“Dad, just listen to me for one second, okay? Just let me explain—”
“Because I am, despite everything, your father, I will tell you this clearly,” I said. “There is nothing you can say to me right now that covers what you did. There is not a sentence in the English language large enough for it. So you need to stop talking.”
His jaw worked.
He looked suddenly younger and uglier at once.
“It wasn’t like that.”
That, finally, got a reaction out of me.
I laughed.
Not warmly.
Not kindly.
“It was exactly like that,” I said. “You just thought you were going to have more time.”
He flinched.
Lindsay’s grip tightened around the flowers hard enough to bend the paper wrap.
“Dad, please—” Preston started again.
I cut him off with one glance toward Cassandra’s door.
“My wife is ten feet away,” I said. “You will not use that voice with me outside her room. If you have a conscience left, you can stand there silently for the next sixty seconds and imagine what she looked like when I found her.”
He went still.
For one irrational moment, I thought he might cry.
Then I realized what I was seeing was not remorse.
It was self-pity.
That killed something in me more cleanly than rage ever could have.
I nodded toward the flowers.
“Those are nice,” I said. “I’m sure someone else will enjoy them.”
The officers met them in the parking lot.
Margaret had coordinated the timing with a professionalism that bordered on art. They were still carrying the flowers when the detectives approached. I watched from the corridor window with Kurt standing beside me, because naturally he had materialized at exactly the moment a man most needs a witness who loves him and will later tell the story correctly.
Preston tried to talk his way through the first thirty seconds.
Of course he did.
He gestured. He leaned in. He wore his best reasonable-guy face. Even from the fourth floor I could see him trying to argue reality into a more convenient shape.
Lindsay went still almost immediately. Not shocked. Not frozen. Still in the calculating way of somebody already running scenarios.
The flowers ended up on the pavement.
One of the lilies snapped at the neck.
Kurt folded his arms and stared out the window.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
I thought about lying. Men our age are trained to answer that kind of question with practical nonsense.
Tired.