Part 6: A Lesson in Grief

I had a good, long rest after that adventure, then I went on to complete the job Madame Xiao-Xiao had given me. She was pleasantly surprised when I snuck into her reading room and draped the necklace of pearls into the pages of her latest piece of reading material.

"Oh Garrett, you and I are going to get along just fine from now on," she sang as she tried it on.

"I hope so," I said as I counted my coins. "I might get jealous if I see you pay any other thief to do a third-rate job getting what you want."

While I paid her a visit, I made sure to travel through the old library and took that Keeper's door off its hinges. Hopefully the Queen of Beggars made it back beforehand because I left it in splinters. I might not have been mad at her anymore, but I'd had enough of Costa and the whole Keeper idea. If she wanted to ask politely to take the primal I might say yes, but I wasn't going to let them hunt me down for it again.

I was eating my breakfast when Rumor came in to greet me. It was sunset: The time of day that I usually woke up to start my nightly routine. I passed her a dry biscuit so I could finish eating while she enjoyed the unexpected treat. After she sampled the edges, she spoke without prompt from any kind of secret gesture.

"Garrett, Garrett. A word if you will. No job but a favor. Important, Garrett, Garrett. Please come."

Favors were another type of job and I was pretty sure Scribe knew that—unless what she needed me for was something serious and personal. I threw Rumor's broken biscuit out an open window to get her to leave, then ate the rest of my food quickly and rushed downstairs to get ready.

The air was somber when I stepped through the window of Scribe's living room. She was sitting at a desk forging bonds while Six-Fingers sat in a worn rocking chair cradling Addi. It didn't feel right to start off the conversation with humor. "What's the important favor?"

Scribe looked at me gravely. "Garrett. Lorena's dead."

"What?" A cold twinge struck me in the back of my head and raced all the way down to my ankles. "What happened?"

"I don't know the details. Something must have gone wrong with her most recent job."

"Then how do you know she's dead?" The words flew out of my mouth quicker than I wanted them to.

Scribe lifted the top of her desk and took out a folded letter. "Lorena had a contingency in place in case she died. We both did, but after Six and I moved in together I didn't think it would be necessary anymore. We paid Chase the courier to keep death notices for us. If he didn't hear from us regularly, he knew to deliver the notice to a place of our choosing. Hers came to my old hideout in Riverside. I had sent Rumor to get some small notes for me and she came back with it."

I took the letter and read it. The death notice was dated more than a week ago... Had I been gone that long or did it take that long for someone to notice she was dead?

I dropped the note on Scribe's desk and turned away from her. "What do you need me to do?"

"Normally, Six and I would go take care of Lorena's hideout..."

I took a look at Six-Fingers. He was still on my shit-list for stealing from my collection, but in that moment I could tell he felt differently about Lorena dying. He was holding Addi close to his chest and kept his head lowered over hers.

"... But since the two of you were so close—"

"We weren't close." Those words also left my lips faster than I wanted them to. "We were just... fooling around." The phrase tasted terrible coming out of my mouth. I could see out the corner of my eye that Scribe also didn't appreciate how that sounded under the circumstances.

"Okay. Since the two of you were just 'fooling around,' I thought it would be better if you handled her personal effects. I know she would want it that way. Do you mind, or would you just be fooling around if you did that, too?"

I deserved that. I shook my head and turned back towards the window. "I'll take care of it." I needed time to myself to process this, anyway.

I hadn't seen Lorena since the night of my funeral. I had tried to contact her several times to work out things between us but every time I stopped by her attic, she wasn't home. I even left one of the Flowers Eternal on her nightstand: The sunflower brooch, which had a large diamond in its disc and emeralds fixed into its petals. She never responded to the gesture and when I checked her attic again, the brooch was gone.

One of the realities of being a thief, assassin or other type of career criminal was that once you were gone, no one would ever know you were there. Unless you made your mark by going on a crime spree to purposefully antagonize the Watch, all of your deeds would fade with time and anyone who eventually stumbled onto your hideout would only recognize your equipment as something valuable to pawn or use for their own amateur purposes. Some of the professionals wanted the dignity of having their hideouts destroyed instead of being looted after they were gone; that's why this idea of contingencies was so popular. I didn't care about that sort of thing. A death notice really only gave someone permission to loot your hideout complete with the directions on how to get there.

I had learned a long time ago not to expect to see anyone after a brief encounter; after all, even highly skilled professionals didn't live a very long life unless they eventually went legit. But I had spent too much time with Lorena recently. Scribe and Six as well, but if they disappeared I don't think it would cross my mind that anything happened to them other than moving away. Spending too much time with Lorena was making it hard for my mind to wrap around the idea that she could be dead. What did a death notice really mean—that she couldn't make it back in time to signal Chase that she was still alive? She could have been in prison somewhere, or hurt. If I could find some clue in her attic about her most recent job, I might be able to track her down and find out what really happened to her.

Lorena's attic didn't look dusty enough to be the home of a dead woman. The air inside was stale but that was to be expected; she always sealed the place while she was away.

I started picking the lock on a file cabinet before the feeling of being watched drew my attention to the corner near her bed. The lockpick dropped out of my hand when I saw who it was.

Lorena was standing there, quiet, calm and bathed in the same blue haze I had seen on every ghost that roamed The City's streets. I took several steps forward but didn't know what else to say or do. Her smile and peaceful exterior were the polar opposite of my interior. There was a knot in my chest that was starting to weigh me down, especially when I thought back on how our last conversation ended.

"Where did you die," I wondered out loud. If I could re-enter my body, it had to have been possible for her to do the same. I could find it and keep it safe for her—if she hadn't died a gruesome death.

Lorena walked past me and pointed to the bottom drawer of her file cabinet. I retrieved my pick and finished unlocking it. The drawer was full of papers with different details on past jobs which she probably held onto for blackmail purposes. I thought that she wanted me to search the records for where her body was, but when I looked up again, she was backing away.

"Wait!" I stood up to take a step towards her but stopped when I saw Red Jenny standing behind her. That cold bolt rushed down my back again.

This was that feeling that I didn't want. The longer I looked at them, the more my chest felt painfully heavy. I looked down at my hands for a brief second to relax the feeling and when I looked up again, they were gone. I had missed the moment when Jenny's wings unfolded but now I knew Lorena was truly dead.

I started to pick up a few of her items from around the attic. Scribe wanted me to clear it out for her and I had every intention of doing that, but my movements suddenly didn't feel right. No matter how many times I paused to relax the pain in my chest, it just wouldn't stay gone. Eventually I settled on the edge of Lorena's bed and looked down at the items of hers that I held. I let them all drop to the floor, then brought a hand up to cover my face and sat still in the stale quiet.

After a while, I decided to focus on the drawer I had opened. Lorena pointed it out to me for a reason and I needed to know what it was.

Most of the drawer was full of papers but there was a space behind the pile. I felt around and gripped something made of fabric. When I withdrew my hand, I found myself holding onto a small knit sock that was stuffed with a rolled slip of paper.

This wasn't a woman's sock... It was the kind you would put on an infant's foot to keep it warm.

The discovery filled my mind with questions. Did Lorena have a baby? Maybe she abandoned it and then felt guilty.

Could it have been my baby?

No... no, it was less than nine months ago that we started sleeping together again. Good. Maybe it was some other man's baby... The thought made a twinge irritate the back of my right eye. I unrolled the paper to give myself something else to focus on.

There was an address written on it but that wasn't the most striking thing about it. Below the address was a charcoal rubbing of the sunflower brooch I had left on her nightstand. The brooch was at that address and she wanted me to go there and find it. Maybe she had hidden the baby away somewhere and left the brooch with it in case something happened to her. I needed to find it. This was the job she had given me, and since it was her last wish, I felt obligated to take on the task.