service will be held at – on -also at -Funeral Home. Myka frowned at it. She was sure Tracy wouldn't like it. Did their mother want flowers? Did she want memorials sent to a charity instead? At least her father would have appreciated the mention of the ski team.
Their return flight was delayed by snow. They were supposed to have left at 10:00, now the flight had been pushed to 2:00. The snow was coming down steadily and at a slant. They would be lucky if they got back to Chicago before midnight. Rachel placed her hand on Myka's knee, stilling its jiggling. "You're shaking the chairs."
"I want to get back."
"So do I, but," she put the back of her hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn and gave Myka an arch look, "I'm going to take this as an opportunity to catch up on sleep that –"
"You were so willing to be deprived of."
"Very willing." Her fingertips did a little dance on Myka's kneecap.
"I was very grateful."
"My dad makes a lot of money, but my mom, she's been a part of movies that have won Oscars. Someday someone will raze all the high rises and office complexes my father's responsible for, but my mom's movies, they'll be watching them 50 years from now." Rachel readjusted her baseball cap and fluffed her ponytail. "Yet he always finds a way to put her down. He interrupts her, gives her little digs about her age or her weight. When he feels really threatened, he can get nasty. I realized your dad's like him, only in a cardigan instead of Armani suits. It was easy to deal with him after that, sad but easy." Her look managed to be both direct and tender. "In that way we're not so different."
"I've always been afraid I'll turn into him," Myka said, her voice so low it was nearly a whisper. "If I were like that with my kids . . . ."
"You won't be."
"How can you be so sure?" Myka attempted to make a joke of it. "Do you have plans for me that I don't know about?"
Rachel laughed. "I can't see my future beyond passing the bar. No, I mean, I don't sense the anger in you that just . . . radiates . . . off your dad and my dad. You're not eaten up like they are, like they've been nursing a grudge since infancy. You're charmingly nerdy and very sweet." Her eyes searched Myka's. "I can't imagine you ever being like that."
She had been, for eight long years. She should leave the obituary alone for awhile. Downstairs Tracy was on the phone, another glass of wine on the island. Noah and Kevin were playing a video game, and her mother was hunched over on the sofa. When Myka came around the other end of the sofa to sit next to her, she saw that her mother was asleep. She walked quietly back into the kitchen. Tracy held up a finger to signal Myka to wait. "We're all still stunned, but we're coping. Yes, thank you. We'll see you at the funeral." She put the phone down on the island. "Do you remember Theresa Brennan? I was friends with her in school. We still see each other around, and her husband works at the hospital where Daddy, you know . . . anyway, that was her, expressing her condolences."
"Can you take a look at a draft of the obituary?"
Tracy drank down half her glass. "Now I can."
After slowly shaking her head at the monitor, Tracy rolled the office chair closer to the desk and started typing. When Myka tried to ask her what she was changing, Tracy flashed her palm at Myka, and Myka got up and wandered the room. She stopped in front of a bookcase that, in its slightly off-centered screws and wood composite sheen, strongly suggested "IKEA" or "Target" and "Sunday afternoon." She pulled a dog-eared hardcover from one of the shelves, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. "Yours or Kevin's?"
Tracy turned her head to glance at it. "We've both read it."
"And? Did it help?"
"I don't think it hurt. It gave us things to focus on and improve." She studied Myka. "I don't recall skepticism being one of the habits." Tracy cocked her head, as if to continue her study of Myka's face from a different angle. "I'm surprised it's not on your bookshelves. You used to eat that stuff up."
"That was before I learned that there are people who eat people who eat this stuff up." Myka put the book back on the shelf. Tracy resumed typing and, after a few more minutes of surveying the Clausens' store of office products, which also revealed their taste in office-appropriate humor, Dilbert and Garfield mugs holding pens and pencils and old desk calendar pages with a Dilbert or Garfield home truth pinned to a corkboard wall mount, Myka returned to the desk. "Can I see it now?"
Tracy rolled away from the laptop. "Ta da."
Taken from his family too soon, Warren Bering, 75, left behind his wife of 43 years, Jeannie, daughters Myka and Tracy (Kevin) Clausen, and beloved grandson Noah. Born in Portland, Maine, he moved to Colorado to train for the U.S. ski team. After an accident on the slopes ended his dreams, he found a new love in rare books and literature. He owned and operated Bering & Sons Bookstore, which became a fixture in Colorado Springs' rare and used books business, for more than 25 years. He remained an avid skier, wrote fiction in his spare time, and loved talking books with his customers. There was more about their father's interests and friendships, which told Myka less about their father than it did the Warren Bering who lived in her sister's mind. She skipped over the visitation and service information. Memorials can be sent to the Alzheimer's Association. She trusted herself to comment only on the last. "I wasn't sure what Mom wanted to do about donations."
"She doesn't want flowers. Daddy never much cared for them anyway." Tracy said. She looked closely at Myka again. "You don't like it, do you? You think it's too sentimental."
"It's an obituary. They're supposed to be sentimental."
"He was better, Myka, kinder. You were never here long enough to see it, but he was, he really was. Even Mom says so."
"You mean when he literally forgot who he was."
Tracy drew back. "That's unfair and untrue."
He doesn't get fairness from me. She tried to ease her mouth into the conceding smile that said "I don't agree but let's not fight." She hoped Tracy would accept it.
Tracy responded with a nonclosing closer of her own, "It's been a long day for all of us."
They reconvened with their mother at the island, going over other items that needed Jeannie's attention or, at least, her consent. Tracy was the one crossing things off on a list while Myka thought her most helpful participation would likely be silence and giving her mother a forearm to clutch in distress or with aggravation at her youngest. When Kevin took Noah upstairs to settle him in bed, Tracy stopped long enough to anxiously confirm with her husband, "You're going to read him happy stories, right? None of the watered-down X-Men stuff I know you usually give him. We don't need any nightmares tonight." Then it was back to "Should we buy Daddy a new suit, or can we work with what's in his closet?" Jeannie eventually placed her hand over Tracy's list and said, "Myka's taking me home. We can do the rest of this tomorrow." She caressed Tracy's cheek. "Have Kevin read you a happy story and get some sleep."
"What happy story, Mom? My father died today," Tracy said plaintively.
The caress turned to a soft pat. "Don't make yourself any unhappier than you need to be. That does no one any good, and it's not what your father would want. It's not what I want. We'll talk tomorrow."
Her parents' house smelled like cleaning fluid. They had come in through the garage, rounding the old Honda Accord that only Jeannie drove and that provided a tempting target for Myka's wayward, wobbling carry-on, and entered through the kitchen. Everything gleamed, appliances, countertops, floor. Jeannie surveyed the kitchen and nodded. They passed into the small living room, and after her mother turned on a lamp, she asked, "Do you want to talk?"
The invitation couldn't disguise the fatigue drawing down the corners of her mother's mouth or the weariness in her eyes. Myka shook her head. "I'll watch TV or catch up on my messages. We have time to talk later."
"Don't worry about turning the sound down." Her mouth slightly parted as if she wanted to say more, Jeannie instead regarded the carpet, which looked freshly vacuumed, and pressed her lips shut.
Myka waited until the last of Jeannie's trips to the bathroom was heralded by the closing of her bedroom door. She pulled the carry-on into the bedroom opposite her parents' and lifted it onto the bed. It looked no different than the last time she had stayed in it, which she hoped boded well for not ceaselessly thinking "I'm sleeping in the house that my father died in." She took out her pajamas and her bag of toiletries. It was past 1:00 a.m. in New York, and despite what Helena might think, too late to call. Bringing her phone into the living room with her, she sat on the sofa and scrolled through her messages. They were much the same as the ones she had scrolled through earlier in the day. The voicemail from Sam she didn't delete, but she ignored it. There was nothing that looked like it might have come from Claudia. She smiled when she saw that Helena had forwarded her a video from Christina. She tapped play and watched as Christina solemnly stared at her grandmother's phone and said that she was very, very sad to hear that My-Ka was very, very sad.
Off camera, Myka could hear Jemma prompting her granddaughter. "Tell Myka what makes you feel better when you're sad."
"Um . . .kittens and puppies." She frowned thoughtfully. "Presents, presents make me happy. Going to the zoo."
"How about making other people feel better, love? Doesn't that make you feel better when you're feeling sad?" Jemma persisted.
Seizing upon the suggestion, Christina shouted, "Yes, yes! I want to make My-Ka feel better." Grinning, she held up a giant-sized piece of construction paper. "Nonni said to put all the things on here that make you feel happy." She began to point out the objects. "Coffee, Twizzlers . . ." she bit her finger before pointing to a stick figure doing the splits, "running, books . . . um." She looked up at the phone. "Most of all, me and Mommy." Her finger hovered over three stick figures, one distinguishable from the others only by the curlicues that stood in for hair and a mug that looked like it was glued to her outstretched hand. "That's you, My-Ka."
Ordinarily she was proof against sentimentality. The treacle that Tracy had dripped over their father's obituary hadn't touched her, but this video . . . . Myka put the phone aside and wept. Not for long, but the duration wasn't important. She couldn't remember the last time she had let herself cry in her father's house, and though she couldn't say whether her tears were for her father or for herself and couldn't name what it was she suddenly felt she had lost, the grief was true.
The days didn't pass in a blur. There was always at least one moment that punctuated the day, that stopped Tuesday from merging seamlessly into Wednesday, that prevented Wednesday from sliding into Thursday, and Thursday from becoming pre-Friday. Tuesday was the day she and Tracy, their mother a reluctant participant, went shopping for a suit for their father for the viewing and service. Jeannie found something wrong with every suit that Tracy pulled off the rack, too dark, too boring, too expensive. After lunch in the food court, she announced that she was done shopping because "your father hated suits." She looked from Myka to Tracy. "Don't you remember how he would unknot his tie, drape the suit jacket over the back of a chair, and roll up the sleeves of his dress shirt? I'm not going to let my last sight of him on this earth be in something he hated."
So they went back to their parents' house with Tracy avoiding the kitchen whenever she could and, when she couldn't, tiptoeing through it as fast as she could. Jeannie opened the closet in the guest room and laid out four pairs of slacks, four long-sleeved plaid shirts, and two cardigans. It wasn't hard to picture Warren Bering in any combination of them because it was what he wore every day in the bookstore with, perhaps, the exception of a couple of weeks in the summer when he would leave the cardigan in the closet. But what made the recognition so immediate was the smell of the clothing. Under the scent of the lavender her mother routinely used to freshen closets and dressers, Myka smelled hints of aftershave and the woodsy shower soap her father preferred but, above them, the dry, musty scent of old books. She wasn't sure if the smell had really permeated her father's skin or if she was simply imagining it, but she was in the bookstore, observing her father behind the counter as she placed new old books he had bought at estate sales and new new books that he had acquired at a discount from wholesalers on the shelves. If her father wasn't busy enough, he found time to complain about how slow she was, but if he was busy, the activity could lift his mood and he might round the counter to tell her a story about a customer or, better yet, to cut short her shift. Sometimes, on those rare, good mood afternoons, he forgot to yell at her when she took a book or two with her up to her bedroom. Then Tracy's impatient, muttered, "They look so worn, and they have to be washed" broke the spell, if that was what it was, and Myka was back in this plain, unloved guest room trying to decide between the green and navy plaid shirt and the brown and navy plaid shirt.
Wednesday was the day the Corbett sisters descended upon her and her mother, Janet, Jane, and Judy, with casseroles and baked goods. Seeing her mother and her aunts together in the kitchen, barely big enough for two people let alone four, Myka was struck by the physical similarity of them, women in their 60s and 70s of middling height, with short blond-gray hair (some sporting blonder hair than they had had when Myka was a child), plump cheeks and blue eyes, and chins that had a square and faintly obstinate set. Her mother's chin was more rounded than her sisters', and though Myka knew better than to read personality traits into a person's features, she couldn't help but note that her mother was more pliant, more amenable to compromise than her sisters. Maybe the sisters would have learned that skill had they been married to Warren Bering. Janet was looking for labels for the casserole dishes, determined to plan her sister's menu for the next couple of weeks, while Jane and Judy were audibly tsking at the state of Jeannie's dishes and silverware. "Good God, Jeannie, this is my old Fiestaware," Judy, the youngest, exclaimed. "I gave you the set more than 20 years ago."
"It's held up," Jeannie said quietly, the only one sitting at the table. Her sisters were busy rummaging through cupboards. "Why get rid of it?"
"Because it's chipped and scratched," Jane said tartly.
Myka had been standing in the doorway to the kitchen but moved to stand behind her mother, protectively placing her hands on her mother's shoulders. Jeannie lifted her hand to pat Myka's hand. "You ought to take your mother on a trip after all this is over," Jane said, "or at least have her come visit you in New York. When's the last time your mother was in New York? Take her to the museums and a fancy restaurant. She'll just think about your father if you leave her in the house."
Myka looked at her levelly. The Corbetts had a talent for packing as many negative implications as possible into otherwise plausibly innocent sentences. Because she was single and childless (neither being a desirable state), she must have all the time and money in the world to whisk her mother away. Because she chose to live in a godless city half a continent from Colorado (and what loving child would choose to do that), she obviously didn't want her family visiting her. Maybe Jane meant nothing of what Myka thought she was hearing, but she had had a childhood full of "Clumsiness is cute when they're little," "Myka is so pretty, but she's never going to find a boy inside a book," "There's independence and then there's eccentricity, Jeannie. You need to make sure your daughters know which is which." Jane met her stare and held it. To them, she had always been the most Bering-like of Jeannie's Bering-like daughters, tall and gangly like her father with a head equally full of crazy, laughable ideas. While she didn't have illusions of becoming an Olympic athlete, she had taken up fencing, which was completely incomprehensible to her mother's family. Though they had been initially impressed by her joining the FBI, art fraud and forgery had seemed so esoteric as to be useless. "Why isn't she on one those task forces that's going after gangs? Who cares about a fake DaVinci?"
"I don't want to go on a trip," Jeannie said. "and I've seen enough of New York."
The sisters collectively rolled their eyes at each other, but they muted their criticisms after that. Once the casseroles and extra loaves of zucchini and banana bread were stored in the freezer, they left, promising that Jeannie would see all of them at the visitation. Yet Janet had lagged behind, crooking her finger at Myka. Myka followed her outside. The sisters couldn't leave until Janet got in the car; she was the driver.
"I know we're bossy, but we love her," Janet said, "and we know that it's going to be difficult for her." She paused, looking away from Myka. "You're not going to believe I'm saying this, but there was a time, a long time ago, when I liked your father. He was different then. I wasn't all that cracked up about them getting married, I thought he was too old for her, too . . . dreamy, but I liked him. But your father's the type to break, not bend, and as the disappointments piled up, he grew angry and bitter."
It was cool, and Janet had the advantage of wearing a jacket. Myka was wearing only a sweater. She crossed her arms over her chest. "Jeannie stuck it out with him. I used to think it was because of you and Tracy, but maybe she hoped he'd turn back into the man she married." She spared a smile for her niece. "You'll find that the older you get, the more lies you tell yourself just to get through the day. She says she'll be fine, alright, but I know better. When Ernie died . . .I swear the sun didn't shine for six months, and I don't remember ever getting out of bed." As if she were afraid that Myka would take it literally, she said hastily, "Of course, I did get up, did my usuals, but my point is, I hardly remember any of it. One day Ernie was alive, and we were planning our anniversary trip, and the next day that I clearly remember, he had been in the ground for more than six months. She shouldn't be alone too much, she needs family around her."
Her Uncle Ernie had died only a few months after her spur-of-the-moment marriage to Sam. She had flown out for the funeral and then flown straight back. A case she was working was about to break, and Sam had been spending nights and weekends prepping for a trial. Her mother had wanted her to stay longer, but she had booked an afternoon flight after the funeral. Myka hugged her chest tighter. "We'll all look after Mom," she said finally, trying not to flinch under Janet's look. It wasn't unkind, and maybe that was what made her uneasy.
"I was always afraid you were too much like him, that you'd break, not bend. When you got into that trouble years back, I thought it was going to finish you, but," Janet made a half-turn toward the car, "it didn't." She chuckled. "You must have some Corbett in you, after all."
Thursday was the day that she saw customer after customer file past her father's casket. Mr. Hanson. Mr. Thomas. Mrs. Grainger. Some whom she couldn't name and recognized only as The Man Who Read the Book in the Store Instead of Buying It or The Woman Who Drank All the Coffee. Some were using walkers now, but they came, and they told her and Tracy how their father remembered the books they liked and was always on the lookout for more. Oh, the conversations they had with him, not just about books but local politics, gardening, sports, anything and everything under the sun. They missed those conversations, the worn club chairs, the burnt coffee. It seemed inconceivable to her, remembering her father's constant complaints about the bookstore – the time and energy it absorbed, its failure to provide an income that didn't leave him grinding his teeth as he and her mother did their monthly balancing of the books – that he might have enjoyed aspects of it. It seemed even more inconceivable to her that he might have been good at selling books, at least to those customers who were now chatting with her mother.
Before the visitation had started, the funeral home had given her, Tracy, and their mother time alone with her father. She and Tracy had linked hands with Jeannie and walked to the casket. Tracy had burst into tears when she saw his face, and Myka wasn't sure whether the foreignness of how he had been prepared for viewing had prompted her sister's tears or whether the inarguable reality of his death was beginning to sink in. Her mother had taken Tracy back to the rows of chairs and sat with her. Myka had drawn in an unsteady breath and looked down at him. Her mother had chosen the brown and navy plaid shirt to go with navy slacks and a brown cardigan, his favorite. From the neck down he looked as he always had, but the face, its smoothness and blankness, it resembled no Warren Bering she had ever known. Sometimes the face had been creased by laughter, but more often it had been scowling, the brows drawn together over a nose that she had inherited along with the lips that, when they set, often had a slight downward or upward angle, depending on his mood. Most of the time, they had angled down. She had turned away and taken a chair on the other side of her sister, feeling more disconnected than she had anticipated. It was and wasn't her father a few feet away from them, and despite the Corbett sisters and their families and a few old friends of her mother arriving, she could feel nothing, not even the resentment that had been her fuel for so many years.
Yet watching this cluster of former customers hug her mother and reminisce with her, she could feel, if no rush of affection, then at least a curiosity about her father, which was no small thing since she had long since been convinced he could no longer surprise her. She stared at the casket. People had loved a bookstore and, by extension, its owner. How had he managed that? A surge of the old resentment commingled with the curiosity – if he had charmed Mrs. Grainger, then surely he could have tried harder with his daughters. Many children would have been appalled to feel banked fury as their surest connection to their parent, but in the Bering household, you soon learned to work with what you had.
Friday, which had been cloaked in gray, from the rainclouds that had rolled in early to the suits and dresses at the service to her own mood, stood out from the preceding days when Tracy said casually, as if it were something that was so well known it was hardly worth repeating, "You were his favorite, you know." Myka was eating slow-cooker turkey breast, which her Aunt Judy, no, her Aunt Jane had brought over for the post-funeral lunch at Tracy and Kevin's. She almost choked on the forkful of turkey she had in her mouth and groped for her glass of water. "It's true," Tracy said just as conversationally. She was perched on the sofa arm, pulling off yet another mom trick in that she managed to keep her son in view while never letting her eyes leave her sister's face. She snapped her fingers at Noah, who was about to chase Aunt Janet's youngest grandson, both carrying plastic cups of juice. "No running. We just got the rugs cleaned."
"Are you kidding?" Myka demanded, after she drank some of her water. "You, he actually complimented. I think there was some Father's Day gift you gave him that he liked."
"Out of the 30 or more that he didn't," Tracy said wryly. "Seriously, though, Myka, I envied you sometimes. He saw you. You mattered in a way I didn't. I know how sad it sounds, but I didn't rate his scorn."
Myka poked at the turkey and dressing on her plate, her appetite gone. She stopped poking, straightened, and looked steadily at her sister. "We deserved better."
"Yes, there were better fathers, but," Tracy sighed, then repeated what was the Bering manta, "he was the father we had." She rose and gestured to Noah and the Corbett cousin twice or three times removed to follow her into the kitchen. "Do you want more juice? Let's get you more juice. And lids. Definitely lids."
"Do I miss him? Should I miss him?" Myka was asking much later, stretched out on the sofa in her parents', her mother's living room. Her head propped up by a pillow in one corner, she rested her legs on the opposite arm. The sofa needed to be about a foot and a half longer. It was almost 11:00 in the evening, which meant it was close to 1:00 in the morning in New York, but she had had to wait until her mother went to bed and then through at least three or four trips her mother made to the kitchen for water, for aspirin, for more water, and, finally, to write something on the grocery list on the refrigerator door.
"There are no 'do's' and no 'should's,'" Helena said, "not in something like this. You feel what you feel." She sounded remarkably fresh for having been awake for 18 hours or longer.
"I don't know what I feel."
"You don't have to."
Myka wondered what the Bureau would make of the data dumps from Helena's Bureau-issued phone after this week, the long calls late at night. Hard to justify that it was all about Nate Burdette. "How are you doing? I saw the card from Irene. Give her my thanks."
"I'm fine, thinking about you, but then I usually am." Helena yawned. "I've been thinking about my father, too. He had drawn up a will, but I suppose you know that." Myka had read it several times in Gentleman Jim's file. It was largely imaginary, the wealth the will pretended to distribute, houses he had never owned, artworks he had stolen only to be forced to use them as collateral, money he had long since spent. "I'm not sure who he thought he was going to con from beyond the grave, but he couldn't stop himself. He lived large, he died large, he always had to make the grand gesture. The only assets he owned were the paintings he had never finished."
"Those he left to you."
Helena laughed, but there was little humor in it. "'Left' is one way to describe it. When I heard he had died, I didn't ask how or if it had been painless, I was on my way to claim my inheritance before anyone else could grab it, his creditors, his enemies, the law. It's what a Wells does."
"There are no unfinished Bering paintings here and no will. I'm expecting Mom to try to give me some family pictures before I leave, but that's it. The Berings aren't much for mementoes, at least this Bering isn't."
Helena was silent for a time. "Before you can want mementoes, you have to have people in your life you want to remember." She laughed again, and this time there was humor in it. "Even in death, my father assumed people would keep him in their thoughts. More like unable to pry him out of their heads, but I don't think he cared about the distinction. The one thing he left me? The request that I light a candle for him. If I believed in an afterlife, I'd say he would never have to worry about a flame being lit for him."
"Have you, lit a candle for him, that is?"
The laughter was even richer. "And risk divine retribution?" Myka laughed with her, but Helena's soon trailed away. "Yours is the only forgiveness I ever wanted. It was the first time, I think, that I knew what it was to want something I couldn't have. There was no con, no seduction, no game, nothing I could to do to win it. That was the first humbling, and then, of course, there was Christina. She deserved so much more than Ben and me, what we were." She paused. "Your father, for all his faults, was not mine. He knew what a gift you were, I know he did, because I've held my child and promised her the world, knowing how ill-equipped I was to give it to her."
Myka woke up groggy the next morning. She had stayed up too late talking to Helena, and when she finally left the bedroom for her run, her mother was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. "You're up late," she observed.
"Stayed up too late," Myka said, reaching for a glass from the cupboard. She ran the tap and filled the glass.
"You were talking to someone. I could hear you occasionally," Jeannie said mildly, too mildly. "I thought it might be Sam. It was sweet of him to call you after hearing about Warren."
Myka drank the water carefully. Choking would be a dead giveaway. "It wasn't Sam." She had waited for days to listen to the message Sam had left her, unsure whether it would be about Helena or her father and deciding she didn't want to hear him talk about either, yet when she had listened to the message, it had been brief and, if stiff, not insincere. For a moment, she had regretted how things had turned out between them, but she and Sam, if they hadn't always hurt each other, had usually managed to look past the other. They might have worked things out, might have realized what the other wanted and adjusted their expectations accordingly, except for the fact that one day she had looked past him and seen Helena.
Her mother turned a page of the newspaper, not asking her who it was. "Go run, and then I'll take you out to breakfast. I'm in the mood for a Belgian waffle."
After breakfast, there had been grocery shopping – the Corbett sisters had been generous with food but casseroles didn't replace milk or eggs – and, later in the day, one more gathering at Tracy's and Kevin's house. Dinner was the leavings of yesterday's post-funeral meal, and as Myka picked through the macaroni salads and various over-braised meats, she reflected that she had had a surfeit of everything, sleep, food, Berings, and she was ready to go home. After dinner, Jeannie opened the two Ziploc bags she had brought with her that held the family pictures, one for Tracy and one for Myka. "I tried to sort them out by which one of you was in them, but there were a lot that had you both, so you'll need to fight it out over who gets what."
Myka knew that saying she had no interest in fighting with Tracy over the pictures, no interest in the pictures, was the wrong thing to say, so she dutifully spread out her share of them hoping that Tracy would be aggressive in laying claim. At times, Tracy pressed her fingertips against her eyes, overcome by an emotion looking at the pictures that Myka knew she could probably name but not share. Most of them were taken by their mother. Their father hadn't enjoyed taking pictures and had enjoyed even less being photographed, but he showed up in a fair number of them, not scowling but radiating impatience all the same. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, high school graduation, college graduation. The holidays and milestones were all there, even a few of her and Sam, which she didn't realize her mother had kept. Her smile was always the same, just this shade of tentative and with a skeptical twist. The pictures in which Sam had his arm around her and beamed at the camera (or phone), Myka could tell that she wasn't easy in the embrace. There was a knife's edge of space between them even in the ones where she should have been the happiest. Anyone looking at those pictures could foretell how the marriage would end. But her mother had painstakingly printed every one of them.
Tracy spun a picture across the island. "I think this one is of you."
It had yellowed a little bit with age. The girl walking, or trying to walk, in her father's shoes, was a toddler, no older, which would put the picture's date in the mid-80s at the latest. She was looking straight at the camera smiling with pride in her sundress and giant oxfords. Giant on her, Warren Bering didn't have particular large feet for a man. Jeannie, leaning over to study the photograph, conceded, "You're right, it is Myka. I should've realized that. You were never interested in wearing your father's clothes, but your sister," she gave Myka a shoulder nudge, "she was always trying to clomp around in your father's shoes or wear his caps."
"Bet he loved that," Myka muttered.
"He did," Jeannie said seriously. "He took this photo. I was always afraid you'd fall down the stairs tripping around in his shoes, but he thought it was cute. When you two were young . . . he adored you so." Myka and Tracy looked at each other but said nothing. "He wanted to do so much for you, and when he couldn't . . . he thought he was a failure. I could never convince him that it didn't matter as much as showing how proud he was of you, but he hadn't been brought up that way. You showed your love for your family by providing for them. That's what he had been taught."
Myka silently placed the photo in her pile and, after they had all been sorted through, with Tracy overemphatically exclaiming over the memories they evoked and Myka quietly assenting or sometimes not, the pictures were put back in the Ziploc bags. It was time then to take her mother home and pack for her flight the next morning. Myka hesitated about putting the bag of pictures in her carry-on, she didn't want them, and she could dump them in a trash can at the airport, but she ended up burying them deep under her dirty clothes as if to deny herself the impulse. When she talked to Helena later in the evening, Helena said, "Of course, you'll keep them. Someday our children will want to see them."
"How much time are you spending in this fantasy world?" Myka asked sharply. "I need you to keep at least one foot in this reality."
Calmly Helena said, "That fantasy world is what's keeping me in this reality." She added gently, "You'll want to look at those pictures again. They're not just a reminder of who you were and where you came from, they'll show you who you are now and how far you've traveled."
"It doesn't feel like I've traveled very far."
"That's because you're only looking backward."
They didn't talk much longer. It was already Sunday morning on the East Coast, very early morning but Sunday all the same, and Helena needed all the reserves she could draw upon to handle a four-year-old. Myka looked down at her phone, engaging in a little fantasizing herself, imagining waking up next to Helena and having Christina rush into the bedroom with all the finesse and discretion at a four-year-old's command. She looked up to see her mother standing just inside the living room, a robe loosely belted around her, and her face wearing the expression of someone who had woken into a nightmare, not from one.
"It's her, isn't it?"
Myka didn't see the point in pretending she had been talking to someone else. "Yes, that was Helena."
Her mother pulled the robe belt tight as if she were preparing to defend herself against a potential Wells invasion. "Have you been visiting her in prison?"
Myka shook her head. "She was released in April." She dreaded saying the next, anticipating what would come. "She's working for us, Mom."
"For the FBI?" Her mother said incredulously. "Why on earth would they have anything to do with her again?" She looked grimly at Myka. "I can understand you, though I don't want to, but I would think wiser heads would prevail at your employer."
"She has special skills." Myka recognized how feeble it sounded. "I can't get into it, but she's been helping us on cases. It's the condition for her early release."
Her mother made a very Warren Bering-like growl and went into the kitchen. Myka could tell by the slamming and banging of drawers and cupboard doors how upset her mother was, and she reluctantly pushed herself off the sofa to join her. Her mother was adding to the collection of prescription bottles on the counter. "Your father has a sedative here somewhere. The doctors thought it might make him less restless at night. I'm going to need some help getting back to sleep."
"I'm sorry, Mom." Myka leaned against the doorway. "I don't know what to say to make you feel better. She's not the same. She has a child, and she knows her chance to be with her daughter rides on her doing things right this time."
Her mother squinted at a bottle she had just taken from a cupboard. She wrestled with the childproof cap and, once it was off, shook a pill into the palm of her hand. "I'm glad that she has a reason to turn her life around, but you don't have to be part of it, Myka." She put the pill between her teeth and poured herself a glass of water. She grimaced and swallowed.
"Are you sure that was wise, Mom? The prescription's for Dad, not you."
"I feel safer taking drugs not prescribed for me than watching my daughter take up with the person who ruined her life." She drank the rest of the water. Turning away and setting the glass on the counter, she said, "For awhile I thought about asking you if you would consider getting a transfer to the Denver field office. I liked the idea of having both of my daughters near me. But you were different somehow, sad, given the occasion, but happier, more at peace with yourself underneath the sadness, and I thought, 'Jeannie, she's found someone. She's not going to want to come back. Let her be happy where she is.'" Turning back to face Myka, she spread her hands, unable to fix what she perceived to be terribly, tragically wrong. "Never in a million years would I have imagined that 'someone' was Helena Wells."
"You did once. Do you remember asking me if I had taken up with her when I came out here to tell you that Sam and I were divorcing?"
"No, but then I've never understood why you and Sam divorced in the first place."
"Just like I've never understood why you put up with Dad for all those years."
Enlightenment spread across her mother's features. "Ah," she said softly, "now we come to it."
Myka shook her head. "I'm not blaming you or him for the mistakes I made. I'm just saying that I have a right not to understand, too. I get that he was different when you married him, less ground down, less angry, but that's not the Warren Bering I lived with. That's not the Warren Being you lived with."
"I wish he had been better, and I regret, more than you'll ever know, that I wasn't stronger, but for every resolution I made not to endure his moods, his criticisms, there was the hope that he would be a different man the next day, and sometimes he was." She balled her hands into fists and dug them deep into her robe's pockets. "I hoped, and I was wrong. I don't want you to make the same mistake, hoping that this time Helena will be different because, Myka, she won't be."
"It's a risk, but I lived for eight years just . . . existing. I didn't hope, I didn't care. I'm capable of learning from my mistakes, but one of the things I learned? I'm going to make mistakes. It's better to hope and be proved wrong then not hope at all."
The glitter of tears appeared in her mother's eyes. "And here I've been fearing that you're too much like your father when, instead, I should be afraid that you're too much like me."
Myka didn't head to her apartment after her flight got in on Sunday evening. She headed straight for Irene Frederic's brownstone. She had barely pressed the doorbell for Helena's apartment when she heard the thunder of feet down the stairs. Helena flung the door open, the relief in her face unmistakable even under the low wattage of the outside light. She hugged Myka and practically nipped at her heels like a terrier up the stairs and into the apartment. Kicking the door closed, she grabbed the lapels of Myka's coat and yanked her in for a kiss. "I'll have dinner ready in a few minutes," she murmured.
"Take out from Mrs. Frederic?"
"Of course. Did you really think I'd ruin the evening by cooking?"
After dinner, they laid together on Helena's bed, Myka resting her head on Helena's abdomen, Helena propped against the headboard with most of the pillows. "Listening to my stomach gurgle?"
"It sounds very content," Myka said.
"It is. You're home." Helena played with the ends of Myka's hair. After a long silence, she said, "Nate contacted me. This time he called me using Irene's number. He wants to meet with us on Thursday, his office."
Myka said, as casually as she could, "You're taking this more calmly than I thought you would."
"More calmly than you are, love. I can see the pulse beating in your neck."
"We're in the dark, Helena, you can't see anything."
"Am I wrong?" She rarely was. Myka's heart had leapt into overdrive at the mention of his name. "I've been afraid for six months, Myka. At last it's going to be over, one way or the other."