She’d seen him holding a gun, and there hadn’t been an opportunity for him to explain without someone else overhearing. It must have freaked her out to see a gun in his hands.
“Hey,” he said softly.
She arched a brow, turned a page. “Hmm?”
“We need to talk. It’s important.”
She closed the book on her index finger. As if to say: I’ll give you a minute, no more. “Important enough to involve me? And maybe your daughter?”
Her voice sounded high, constricted. Indignant. A faint tremble.
She looked at him, eyes hooded, a hostile expression that said either I really don’t care or I don’t believe a word you’re saying.
“Oh?”
“I can’t talk about it here. But as soon as we get home. I just want to say I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, returned to her book.
The horror he’d witnessed that afternoon on the mountain pass had changed everything.
For far too long, he’d kept the real situation from the woman he loved.
It was time to tell her the truth.
PART FIVE
59
He waited until Abby had gone to bed that night.
In the old days, not so long ago, that meant tucking her in and reading to her and talking and eventually turning out the light. Often he’d fall asleep before she did and later stumble out of her bedroom in a stupor. Now it meant she closed the bedroom door and put on her headphones and listened to music and “chatted” with friends on Facebook.
Danny kept his voice low, just in case Abby wasn’t wearing her headphones and had her ear against the wall.
“Baby, something happened this afternoon,” he began. “But it began a while ago.”
He started with Galvin’s loan and the meeting with the DEA. He told her how he’d planted a bug in the Boston College medal and how it was somehow discovered. He told her about Esteban’s mutilated body. About how he furtively downloaded Galvin’s BlackBerry at the Plympton Club. And finally about the nightmarish event earlier in the day. Had it been only a matter of hours since they’d discovered the mutilated body of the bodyguard? It felt like days.
Mostly, she listened. After the first few minutes, she stopped interrupting him with questions. Her mouth came open a few times, an understandable response to the shock. She gasped at his descriptions of what had happened to the two driver/bodyguards.
When he finished, she was silent for a long time.
Her eyes were filled with tears, her jaw tight.
“So basically you decided to secretly cooperate with the DEA against a Mexican drug cartel,” she said. “And put your life in harm’s way. And your daughter’s. And mine, too.” He was surprised by her tone, flat and cold and bitter.
“That’s not how it happened, Lucy. I told you.”
His cell phone made the plinking sound of a secure text message. He ignored it. He knew what it was: They wanted his photos of whoever Galvin had met on the Aspen mountainside. Well, they could wait.
She sat up in bed very straight. “No, that’s exactly how it happened. You didn’t tell me in the beginning because you knew what I’d say. You knew how I’d react.”
He shook his head. “Come on.” But he knew she was probably right.
“Because keeping me in the dark would keep the bad guys away. Like that? Is that what you thought? You know, we shrinks call that magical thinking.”
“Lucy.”
“Because you didn’t want to have this very argument?”
“I wanted to keep you safe. You and Abby both.”
She shook her head slowly.
She was wearing an extra-extra-large T-shirt that said KEEP CALM AND CARY GRANT on the front. A spoof of an old British wartime poster you now saw parodied everywhere: KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. A silhouette of Cary Grant in North by Northwest, running from a crop duster. Danny had forgotten whether he’d given it to her. She loved old Hitchcock movies. She insisted they didn’t make movie stars like Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy or Gregory Peck anymore.
“I figured, the less you or Abby was involved, the better. Safer to keep you out of the loop.”
“So one day Tom Galvin would get arrested and-what, the Mexicans would leave us all alone and say, ‘Rats, I guess we’re just going to have to file an appeal’? And ‘Oh, that guy who’s responsible for us losing billions of dollars, that guy who funneled the information to the DEA, we’ll just leave him alone, because them’s the breaks of the justice system’? Like that?”
“There’s no need to raise your voice.”
She swung her feet out from under the covers and onto the floor. “What the hell were you thinking? That they’d go away quietly? Because they always do that, right? Just walk away and throw up their hands. These people who behead their enemies and butcher them, and… and you just thought you were going to work against these cold-blooded killers and they’d leave you and your daughter alone?”
He made a palms-down gesture, patting the air, trying to calm her, get her to keep her voice down. “You don’t really think I’d deliberately do anything that might cause harm to you or Abby, do you?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “So when you told her she couldn’t go over to the Galvins, and I asked you if there was something about them you didn’t like, and you said no…?”
“Yes. That was a lie.”
“And the reason you didn’t want her being driven around by Galvin’s chauffeur-when you said you were just uncomfortable-”
“That was also a lie.”
“The old friend who wanted publishing advice, the Jay Gould letters at Wellesley-”
“I lied to you over and over again. I did. I’m deeply, deeply ashamed of it. But everything I did was about protecting you and Abby. Lucy, come on, keep it down, Abby can hear.”
“And all because you can’t deal with confrontation.” Her cheeks burned deep red. “Well, that’s something I really can’t fix. This is such a disappointment, really.”
He no longer recognized her. The mask of anger had lifted away, and what remained was terrifyingly unfamiliar. A woman who looked at him like he was a stranger. Her eyes stared, her expression oddly neutral, impassive.
“You didn’t want to have this fight, so you decided you knew best.”
“I didn’t-” He faltered. He didn’t know what to say, because he knew she was right.
She fell silent, and so did he. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say.
He got up from the bed. He saw tears in her eyes. She spoke so softly he could barely hear. “You take care of that girl, and tell her I love her so much and I’ll say good-bye to her another time. Right now I can’t.”
“Lucy,” he said.
But she’d closed the bedroom door behind her.
He lay awake for what seemed like hours.
He wept.
At four in the morning, when the sky was dead black, and daybreak seemed impossibly far off, he had an idea.
He selected ChatSecure on his iPhone and texted the DEA agents: Need to meet ASAP.
“It really sucks that I have to go to school today,” Abby said the next morning. “Instead of being in Aspen.”
“I know. Life’s tough.”
She seemed to relent a bit. “I know. Jenna calls it a first-world problem. Lucy left already?”
“She had to leave early.”
A beat. “You guys were fighting last night.”
“We were talking. Did we wake you up?”
She shook her head, then shrugged.
His iPhone, in his pants pocket, vibrated and bleated the distinctive tritone of a secure text message.
“Is that yours?”
He nodded, slipped it out of his pocket. Entered his passcode. The message read: Busy on another case. Can’t meet until tonight or tomorrow.