Page 79 of Forbidden Protector

Gideon Blackwater doesn't say hello. He never has, and grief hasn't taught him one tonight.

"I'd rather stand here."

"I know you would." He looks past me at the double doors, the wired-glass windows dark on the other side, Josephine still and silent in the chair beside me.

I fold my arms instead, badge and weapon still behind the front desk, and nothing on me that says who I am except the blood I haven't washed off yet. Whatever he's about to say, he's saying it to a woman with no institution standing behind her.

"My wife spoke to you in the garden. I don't know what she said, and I've learned not to ask her that question twice in the same year." A pause, the kind a man sets down like a boundary he means to keep. "But I'd guess it's been keeping you up nights, trying to make it mean something it won't mean yet."

"Is that why you're here? To tell me it doesn't mean anything?"

"I'm here because my son is in the operating room with a hand that will never work the way it used to, and I've spent six hours deciding whether I'm going to be a coward about this for the rest of my life or only for most of it." His jaw does the thing Holt's does, the exact hinge, and for the first time since I met him I watch it wound him instead of buying him room to maneuver. "I'm choosing most of it. Tonight, at least, I'm going to tell you one⁠—"

The double doors open.

The surgeon comes through them mask pulled down around his neck, scrubs still damp at the collar, and every other thing in the hallway stops mattering at once. Gideon's mouth closes on whatever he was about to say. His hand moves without him seeming to notice it, folding the paper smaller and putting it away inside his coat. Josephine comes up out of the chair without a sound.

"Saved the hand," the surgeon says, before anyone has to ask him to. "Saved the function. We won't know how much until therapy, but he's got fingers and he's got a pulse in all of them, and that's a better sentence than I had for you three hours ago."

I don't remember deciding to close my eyes. I do it anyway, one second, the same length as I've watched Josephine close her hand on a pair of garden shears and let go again.

"Can I see him?"

"Not yet. He's still coming up. Give the nurses twenty minutes and someone will come get you."

"Thank you." Gideon says it exact and without waste, same as he says everything, but it takes him a half-second longer than it should.

The surgeon has clearly stood in enough hallways at this hour to know grief when three exhausted people are trying not to show it. He nods and goes back through the doors.

Josephine touches my shoulder once, on her way past. She's done all the waiting she came to do, and now she's going to the cafeteria to let the others have the relief without whatever's still standing in this hall behind her.

That leaves Gideon, and whatever's in his coat pocket now instead of his hands, and twenty minutes neither of us was using for anything.

"You have some time now," he says.

"Finish it."

He looks at me a moment longer, like a man deciding whether the interruption stole his nerve or only his place in the sentence and picks it back up exactly where the doors took it.

"I was nineteen." He says it plain, like a man reading a coordinate off a map. "My father sent me to Caleb Tatum's camp on the north bench; the summer he was surveying that section for the county. He told me to tell him to leave the mountain. Not to threaten him. My father would have called that beneath us, and I believed him, the way a nineteen-year-old believes his father about everything he hasn't learned to doubt yet. Just tell him. Leave the mountain, Caleb. Nothing good comes from a man surveying that ground."

The hallway has gone very quiet. Somewhere down it a cart wheel needs oil.

"Did you tell him?" My voice comes out flat, almost annoyed.

"I told him." His eyes come up to mine, and there's nothing in them tonight that I've seen in that study. No chess, no lever, and no offer with a number attached. "He looked at a nineteen-year-old boy standing in his camp at dusk, and he laughed. Not unkindly. Said he'd been threatened by better men than my father, and he had a section to finish, and he'd be up there till first snow if that's what it took."

He stops. Starts again, slower.

"Three days later he was dead. And I have spent thirty-nine years telling myself the thing I said wasn't a threat, because I never once raised my voice, and thirty-nine years knowing that's the kind of distinction only a guilty man bothers making."

"You're telling me you didn't kill him?"

"I'm telling you I didn't kill him, and that's not the same as telling you my hands are clean. If you walk out of this hospital believing those two sentences mean the same thing, I've done you a disservice on top of everything else my family has done to yours."

His voice slows, laying each word down where it must bear the load. "We knew who would. Not a name. Not a face I could pick out of a lineup, not then and not now. But my father knew something was circling that section line, and instead of telling Caleb Tatum what he was walking into, he sent his son to deliver a warning dressed up as a courtesy. Then both of us went back to the house and said nothing else about it. Not to each other, not to your grandfather's widow, and not to a coroner who ruled it exposure, because nobody in this county gave him a fact worth a second question."

I get about half of the composure I want. My hands stay steady. My breathing doesn't.