“Dad,” Todd said, his expression at once steady and yet uncertain, like someone looking down at a long drop and standing very still, “how come this is happening? All of it?”
“I don’t know, buddy.” He paused. “I mean, we’ve talked before about how people are different, right?”
“Yeah, but . . . Mom told us that the president and a lot of other people died. That wasn’t just because they were different, right?”
He looked at Natalie, caught her tiny shrug, and in another burst of that psychic communication, he could almost hear her saying, Good luck with that one, Dad.
There was the temptation to lie. But with the world in the state it was . . .
Kate kicked the ball to him. He pinned it beneath one foot. “There’s not an easy answer to your question. Are you up to a complicated one?”
“Yeah.”
Cooper looked at Kate, who nodded somberly.
“Okay. Life isn’t like the movies—you know, how the bad guys just want to be bad guys, villains. In real life, there aren’t very many villains. Mostly, people believe they’re doing the right thing. Even the ones who are doing bad things usually believe they’re heroes, that whatever terrible thing they’re doing is to prevent something worse. They’re scared.”
“But if there aren’t real villains, what are they scared of?”
“It’s kind of a circle. When people are scared, it’s easy for them to decide anything different is evil. To forget that everyone is basically the same, that we all love our families and want regular lives. And what makes it worse is that some people use that. They make others scared on purpose, because they know if they do, everyone will start acting stupid.”
“But why would they want that?”
“It’s a way to control people. A way to get what they want.”
“What about the guy at the restaurant who tried to kill you? Is he a villain?”
“Yes,” Cooper said. “He is. He’s broken. Most real-life villains are. Usually it’s not their fault. But that doesn’t matter. They’re broken, and they do things that can’t be forgiven. Like hurting you.”
Todd pondered that, chewing his lip. “Do the bad guys ever win?”
Wow. Cooper hesitated. Finally, he said, “Only if the good people let them. And there are a lot more good people.” He bent and picked up the soccer ball. “Now. My turn to ask an important question.”
“What?”
“You guys have been here for a couple of weeks.” He cocked his head. “Have you figured out where to get decent pizza yet?”
They had.
After Cooper whispered his final goodnights and closed the bedroom door, he found Natalie in the kitchen with a bottle of wine and two glasses. She poured without asking, and he took the glass, clinked it with hers, then settled into the opposite chair. For a long moment they just looked at each other. Like coming home from a long vacation and walking the rooms, opening curtains, running fingers over tabletops. Reclaiming space.
“I was proud of you today,” she said. “The way you talked to them.”
“Christ. Why can’t they ask where babies come from, like normal kids?”
“They haven’t had a normal life.”
One of the things he had always loved about Natalie was that her words and actions and feelings were more aligned than those of most anyone he knew. She didn’t have a passive-aggressive gene in her DNA. If she was pissed, she told him.
So he understood that she was just stating a fact, not making an accusation. But still. You’re the reason for that. Your job, your crusade, your mission to save the world. If you’d just been a regular father, they would have had regular lives.
Of course, if he’d been a regular father, Kate would be in an academy right now, her identity taken away, her strength and independence shattered, her fears cultivated. He’d seen firsthand what those places looked like, and he’d sworn his abnorm daughter would never end up in one.
Fine, but instead an assassin put your normal son in a coma. And you’ve brought both your children to the center of a war zone. So don’t pull a muscle slapping yourself on the back.
Natalie sipped her wine. “How long are you staying?”
“Just tonight.”
She sighed and reached across the table. Their hands met, fingers threading with easy habit. “It’s important?”
“I’m going after John Smith.”
Her fingers tightened. “It’s too much. Why does it all depend on you?”
“I don’t know, Nat. Believe me, I wouldn’t mind a break.”
“Are you sure you can’t take one?”
He considered. Thought about a boy lynched in Manhattan. About soldiers burning in the desert. About the way Abe Couzen had moved this morning, the scientist’s certainty he could kill them all. About John Smith smiling into the security camera and blowing him a kiss.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”
She stared for a long moment, and he could read the struggle in her, the tension. He’d known her so long; they’d been little more than kids when they first got together, and he’d had her patterned in the most intimate ways for a decade. It had been one of the things that came between them, the fact that he knew her so well that he could often tell what she was about to say before she said it.
Like now.
“Okay,” she said.
He nodded and squeezed her hand once more. Then disentangled his fingers from hers to pick up the wine glass and—
“Take me to bed.”
—swallowed it down the wrong pipe. He coughed, spat what was left of the wine into the glass. When he could breathe again, he said, “Pardon?”
“Take me to bed.”
He flashed back to a month ago, the two of them in a fort they’d made with the kids, and the kiss they’d shared. He’d realized at that moment that something had shifted in both of them. They had reawakened to the possibilities of a shared life. But the weeks since hadn’t afforded them time to explore those feelings.
“Nat . . .” He stared at her, wanting very much to take her up on the offer. It wasn’t just solace or desire, it was a longing for Natalie personally. She was as strong and sexy a woman as he’d ever known, and though they had made love a thousand times, it had been years, and the notion of that combination of experience and novelty rode his system like a drug hit.
But this was the mother of his children, not someone to trifle with. Not casual comfort. Besides, there was Shannon. They’d only been together a handful of times, but they’d also saved each other’s lives, brought down a president, and fought side by side to stop a war. Their relationship hadn’t been conventional, and there’d been no time to discuss whether they were exclusive, or even where they were going, but still—
“Nick, stop.” She set down her glass and leaned in, hand on chin, other arm crossed at the elbow, her eyes bright and deep, hair falling tousled down one shoulder, smelling of red wine and cold air. “I’m not suggesting we get remarried. But you’re about to go off on your own again, chasing the most dangerous man in the world, and I hate it, but I get it, and I know you’re doing it for us. So before you do . . .” She stared at him for a moment that stretched electric.
Then she rose and gave a husky laugh.
“Before you do, come to the bedroom and fuck me.”
DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE?
The DAR does. They’ve got a list of every abnorm in these Disunited States. Ask for it, though, and they say things like, “disclosing said information is not in the interests of public safety,” because it could “jeopardize the well-being, both commercially and personally, of American citizens.”