Page 60 of The Jackal

And this time, when the light gathered itself into a shape, it wasn't my father's face that came out of it.

It was a dog.

Gray muzzle. Steady eyes, clear now, the cloud gone out of them. Standing easy on four good legs like the years and the last night had never touched him, ears up, watching me come the way he'd watched a stranger in a kitchen a lifetime ago. Off duty at last. Waiting.

There you are, I thought. You old soldier. There you are.

Duke huffed—one short, patient breath—and turned, and looked back at me over his shoulder the way he had that first night in her front room. Only the question was different now.

You coming? he asked. Or you going back for her?

31

MAGNOLIA

Morning came gray through the blinds of a room on the surgical floor at MUSC Health University Medical Center. I was still in the chair I'd been in for hours, holding a hand that hadn't yet held mine back.

I had not slept. I'd come out the far side of that night a different person than I went into it. When Elias said the words in that firelit room—something's gone wrong, out there, Maggie—the floor had dropped out of the world. The hours after had been the worst of my life, worse than the night men came through my door, worse than anything. Because in those hours, I did not know.

That's the thing nobody warns you about, the not-knowing, how it's its own kind of torture with no bottom to it.

They'd moved fast—the whole machine of Dominion Hall folding around me, a car, the dark streets, Claire's hand locked in mine the entire way and never once letting go—and somewhere in the middle of it, Brock's voice had come through somebody's phone saying he's alive, he's hit bad but he's alive, we're inbound to MUSC. I'd folded in half in the back of that car and made a sound I didn't know I had in me.

Alive. He'd been alive. And then, for hours, he hadn't been guaranteed to stay that way. I'd stood on the wrong side of a set of double doors while people I'd never met opened my whole world up on a table and tried to keep him in it.

Something had been nicked. That was the word the surgeon used when he finally came out, still in his cap, pulling his mask down—nicked, such a small, domestic word for the thing that had nearly taken everything. A vessel. He'd lost a staggering amount of blood, more than a body is supposed to be able to lose and stay a body; they'd been pouring it back into him as fast as it ran out, and there'd been a stretch on that table, the surgeon told me, gentle and honest, where they had genuinely thought they were going to lose him. Where his heart had gotten quiet in a way that wasn't the calm I knew but the other thing. And then, they'd found it, and closed it, and the blood had stayed where blood is supposed to stay, and the monitors had climbed back up out of the basement.

My mother had done something that night I wouldn't understand until later.

He'd come through. That was the sentence I'd been living inside since somewhere in the small hours. He came through surgery. He was stable. He was going to make it. And now, there was nothing left to do but the hardest thing, which was wait for him to open his eyes. I sat in the chair and held the hand that lay slack and big and warm in mine, IV lines running into the back of it, and I willed the fingers to close.

"He'll wake when he's ready," Brock said, low, from across the room. "Man's contrary about everything else. Figure he'll be contrary about this, too."

Brock hadn't left either. None of them had.

He was slumped in a chair too small for him in the corner, still in the clothes from the night. There was dried blood on him that wasn't his, and glass in the tread of his boots, and the hollow look of a man who'd carried something too heavy for too long and set it down and wasn't sure yet if he'd set it down in time. Because Brock was the one. I'd gotten that much, in pieces, through the night—that whatever had happened out there in the dark, my Cash had been a breath from gone, and Brock had been the reason he wasn't.

I didn't know the details. I didn't want them. I only knew that this large man across the room had reached into the worst moment of both our lives and pulled Cash back out of it. There was no word in any language for what I owed him, so I hadn't tried to find one. I'd just walked over at some point around three in the morning and put my arms around as much of him as I could reach. He’d gone still, and then one huge hand had come up and patted my back, awkward and gentle, a man who did not know what to do with being thanked for the thing he'd have died doing.

Tommy had gone for coffee nobody drank and come back with it, anyway, because Tommy needed a job the way I needed a dog. He kept finding small ways to be useful—a blanket over my shoulders I didn't remember him fetching, a word with a nurse, that easy warmth moving through a grim room and making it survivable. Ryker stood at the window most of the night with his arms crossed, watching the street, and I understood without being told that even here, even now, one of them was always watching the door. Somebody always stayed. Nobody was ever unguarded. It was the ritual, moved to a hospital.

"How's the dog?” Brock asked, because he knew. Of course, he knew. They all knew what Max was to me, to Cash, to the whole impossible story.

"Out of surgery." My voice came out rough with disuse. "Vivi sent word an hour ago. They had to go in—he'd caught more than anybody realized in all the—" I stopped, because I still didn't have the picture of what all the had been, and didn't want it. "But he's going to be okay. They're saying full recovery. He's tough. He's the toughest thing I've ever—" My throat closed. "He was with Cash. Out there. The whole time. He got hurt because he wouldn't leave him."

"No," Brock said quietly. "He got hurt because he's exactly what your man is. And your man got out of that room alive partly because of that dog. That's the truth, Maggie. Two of them. Watching each other's backs to the last."

I had to look at Cash's slack face for a while after that and breathe.

I don't know exactly when my parents came. The night had come apart into pieces by then, unstuck from any clock. But at some point, I lifted my head from the edge of the bed where I'd let it rest, and they were there—both of them, in the doorway, my mother and my father, and the sight of them undid the last thing in me that had been holding.

My father crossed the room first and gathered me up out of the chair without a word, all six feet of retired colonel. I put my face in his chest the way I hadn't since I was small and let him hold the whole shaking weight of me. He smelled like the long drive and like himself, like safety, like the one man who'd been walking into rooms like this his whole life and coming out the other side. "I've got you, baby girl," he said into my hair, gruff, steady. I felt him look over my head at the man in the bed, taking his measure even now, even here, the colonel reading a soldier he hadn't gotten to meet yet.

And my mother stood a step back, and she was already crying, my mother who did not cry, my mother who'd built a whole life out of not falling apart in front of people—and she was crying, one hand pressed to her mouth, looking at me and then at Cash and then at me.

Because it was my mother who'd saved us, in her way. I found that out later. When the call came, she hadn't just gotten in a car. She'd gotten on the phone. A cardiologist who'd spent thirty years in and out of hospitals like this one, who knew which surgeons were the ones you wanted at three in the morning and how to make sure they were the ones in the room—she'd worked it the whole drive down, called in favors from a career's worth of them. By the time Cash hit those doors, the right people had been waiting for him. My mother, four hours away, had reached into that operating room with a telephone and helped keep the man I loved alive. She would never once take credit for it. But I knew.

They'd come together.