Page 140 of Wreckage and Rain

She comes out in my rugby shirt with her hair dripping down her neck and reads my face in about half a second, because she has always been quicker than me at the things that matter.

"Tell me."

So I do. I tell her about the whole call while pacing. Cheyenne's threats about releasing the photos, to trade my testimony for her silence. The story she would sell a jury. Summer sets the towel down and watches me wear a path in the floor. Somewhere in the middle, her face goes from worried to something colder, brighter, the look she gets when a plot problem cracks open and she can see the whole back half of the book.

"Stop pacing. You're going to fall through to the apartment below."

"I want to get in the car."

"I know exactly what you want to do." She catches my hand on a pass and holds on, which stops me better than the sentence does."You're not going to do any of it. You're going to do something so much more satisfying. You're going to do nothing, beautifully, and let her bury herself."

She ticks it off, fast, lit up. "She called you. On a phone. To pressure you about your testimony. After her lawyer told her not to come near you. She didn't threaten you, Colt. She confessed. Call Dade. Tonight. From here on she gets nothing from either of us that doesn't go through a lawyer. She calls, we don't answer. She shows up, we shut the door. We hand her no thread to pull and let her keep digging."

"God, I love your brain."

***

I call my attorney, Dade. Summer hops up to sit on the counter, swinging a heel, and I put it on speaker. I lay it out. He's quiet while I talk, and when I finish he makes a sound that's almost a laugh.

"She called you herself."

"Herself."

"After her own counsel told her, in writing, no contact." He is up and moving, I can hear it. "And she didn't just call. She asked you to change your testimony. Offered you a trade for it. That's the line. Contact is one thing. Asking a witness to lie for you is the thing that gets you a new charge. Write down every word, times and all, before you sleep. In the morning I call the U.S. Attorney's office and I ruin her week. She just took a fraud case she might have pled quietly and stapled a tampering charge to it with her own hand. The assault count was already strong. This makes her radioactive."

Summer mouths the word radioactive and does a little drumroll on the cabinet with her heels.

***

Cheyenne tries Summer two days later. A text, not a call. Summer reads it at the counter over her coffee and her facedoesn't move one muscle. She doesn't answer it. She screenshots it, forwards it to Dade with three words, one more for you, and picks her coffee back up.

"What did she say?"

"Nothing worth your morning." A sip. "She's knocking on a wall and calling it a door."

Dade calls Thursday. The tampering is filed. The photographs Cheyenne was holding as her ace are in evidence now, and they show exactly what Dom's investigator always said they would, a man who couldn't stand on his own being moved into a room he didn't choose. She was sure they were a weapon. They were just more of the case against herself, and she gave them up to make a phone call.

He asks me, careful, almost reluctant, whether I want to see them. They're mine to look at if I want. I have the right.

Part of me does. That is the part that catches me off guard. Some piece of me has always wanted that room back, wanted to stand in it and know instead of guessing at the worst night of my life.

But I asked Dr. Ramos about this a while back, whether I should make myself look. She didn't tell me yes and she didn't tell me no. She asked what looking would give me that I didn't already have. I keep coming back to the same answer. Nothing. I know the only part that matters. I couldn't stand up. Someone moved me. I didn't choose a second of it, and not one second of it was ever mine to carry.

"No," I tell him. "I don't need to see them. I know what's in them."

Summer is pretending not to listen from across the kitchen, which is its own kind of listening. When I hang up she doesn't ask me to explain it, and she doesn't tell me I did good. She crosses the floor, fits herself against my side, and puts her face in my neck, and we stand there a while, not looking at a room a long way behind us.

***

That night she falls asleep on me before I do, which never happens, one hand flat on my chest where she can feel it.

Somewhere across town Cheyenne is lying awake building her next bad idea. Let her. She's swinging at a man who doesn't live here anymore, and I'm not going to do her the favor of a forwarding address.

I work a piece of hair off Summer's face. She makes a sound she will deny under oath in the morning.

I don't move all night. I don't want to.

Chapter 40: Sworn