Chapter 3 - A Man Who Does Not Pray
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They brought her back a second time before dawn.
The doctor used those exact words in the corridor.
Brought her back.
As if Sophia had gone somewhere quiet and they had persuaded her to return.
Declan stood with his back against the wall and his shirt finally changed because Jamie had insisted.
The clean shirt felt obscene.
His hands still did not feel clean, although he had washed them twice at a sink in the men's room.
Jamie waited until the doctor left before speaking.
He said the sedan had been reported stolen in Riverdale two days earlier.
He said the plates did not belong to it.
He said a shell casing had been recovered near the corner where Sophia fell.
Declan asked what kind.
Jamie told him.
The caliber was one Anton Sorin's men favored and everyone in their world knew it.
Declan looked down the corridor toward the doors of intensive care.
He asked if Sorin would be that careless.
Jamie said men who wanted a message sent were sometimes careless on purpose.
He said a traffic camera had caught a man leaving the sedan a block away.
He said the man's jacket carried a small silver pin in the shape of a rook.
Declan knew that pin.
Sorin gave them to his captains.
He had seen one on a lapel across a negotiating table only last month.
Jamie lowered his voice.
He said the Thursday meeting was now in question.
He said Sorin's people were already denying any involvement to every intermediary who would listen.
Declan said denials cost nothing.
Jamie agreed.
He said Nolan was handling the calls from the house.
He said Nolan had urged caution until they knew more.
Something in the way Jamie said it made Declan look at him.
Jamie shrugged once.
He said Nolan was being careful.
He said careful was not a crime.
Declan let it go.
He had no room in his head for anything that was not the sound of that monitor.
Later, when the sun was a thin gray line behind the hospital windows, he walked without deciding to walk.
He found himself in the small chapel on the third floor.
The room was empty.
There were six wooden chairs and a stand of candles, most of them unlit.
There was a plain cross on the far wall and a box of tissues on a side table that had been used recently.
Declan had not entered a church to pray since he was fourteen.
He had entered churches for funerals.
He had entered them for weddings where armed men sat in the back rows and pretended not to scan the doors.
He did not know the words anymore.
He sat in the second chair and put his elbows on his knees.
He tried to bargain the way his grandmother had taught him, with promises offered in exchange for mercy.
He promised things he was not sure he could give.
He promised the Thursday meeting would happen if she lived.
He promised he would sign whatever Sorin put in front of him if it ended the killing.
He promised he would walk away from rooms he had spent his life learning to control.
The silence in the chapel gave nothing back.
That frightened him more than the alarm had.
A hospital chaplain paused in the doorway and asked if he wanted company.
Declan said no.
The man nodded as if refusal were also a kind of prayer and left him alone.
Declan stayed until Jamie found him an hour later.
Jamie did not comment on where he was.
He only said her eyes had moved beneath her lids.
He said the nurse thought she might be surfacing.
They returned to intensive care together at a pace just short of running.
The tube at her mouth was gone.
An oxygen line rested beneath her nose instead.
Her breathing was shallow but her own.
Declan resumed his place in the small chair as if he had never left it.
He took her left hand again.
This time, her fingers were warmer.
He told himself not to make meaning from warmth.
He made meaning from it anyway.
Minutes passed.
An hour passed in pieces.
Her eyelids moved.
Her brow tightened as if pain had found her before memory could.
Then she opened her eyes.
She stared at the ceiling first, unfocused.
She stared at the monitor.
Then she turned her head with great care and found him.
Declan's shoulders began to shake before he could stop them.
He bowed his head over her hand the way he had in the night.
Sophia watched him with exhausted confusion.
Then she moved her fingers inside his grasp.
He looked up so abruptly that she almost apologized.
You look terrible, she whispered.
Her voice was raw and barely there.
A broken sound escaped him that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob.
He leaned forward.
Sophia, he said.
What happened, she asked.
His eyes closed.
Then opened.
For a little while, he said, they could not find your pulse.
She absorbed that in silence.
How little while, she asked.
He shook his head.
Long enough, he said.
She looked at their hands as if she were trying to understand how they had come to be joined.
She did not pull away.
After a moment, she asked if it was Thursday.
Declan frowned.
He said it was Tuesday morning.
She closed her eyes again, but not in sleep.
Relief passed over her face, small and unmistakable.
Then you still have time, she whispered.
Time for what, he asked.
The left sleeve, she said.
He stared at her.
She opened her eyes again and tried, weakly, to be precise.
I did not finish the left sleeve, she said.
It is still pinned.
If it sits pinned too long, the chalk will set into the wool.
Declan laughed then, truly laughed, and immediately looked ashamed of the sound in that room.
Sophia's mouth moved in something too tired to be a smile.
She said the suit was for his meeting.
She said the meeting mattered.
He told her the suit did not matter.
She looked at him as a tailor looks at a man who has said something foolish about cloth.
It matters to me, she said.
Her eyes drifted closed again.
He thought she had fallen asleep.
Then she asked about the street.
She asked if the car that came around the corner had hit her.
Declan chose his words with care.
He said there had been a shot.
He said the sedan had been a distraction and a getaway at once, or so they believed.
He watched her face change as the words reached her.
She asked if anyone else had been hurt.
He said no.
She asked if the driver had been caught.
He said not yet.
She was quiet for a long time.
I remember the light, she said at last.
I remember my boot going.
I remember reaching for you.
After that, there is nothing.
Declan felt something settle coldly in his chest.
He asked gently if she remembered stepping toward him or away from him.
She frowned at the ceiling as if the memory were written there.
I reached, she said.
That is all I know.
I reached, and then the street was gone.
She did not remember the sound.
She did not remember falling into his side.
She did not remember choosing anything at all.
Declan held her hand more carefully than before, if that were possible.
In that moment, he understood that the story already moving through his world was not the story she carried.
His men would call her brave.
Strangers would call her a woman who took a bullet for Declan Callahan.
She would call it ice.
He did not correct her then.
He did not tell her what people were already saying outside that room.
He only asked if she was in pain.
She said yes, in the honest and unadorned way she said most things.
He reached for the call button at once.
She caught his sleeve with two fingers before he could press it.
Stay, she said.
May you like
Just until the nurse comes.
He stayed.
