Chapter 6
1214 Words
he hasn't gotten the chance to speak.
She wasn't prepared for that part yet, she just made the decision through the thoughts at night, then stood up in the morning, and walked down there, even though she had been imagining herself speaking first. Saying it cleanly and clearly. Handing over the weight of it across the desk and letting it stop being hers alone to carry.
She hasn't said a single word.
Because the door behind her opened and Ethan walked in.
She turned and there he was.
He was breathing so hard like he has been running.
Still wearing the clothes he had been wearing since last night. One side of his face marked faintly with the lines from her pillow. The note she'd left behind crushed tightly in his fist like he'd snatched it off the table and bolted before he could even think straight. One shoe half unlaced.
And he looked at her from across the room with an expression she'd never seen on him before.
One she hoped she'd never have to see again.
Not panic. Worse than panic.
Understanding.
He knew exactly what she was doing. And he was looking at her like she had broken something in him just by being here.
"Lena." His voice came out low. Shredded. "Don't."
The officer at the desk looked between them.
"Sir..."
"She didn't do it." Ethan said it loud enough for the room. Loud enough for the two officers who'd just come in behind him to stop walking. Loud enough to be a declaration, not a conversation. "Whatever she's about to tell you, it isn't true. I was driving. It was me."
The room went very still.
Lena stared at him.
"Ethan.."
"No." He stepped forward. His jaw was set. His eyes were so red from crying and he was just nineteen, standing in a police precinct in unorganised shoes and he had never in his life looked more like the boy she had raised. "You don't get to do this. I won't let you do this."
"This is not your decision..."
"Neither is it yours to decide." His voice cracked on the last word and he didn't stop looking at her. "It's mine. It was always mine. I did it. I have to fix it."
She felt something give way inside her chest. She pressed it back down.
"Sir." The officer at the desk stood up. "I'll need you both to calmly explain what the issue is right now."
Neither of them looked at him.
They looked at each other the way they had always looked at each other when the world got its hands on them and tried to pull them in different directions, like there was a conversation happening underneath the one anyone else could hear. Years of it. The whole long private language of two people who had only ever really had each other.
Don't do this, her eyes said.
I already have, his said back.
A long moment passed.
Then Lena turned to the officer. She felt it is slowly becoming so hard for her to bear, and the decision is gently slipping out of her hands at the moment. "We need to speak with someone," she said. "About a hit and run. Last night. Lower East Side."
The officer picked up the phone.
---
Carmen Reyes was two blocks from the East Village address when her radio crackled.
She almost ignored it. She was focused. She had the name Ryan Castellano in her head and the borrowed car in her head and the shape of what she thought had happened assembling itself the way cases did when the pieces started agreeing with each other.
Then she heard the desk sergeant's voice say hit and run and Lower East Side and walked in voluntarily and she pulled the car over so fast the vehicle behind her leaned on its horn.
She grabbed the radio. "This is Reyes. Who walked in?"
A pause. Papers shuffling. "Two of them. A woman and a younger male. Male is saying he was the driver."
She sat very still.
"Names," she said.
She wrote them down. Looked at what she'd written.
She pulled up the DMV list still open on her passenger seat. Ran her finger down it. The borrowed car. Ryan Castellano. East Village.
She took her phone and made a call she wasn't really ready to make.
Graves picked up the call immiediately.
"They walked in already," she said. "I'm on my way back."
A pause. She could hear him processing it. "Both of them?"
"Both of them."
Another pause. Longer. She knew what was in it, the same thing that was already sitting in her own chest, cold and complicated. Because this was the part nobody told you about when you were twelve years into the job. The part where ordinary people walked through a door and handed themselves over and what happened next had almost nothing to do with what they deserved.
It had to do with who was waiting on the other end of a phone call in a hospital on the third floor.
"Reyes." Graves' voice was careful. "The Commissioner's office..."
"I know."
"A Senator's son..."
"I know, Lieutenant."
A silence.
"Get back here," he said. And hung up.
She put the car in drive.
---
They put Lena and Ethan in separate rooms.
That was the first thing that happened and it happened fast, faster than she'd expected, two different officers appearing and asking them politely but firmly to come this way please, and she had just enough time to look at Ethan before the doors between them closed.
He looked back at her.
He nodded once. Small. Steady.
Like he was the one reassuring her.
She turned and walked into the room they'd shown her and sat in the chair across the plain table under the flat pale light and put her hands flat on the surface in front of her and breathed.
A detective would be with her shortly, the officer had said.
Shortly.
She looked at the wall.
She thought about the notepad on the kitchen table. Face down. The numbers that never balanced no matter how many times she ran them.
She thought about the note. Finish school. Get the job. Make it worth it.
She kept thinking about Ethan's face in the streetlight last night. The innocent looking Nineteen years old young guy and completely wrecked and looking at her like she was the only one he can depend on in the world.
She thought about the consequences of walking through the door.
And then the door to the room opened.
And Detective Carmen Reyes walked in.
And sat down across from her.
And opened a folder.
And looked up.
And Lena understood immediately, in the specific wordless way you understood certain things about certain people in the first seconds of meeting them, that this woman was not going to make any of this easy.
Not because she was cruel.
But she looks exactly like one of those serious professionals who makes no mistake at their jobs.
And somewhere, a place above the both of them, in the particular area where power that ran this city like a second government, Senator Adrian Mercer's phone was already ringing again.
- Writer
