Page 61 of The Jackal

That was the thing I saw next, the thing that went into me like warmth into cold hands.

When my father finally let me go and stepped back to stand beside her, my mother reached over without seeming to think about it and took his hand. He let her, and their fingers laced together the easy, unconscious way of two people who had been doing exactly that for a very long time, or had just remembered how. They'd driven out together. From Georgia, the both of them, side by side in one car through the whole, long dark—the colonel and the cardiologist, my father and my mother, who had not been in the same room in years and had spent this one holding hands in a hospital doorway.

I looked at their laced fingers, and I looked at my father's thumb moving slow over the back of my mother's hand, and I looked at my mother not letting go. Something in my chest that had been clenched since I was a teenager simply came loose.

"Mom," I said.

"Not now," she said, and gave a nervous laugh, and squeezed my father's hand tighter. I understood that not now meant later, meant there was a later coming, meant that the thing I'd stopped letting myself hope for around the time they sat me down and explained the unexplainable had quietly, while I wasn't watching, become possible again.

My father was retired now. The mission was done taking him. And my mother had spent this whole, terrible night in a car beside the man she'd never really stopped loving, and she wasn't letting go of his hand, and maybe—maybe—the second half of their story was going to be the part where they got to stay.

I didn't say any of that. I just went and stood with them, the three of us, and we watched Cash breathe.

It was Ryker who arranged the other thing. I don't know how—I'd stopped asking how the Danes made things happen—but somewhere in the late morning, he stepped out and came back twenty minutes later. Behind him, Tommy was pushing a wheelchair. In the wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket with a shaved patch on his flank and a cone he was deeply insulted by and an IV port taped to his leg, groggy and drugged and gloriously alive, was Max.

"Vet cleared him to travel,” Ryker said, deadpan, like he hadn't just done something enormous. "Nobody at this hospital saw a dog. There is no dog. Are we clear?”

We were clear.

They lifted him out of the chair—Brock did it, gentle as anything, that huge man cradling sixty pounds of stitched-up war dog like he was made of glass—and they laid him in the bed. Right up against Cash's uninjured side, in the curve of him, careful of all the lines and the leads. And Max, who'd been fighting the fog of the anesthesia, went still the second he was there. He put his shaved, sutured body flush against his person, and he laid his heavy head on Cash's chest over the heart the machines were still counting. He let out a long breath that went the whole length of him, and he closed his eyes.

The whole room went quiet. Tommy turned around and studied the wall. Even Ryker had to clear his throat.

And that was how Cash woke up.

I was watching his face—I was always watching his face—so I saw it happen. The flicker under the lids. The long pause. And then, his eyes opened, unfocused, swimming up out of somewhere very deep and very far. For a moment, he didn't know where he was. I saw the disorientation move through him. I took his hand in both of mine and leaned in close so mine would be the first face.

"Hey," I said, and my voice broke all the way open on the one small word. "Hey. There you are. I've got you. You're okay. You made it, Cash. You're here."

His eyes found me. Focused, slow, and landed. I watched him come all the way back into himself the second he saw me—watched the man I loved return from wherever he'd been, and know me, and choose me all over again with just a look.

"Mags," he rasped. Barely a sound. But my name.

"I'm here." I pressed his knuckles to my mouth, hard. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

Then his eyes moved, drifted down, and found the weight against his side. The gray-nothing, the cone, the shaved flank, the heavy head over his heart. Max, feeling him wake, thumped his tail once against the blanket without lifting his head, too worn out for more, and pressed in closer.

Something crossed Cash's face that I will keep for the rest of my life. A wonder. A wholeness. His good hand came up, slow and shaking with the effort, and he laid it on the dog's head, and he closed his eyes again—not going under this time, just holding still, just feeling the two of us there, his woman's hands around one of his and his dog under the other, both of them alive, both of them his, both of them not going anywhere.

"Both of you," he breathed. "You're both here."

"We're both here," I said. "We're all here."

Behind me, I heard my father let out a slow breath, and my mother's soft sound. I knew without turning that they were watching this—watching the man their daughter loved wake from the edge of death and reach for a dog and for her—and I knew, the way you know a thing in your bones, that my father had just finished taking his measure, and that Cash Dane had passed.

"Sir," Cash said then, without opening his eyes, rough as gravel, having clocked the room even now, even like this, "I'm sorry. I promised you a proper conversation, and a handshake. I'm afraid I'm going to have to owe you both a day or two."

And my father—my gruff, unbendable father—made a sound that was half a laugh and all the way undone. He came to the side of the bed, and very carefully, mindful of every line and lead, took Cash's hand where it rested on the dog and shook it, once, soldier to soldier.

"Son," he said, "you take all the time you need. You've done plenty for one night."

EPILOGUE

MAGNOLIA

The garden was the first thing we saw when we came home from the hospital, and it was the thing that finally broke Cash Dane open.

He'd held it together through all of it. Through the surgery and the waking and the long days on the surgical floor, through the humiliations of healing—the walker he despised, the nurse who wouldn't let him do a single thing for himself, the slow, shuffling laps of the ward with his IV pole and his scowl and Max pacing at his knee like a furious chaperone. He'd held it together the way he held everything, quiet and unbending, giving the pain nowhere to land where anyone could see it. And then, we'd driven home to my little crooked house.