Shane stood silently for a moment in the dimly lit hospital room, breathing in the antiseptic air and listening to the hum of the monitors attached to Peachy's body.
"Now, Laddie," Peach commanded, gesturing toward Kim's recently vacated chair. Shane obediently sat down, not liking the way he could feel the residual heat from Kim's body seeping into his clothes. It was too intimate. It was completely inappropriate.
(It was a chair in a hospital room.)
"If I'm in trouble, I don't think I deserve it," said Shane, far too petulantly considering that he was talking to a mortally ill woman who had been the closest thing he'd had to a mother for most of his adult life.
"Never in trouble," said Peach.
"I got the impression that you disapproved of my taking Kimberly to the ISA training center."
"If I disapproved, Laddie, you would know it. No need to get an impression. You're quite right that if Kimberly is going to continue to insert herself into dangerous situations, she ought to have the proper training."
"There's not enough training in the world to prepare her for what she wants to do with Lawrence Alamain."
"Perhaps not, but she's willing to do the job. There are dozens of agents who are infected. It may be too late for me—"
"Don't say that, Peach!" Shane recoiled with horror.
"I will do my best to be here when you find the cure. And I don't doubt that if there is an antidote out there already, you will find it. You and Kimberly both. You were always a remarkable team."
It was a metaphorical bucket of cold water down his spine. He had heard quite enough commentary about the state of his relationship with Kim from all directions. It was different coming from Peach. Almost all of the people who mattered to him had divided loyalties that fell ever-so-slightly on Kim's side. Even Andrew had made more than one pointed remark that Shane ought to be spending his time with Mommy, not with Aunt Kayla. "I thought you supported my relationship with Kayla."
"I do! I support you. I support you in whatever you chose. In whomever you choose. Kayla is a wonderful woman. Smart and kind and everything I could want for you."
Shane nodded, mollified.
"How does Kayla feel about you leaving with Kimberly?"
"She loathes the idea. She thinks I'm choosing Kim over her."
"Are you?"
"I am choosing to find this antidote by any means necessary. I certainly conducted ISA business over Kim's objection when we were married, on more than one occasion. And sometimes with women Kim did not like."
"And do you think that was a good idea in the long run? If you had never gone after Jericho—"
"Do you honestly think I had a choice? They hit me over the head in a back alley and forced me to call Kim and say goodbye to her while they held a gun on me." Peach suddenly looked very old, and a wave of guilt engulfed Shane. "I'm sorry Peach, I'm—"
"Under a great deal of stress. I know. I just wouldn't want you to make the same mistakes with Kayla that you made with Kimberly. It has been one of the great honors of my life to work with you, Shane. When you went from being my subordinate to being my superior in the blink of an eye, I never felt anything but proud and amazed to be in your presence. The quickness of your mind, your devotion to justice, your skill in a fight or with a gun. But the fact that your mind is a steel trap and your tolerance for pain probably warrants a medical diagnosis does not mean that you have to continue to put your own desires and your personal life last. You're allowed to choose a day in the park with my beautiful godson or moonlit sail with Kayla over your duty sometimes."
"I hate sailing. I get seasick," said Shane. He was gratified when Peach laughed.
"I know. Are we still lying about that, or did you tell the Bradys?"
"Kimberly knows. I had to tell her so she could help me hide it from the rest of them. I'm hoping I won't have to tell Kayla."
"What do you think she would do? End the relationship? Laugh?"
"Her father and her brothers would laugh, and then she would get angry with them, and then she would go back to questioning whether it's even appropriate for us to be together when it hurts her family. In any event, it hasn't come up." He thought about it for a moment. "I suppose it will eventually, what with the way the entire Brady family breathes the riverfront."
"I find that very charming."
"I find it convenient," said Shane, who had redoubled his efforts to be rational rather than susceptible to charm. "Any time one of them isn't where he or she should be, I know to go down to the pier. And so does everyone else. But they still do it, even when they claim that they don't want to be found. It's as if they have moments where they can't stay away, where they might as well be tied to the dock like a dinghy. They look at the river and they see themselves swimming and fishing and sailing and waterskiing. I'm not sure any of them ever truly wanted to be anywhere else, with the possible exception of Kimberly. She has a certain… flexibility of mind that I used to find very appealing. She loves the water and her mother's clam chowder. But she also loves the hidden streets of Paris and she can tell the difference between Albariño and Pino Gris."
"You sounded very fond of Kimberly just then," said Peachy shrewdly.
"I married her. Of course I was fond of her. That doesn't mean I—"
"It needn't mean anything, Laddie." Peach ran her hand along his arm. Her hand felt too warm, too shaky, too weak.
He caught her hand and kissed it. "I'm sorry, Peach. Don't— don't try to—"
"Don't try to sort out your life when I should be worrying about mine?"
"I was going to say it more tactfully than that," Shane protested.
"And tactful or not, you would have been wrong. I'm old, Shane—"
"You're hardly—"
"Spy or not, there are some lies you shouldn't tell." He shut his mouth obediently. "Shane, if this is our last time together then I would like to give you one last observation from your superior officer. Even if I haven't been your superior officer for many years. When I joined the ISA, after what happened to my Lily… I'd hungered for more, more than just being a bobby, but I also adored being a Glasgow shopkeeper's wife. I loved my Harold until the day he died. Oh, we had our squabbles, but I never regretted my choices. I loved raising my daughters.
"As driven as I was, as many years as I'd spent in law enforcement already, it took me by surprise when I was so spectacularly successful on my very first mission. How wonderful to be a middle aged woman and therefore invisible to my targets. How powerful I was. How each new mission lit me on fire until I could barely breathe without the rush of next case to think about, and the next, and the next. And I continued on with field work long past the time when my family thought that I ought to slow down and the ISA offered me retirement. I tried it once for a while. Geoffrey— you hated him—"
"Of course I hated him. He was a conman."
"And I knew it. I didn't need you to tell me that. I thought it might be worth it to have that experience one more time, even if I were paying for it. The danger of being with a man who would never have chosen me had I been a pauper, of needing to outmaneuver him, was one more sort of mission. Do you understand where I'm going?"
"I'm afraid that so far I've missed the point." He truly had. And that irritated him. He prided himself on his intellect and he liked to think that he knew Peachy better than anyone else in the world knew her, save perhaps her surviving daughter.
"The point is that if there is a silver lining to me contracting this bloody virus, it is that I learned to stay still for the first time since my child was caught in that blasted explosion when she wasn't doing anything but conducting the most mundane activities of a teenage girl's daily life. For so long, Lily wasn't dead but she wasn't alive. I was glad when— when her body finally gave out two years ago. Almost on the exact day that the ISA declared you dead, Laddie."
"Oh, Peach."
"I told you to stop. Everyone knows it never rains but it pours. I don't know that I believe in an afterlife. But if it's true that when I leave I'll see Lily and Harold and again, well, that's quite something. Either way I'll be at peace. You lost your parents too soon and I lost my child much too soon. You've always filled an empty space in my life without even trying. I certainly didn't expect it the day you walked into the London office wet behind the ears and fresh off your Eton-Cambridge education. And that is why I need to warn you now.
"I regret nothing about my years with the ISA. I don't regret the time I spent putting away Coinneach Ritchie. I certainly don't regret the time I spent with you. But for so long I was looking at the next case as a way to avoid facing my feelings about Lily. I would have sworn I wasn't doing it. I would have sworn that I was very much in touch with my anger and my grief. Coinneach Ritchie put the briefcase on the bus, and the briefcase blew up, and the bus blew up, and my daughter was on the bus. But stuck here, in this hospital bed, I couldn't do anything to distract myself. And I had to live with it, truly live beside it. Now, I had my first life as a wife and a mother and a run-of-the-mill bobby before I ever joined the ISA. You, Shane, were not very much more than a child when you began doing the same thing I do. Living for the next case. Needing the next case. Prioritizing one more case rather than admitting to yourself what you want or what you feel."
"I understand," he said, because he could hardly tell Peach that ever since his memory had returned, he'd barely felt anything but numb. The ISA couldn't very well take away what he didn't have in the first place.
"See that you do. I love you, Laddie."
"I love you, too—"
But his words were drowned out by the wail of an alarm. He didn't have to yell for help; a crush of doctors and nurses were around Peach's bed instantly, shouting measurements and hastening to maneuver the crash cart into position.
Her heart resumed beating.
Her eyes didn't open.
Not dead, but not alive. Just as Lily had been for ten years in the institution.
The medical staff didn't seem to realize until the chaos was over that he'd backed himself into a corner and watched them work. Invisible, Peach had said. How good to be invisible, quiet and slight and blending into the walls of a room where you didn't belong.
They volunteered that this was not entirely unexpected, that Peach had been in and out of a comatose state for some time, and that Shane mustn't blame himself for overstimulating her with his visit. They said that another rally, another return to consciousness, was neither impossible nor inevitable.
Then they asked whether he had any questions and told him that, if not, it was time for him to leave.
He asked to be permitted to take her hand and say goodbye, and they nodded their consent.
He kissed her hand— now much too still in addition to being much too fragile— and tried to somehow put everything that had happened since their paths had crossed into the gesture. He wasn't sure whether it worked.
The medical staff looked sad as he left the room. He thanked them in his most professional tones and otherwise ignored them.
He expected to see Kim waiting outside the door, hoping for an update on Peach's condition, perhaps ready with a reassuring word, but Kim was gone. And so Shane went to the airport by himself, with Peach's stories and warnings ringing in his ears.
At least he'd told her that he loved her.
And she understood better than anyone that it would do no good for him to wait at the hospital for confirmation that, yes, they had spoken for the last time.
Kimberly was late to the airport. The plane was already set to take off by the time she scrambled on board with a mixture of complaints and apologies.
Shane ordered her to say goodbye to Lawrence and take another flight, later, meeting him at the training center.
She objected, but he held firm.
She left, annoyed with him as usual.
He relished the quiet.
Peach had been wrong about that. He'd never minded quiet.
Not the sort of quiet I meant, and you know that, Laddie, her voice scolded in his mind.
He wondered whether it was his imagination or a message from the great beyond. Peach might have died while he was waiting on the runway and Kimberly was flouncing about choosing cocktail dresses.
He closed his eyes against the pain in his skull.
Shane's plane bounced erratically as it landed on the airstrip adjacent to the training center. The airstrip barely counted as an airstrip; it was simply a vacant, well maintained stretch of land that adapted well to any number of exercises, including but not limited to exercises involving planes.
He passed through the first, perfunctory, security check and then was directed along a familiar path through the woods. After ten minutes of brisk walking, the hulking grey training center rose before him. The door slid open at his approach; half a dozen security cameras twisted to point themselves directly at him as he approached the reception desk.
"Shane Donovan," he said, proffering his badge.
"Your badge, Captain Donovan," the agent said courteously, although the smirk on his face told Shane that he needn't have stated his name. "Would you like instructions to room 301?"
Out of sheer peevishness, Shane asked for directions. He knew that his reputation for having a comprehensive knowledge of the layout of the training center preceded him.
(He didn't understand why so many people thought it was so hysterically funny that he had taken the time to steal the blueprints and commit them to memory. It was just good sense.)
The agent paled and stumbled a bit, full of conflicting advice about going past the fire pit and crossing a bridge. If Shane hadn't already known where he was going, he would never have figured out from those instructions.
"But," the agent said brightly, remembering a bit of information that he hoped would be his salvation, "Chief Tarrington wanted to see you as soon as you arrived. He's just down the hall, on the right." The agent pointed.
Shane nodded, clipped his badge to his jacket, and headed to the front office. So Tarrington had come in person. It was neither surprising nor expected. It simply was.
The training center, too, simply was. Far fewer agents would have struggled to navigate it if they accepted as much.
He knocked on the open door and Tarrington called for him to enter, rising to shake Shane's hand as Shane closed the door behind himself. "Welcome, Shane. But where is Kimberly?"
Shane highly doubted that Tarrington didn't already know, but he played along nonetheless. "I asked her to say goodbye to Alamain one more time and take a later flight."
Tarrington's face revealed nothing of what he might have thought. "I suppose we can fill your time until she arrives," he said neutrally. "After all, you did want to make yourself available to coach her through the program, but as long as you're here, I thought it efficient to let you sharpen your skills as well."
Shane wondered what the hell that was supposed to mean. "What sort of skills?"
"I believe you already hold the record for marksmanship in this facility, but I doubt that you'd mind trying to best yourself when you renew your certifications."
That almost sounded like fun. Shane nodded his agreement.
"And there will be the other standard evaluations. Physical. Psychological. You understand."
That sounded like a misery, but Shane was used to misery.
"Perhaps you can get them out of the way before the opening reception."
It was an order, not a suggestion. Shane didn't care. He'd submitted to far worse punishments in his life.
The map of the crumbling Soviet Union that had been spread across Tarrington's desk— coupled with photographs of Gennady Yanayev, Oleg Baklanov, Valery Boldin, and Oleg Shenin— even reminded Shane of some of those punishments.
Shane knew very well how to pass a basic psychological evaluation. He never thought of it as cheating when he lied; after all, if he was well enough to know the correct answers, he was well enough to work without putting anyone in danger. It wasn't as if the ISA was deeply concerned about the well-being of its field agents in any event. The evaluations were merely what Roman liked to call a cover-your-ass move.
Shane didn't know whether Roman lied on his psych evals. Considering the years he'd spent married to a psychiatrist, perhaps he took this nonsense seriously.
He chuckled to himself. There was no way that Roman was honest about this kind of thing. Roman wouldn't have cared about a lecture from Marlena any more than Shane cared that he would earn a joint scolding from the united team of Kimberly and Kayla if he informed them that he didn't tell a complete stranger about the darkest thoughts that lingered in the deepest recesses of his mind.
He didn't always need to lie. There had been times in his life when he'd been truly content and at peace with his lot. When he'd first joined the ISA out of Cambridge, newly married to Emma. When he'd had himself permanently reassigned to Salem and stopped fighting the Bradys' attempts to absorb him into their raucous circle. When he and Kim and Andrew and Eve had finally become a functional family, just before the Jericho situation had spiraled out of control.
The doctor (a PhD, not a medical doctor, which made Shane even more comfortable lying) arrived and asked Shane the usual screening questions.
"Within the last two years, have you been physically assaulted?"
Politely, Shane didn't laugh. "It does tend to come with the territory, yes."
"In the past month, have you had nightmares about that?"
"I don't think so," he said, and this was going well because he wasn't even entirely sure that he was lying. "I don't always remember my dreams."
"Have you gone out of your way to avoid situations that remind you of the events?"
"No." It wasn't as if he regularly found himself tied up in a hidden room or engaged in fisticuffs on the edge of a cliff, so he hardly had to go out of his way to avoid it. And to the extent that seeing Kimberly and Jeannie reminded him of everything he'd lost, he could hardly avoid them, either.
"Do you feel constantly on guard and watchful?"
"To the extent that that's in my job description, yes."
There was a raised eyebrow. The doctor thought he was prevaricating. "Do you ever relax and enjoy yourself and not think about your latest mission?"
"Yes, of course." His first blatant lie, delivered casually, as if he hadn't even noticed the note the doctor had made in his file. He lied for a living, after all.
"Have you recently felt numb or detached from people, activities, or your surroundings?"
The level of difficulty had increased. The honest answer was virtually all the time, and that would get his file flagged. So the question was not whether to lie, but how much to lie. "Not particularly," he decided. "There are young children in my life, so even when I'm not working there's a certain amount of sleep deprivation, and that can lead to a certain amount of numbness."
The doctor chuckled and moved on. "Do you ever feel guilty or unable to stop blaming yourself or others for the events or the problems the events may have caused?"
If Shane hadn't known that this question was coming, it might have been his undoing. But this was not his first PTSD screening, and he didn't even need to engage his brain to answer. "No, I don't feel guilty. I did my job as well as I possibly could under the circumstances. Everyone else did what they could with what they had, as well."
Any thoughts along the lines of my wife might have bothered to miss me rather than bringing a complete sociopath into my children's home and making love to him in my bed, and barring that she might have trusted me to raise the sociopath's daughter rather than divorcing me were his alone. They didn't belong to this doctor, to the ISA, or even to Kimberly.
The doctor nodded and turned the page. "Over the last two weeks, how often have you had little interest or pleasure in doing things?"
It was to be the depression screening in addition to the PTSD screening, then. That was no surprise. He knew that there had long since been a note in his file that said he was vulnerable to "major situational depression." He would have been more irritated if he hadn't also known that the file went on to state that he was actually a better agent when he was in utter despair.
But still, there was no need to let the doctor put another note in his file.
"Nothing like that," said Shane easily. No, he didn't feel like he'd let anyone down. Yes, he was completely happy in his home life— proud of his daughter, enamored of his son, delighted to have Stephanie as a bonus child, overwhelmed by his good fortune at having Kayla as a partner.
Kim had fixed her makeup well enough that nothing showed, but she could still feel that her eyes were sore and swollen from crying as she made her way through the woods.
For a moment, she wondered if there was really a training center or a bunker or whatever anyone wanted to call it at the end of the path. It would be just like the ISA to dump her in the middle of nowhere and subject her to impromptu wilderness survival training after demanding that she bring a wardrobe of high heels and cocktail dresses.
The joke was on the ISA, then. She'd survived giving birth in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. She could certainly survive this.
Then the concrete monstrosity rose before her.
It was no wonder that they called it a bunker. The other word that would have come to her mind was prison. In fact, she thought that Lawrence's current place of residence was actually nicer and more welcoming than this.
When she passed through the front door— the plethora of security cameras told her that she was in the right place— she was greeted by a check-in desk that could have belonged in any mid-range hotel. The agent behind the desk pressed a binder full of instructions into her hand along with a badge that she was warned to keep on her person at all times because it functioned as a key. Finally, she was given directions to her room, and, mindful of Peach's advice, she committed them to memory.
Halfway down the corridor. Turn left. Third door. Up two flights of stairs. Over the bridge. Turn right. Last door before the alcove.
She had been penniless in her life. She had been desperate for food and shelter. She had sold herself in the worst ways possible.
None of the rundown rooms-for-hire in her past were more depressing or frightening than the ISA's state-of-the art training center.
Grey was the only color; her echoing footsteps were the only sound. There was no natural light and there were no decorations. What struck her most might have been the lack of smell. Where there ought to have been dust, or cleaning products, or the lingering scent of someone's lunch, there was nothing she could name. There was nothing at all but winding corridors and surveillance cameras until she reached her designated room.
The door opened to reveal something like a cell, and again she was reminded of Lawrence Alamain's current accommodations.
No matter where in the room she stood, she could touch at least one wall. The bed filled most of the space. Given the place's resemblance to a trashy motel, she was struck by an intense urge to check for bedbugs.
She probably ought to check for the other sort of bugs, too, but she didn't carry that kind of equipment. She would just have to assume that she was being observed at all times.
When she lifted the corner of the mattress, she was pleasantly surprised to find no indication of listening devices or blood-feeding parasites. The mattress seemed to be reasonably new, and the sheets, while rough, were clean and fresh. A bathroom which had obviously been a late addition jutted into the room, taking up a full quarter of her living space. The bathroom, too, was clean and functional if small.
She had been in worse places after all, she decided. Her cell was ugly, and the bunker itself uglier still, but she was safe and had been granted basic comforts. She opened her garment bag and hung her dresses on the tiny rack beside the bathroom.
The first was such a deep shade of red that it was nearly black. It was sleeveless and had a plunging neckline, but it was classic and sedate enough that she could wear it more than once if need be. It was certainly the best choice for night's opening reception.
The second was light pink. Innocent and gentle and useful if someone wanted to see her practice selling herself as a damsel in distress so that Lawrence would be moved to save her from all the dangers of the world (or perhaps just from a virus that was on track to kill at least two people she loved).
The last was emerald green and sparkling. Shane had bought it for her in London when they'd been staying at Donovan Manor. She wasn't sure whether or not she planned to wear it. But she'd been in a rush when she'd packed, and the dress had all but jumped into her hand. She hung it on the far side of the rack, closest to the wall, so that she wouldn't be able to see much of it.
She sat on her bed, which was the only place to sit, and opened the binder. The reading material was interesting, and under other circumstances she would have looked forward to some of the classes. She'd taken self-defense courses before and enjoyed them, and she knew that she ought to get more practice with handling a gun before she shot someone she loved a second time. The lectures on the history of spy techniques would yield some good stories if nothing else.
She did flinch when she saw that one of the instructors was Gabrielle Pascal. She wondered whether Tarrington and Shane had summoned Gabrielle just to try Kim's patience, or whether it was all just a coincidence.
No. In the ISA, there were no coincidences.
Well, fine. She would greet Gabrielle politely and ask if she wasn't pleased that Eve had decided to go to Africa and do volunteer work.
(Kim, herself, worried about Eve. She and Eve had an awful tendency to make the same kind of mistakes, and when she'd been Eve's age and had fled to a new country… well, at least Eve had Frankie with her, and Frankie insisted that the two of them were happy together.)
And if Gabrielle intimated that they were equals now because Shane had chosen neither of them, or if Gabrielle announced that she was going to pursue Shane now that Kim was out of his system, Kim would not punch Gabrielle in the face. Kim had more important things to worry about, and the ISA damn well should have known that.
It was hard not to notice that there was nothing on the training course that she couldn't have navigated without Shane's help. He could have stayed in Salem with Kayla and Andrew and Peach.
He just hadn't.
But that, too, was a problem for another time.
For now, she had to put on her red dress and memorize the route to the ballroom.
She highly doubted that it would be anything like any ballroom she had ever seen.
To be continued.