Page 56 of Rooster's Remorse
"I remember all of it. Every name that ever went out there, every one of them." His voice drops and goes to gravel, and I can hear the wet in it. "And I've laid awake a lot of nights in here wishing I didn't, because a man who remembers a place like that and can't do one damn thing about it, that's its own cell, son. That's the real one. The bars are the easy part."
Amara comes off the wall.
"Dad—"
"I don't know how much of this you can hear." He's talking faster now, right up against the wire he can't cross, walking the top of it. "But if you've got people, and those people ever wanted to know about the old crowd, about the county, about who went out and how it got paid for—your old man remembers. All of it. And I've got nothing in here but time to remember it. There are ways to ask a man like me things. Legal ways, on paper. Your people would know them."
"Thirty seconds," Petrowski says, flat.
"Dad."
"I love you, Finn." All at once, ten years of it coming through the wire. "I did the best I knew and it wasn't enough, I know it wasn't, and I think about your mother every day, every single?—"
"I love you too, Dad."
"—and if there's a thing I can do from in here that helps you or helps anybody, you find the way to ask me. You hear me? You find the way."
"I hear you."
"Good." His voice breaks clean in half. "That's my boy. That's my?—"
The line dies.
Amara doesn't say anything for a while.
I'm at her desk with my hands still flat on it, the dead phone in front of me, and there's water on my face.
I'm not doing anything about it, and she's not making me.
"He knows every name," she says finally.
"Yeah."
"And there's a legal way to pull it out of a man in the program. He said it twice." She comes around and sits on the edge of the desk. "Imani will know what it is. A deposition, a sworn statement, something a lawyer files under seal. Slow. But real, and it'd hold up."
"Yeah."
She looks at me.
"You did good. That was hard and you did it right. You got us a door nobody else in this club could've opened."
I nod because my voice won't work.
He's been in it for years, knowing a building existed.
Mila was inside that building the whole time.
Neither of us knew, and neither of us gets absolved for the not-knowing, even though the not-knowing was never a thing we chose.
I don't say any of that to Amara.
I get up, I thank my president, and I go find something to fix.
CHAPTER TEN
Mila
There are five of us in the truck and they've put me in the middle of the back seat, which is the worst place to sit if something happens and the only place left, and I'm working on being okay with it.
