Snowflakes & Fire Escapes (8 page)

“How are you?” he asks. “You staying safe? How’s school?”

He fires questions at me, innocently enough, but I have to think through every answer before saying anything at all. Something as simple as conversation about the weather could lead the wrong person right to my front door.

I say I’m fine, people are nice, school’s great, but the truth is I stopped going months ago and I haven’t made a single friend in this place. Holden leans against the counter and listens in on the conversation, knowing I’m lying my ass off.

Maybe I’m better at being dishonest than I think.

I absently scribble in the margins of the manual as my father babbles on and on, doing what I always do—signing my name.

My
fake
name.

Over and over, practicing until it practically bleeds from my fingertips.

Ten minutes isn’t that long, not when you haven’t spoken to someone in over a year, but there’s a lot of awkward silence when you have nothing to say. I’m ashamed by the relief I feel when Holden pushes away from the counter, tapping two fingers against the face of his watch, telling me time is up.

“I have to go,” I say, interrupting my father as he’s talking about something. I don’t know. I stopped paying attention.

He lets out a deep sigh. “Just a few more years, Grace, and I’ll be out of this mess. A few more years and we can start over as a family.”

I don’t respond to that.

I’ve faced reality.

There’s no starting over for him and I.

“Goodbye, Dad.”

I pull the phone away from my ear and hit the button to end the call before holding it out to Holden. I drop the pen after he takes the phone, leaning back in the chair and running my hands down my face. “Please don’t ever do that to me again.”

Holden pulls out the chair across from me and sits. He’s quiet for a moment, and I glance over, meeting his eyes, seeing the frown on his lips. He thought he was doing me a favor, that talking to someone I knew in that other world would pacify me, but hearing my father’s voice again only made these feelings worse.

I haven’t seen the man in a year, yet he’s still controlling my life.

I’ve never felt so smothered.

“You wanted it to be somebody else on the phone, didn’t you?”

I scoff. “What makes you say that?”

Holden motions toward the manual I’d been doodling in. One glance at it gives me my answer. I’d absently scribbled Cody’s name more than once without thinking. Picking up the pen again, I quickly scratch out every instance of it, knowing there’s a rule against leaving shit like that around. There are ways, of course, of communicating with the past … these untraceable phone calls, letters hand delivered by Marshals that are burned after reading.

But in my case, it wasn’t possible.

I look around the kitchen, looking at everything except for Holden. We’ve had this conversation about Cody before, and I’m not in the mood to have it again. “Can I ask you something, inspector?”

From the corner of my eye, I see him grimace. He hates being called that about as much as he hates being deemed a handler.

‘Just call me Holden,’
he’d insisted.
‘Not Inspector, not Marshal … just Holden.’

Holden is his last name, technically. I didn’t even know that until I spotted it on some paperwork a few months back.
United States Marshals Service Inspector Brian Holden
.

I’ve never called him Brian.

He probably doesn’t even realize I know that’s his name.

“You can ask me anything,” he says, tearing the manual away from me and tossing it across the room, onto the kitchen counter, when I start doodling in it again. “As long as you look at me when you do.”

I stare at him, still clutching the pen, and defiantly start scribbling right on the top of the kitchen table. He doesn’t stop me, knowing he really can’t. The Marshals Service paid for this table, but it belongs to
me
. Holden wants to intervene, though. I can see his fingers twitching.

“Have you ever lost a witness?”

It’s kind of funny, I think, that I’m considered a
witness
, considering I haven’t witnessed a fucking thing. Unless the injustice of humanity counts …

He hesitates. “Define ‘lost’.”

“As in ‘died’,” I say. “Has anyone ever died on your watch?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never,” he says. “No witness has ever died that followed the rules.”

“And the ones that didn’t follow the rules? How many of them have died?”

“About thirty.”

Thirty.

My father’s personal body count is higher than that.

“Out of how many?”

“There are about seventeen thousand people under protection.”

That momentarily leaves me speechless.

That’s a lot of people living lives that don’t belong to them. I wonder how many feel like me. I wonder how many leave because of it, how many risk death, risk becoming one of those unlucky thirty, just for the chance to be themselves again.

“I know thirty doesn’t seem like a lot,” Holden continues. “But it’s thirty lives we tried to save … lives we
would’ve
saved, if they had just followed the rules. It’s a senseless death, and I pray to God there’s never a thirty-one.”

I nod, tinkering with the pen, scratching marks into the table until Holden reaches his breaking point. He covers my hand with his own, prying the pen from my grip.

“The program works, Gracie,” he says, pocketing the pen before I can take it back. “You just have to learn to work with it.”

Standing, Holden starts gathering his things, and I watch as he pulls himself together to leave. The tie goes on, his badged slipped around his neck, before he puts on his holster to conceal his gun beneath his coat.

I know he’s still standing in front of me, but I suddenly feel utterly alone.

“I have some other business to attend to, so it’ll be a while before I make another scheduled visit,” he says. “It’ll probably be closer to Christmas.”

Christmas.

It’s only three weeks, but it feels so far away.

He’s never stayed gone so long before.

“Call me if you need me,” he says, pulling out an envelope and dropping it on the table. “Here’s your stipend for the month.”

I grab the envelope, pulling it into my lap, and skim through the cash as he finishes getting ready. There’s fifteen hundred dollars in it. My father used to leave me that much when he left for a weekend.

Holden strolls around the table to where I’m sitting on his way to the door, placing his hand on my shoulder and squeezing. “Happy Birthday, Gracie. Here’s to many more …”

***

The sound of tapping glass was so faint I felt like it had to be a figment of my imagination, a phantom echo from somewhere deep down in my soul. My head turned, slowly, the sense of disappointment already brewing in my gut, preparing for the let down.

It had been two weeks.

Two weeks since Cody scurried out that window only to get caught on the way down. He hadn’t been hanging around the neighborhood with his friends. He didn’t show up at the diner while I was having breakfast. He certainly hadn’t come
here
.

I expected to see nothing, but my eyes caught a sliver of green in the moonlight. He was there, crouched on the fire escape, peering in the window at me. His face was cast in shadows from the darkness, but I could make out bruising on his face, the marks moving down his jawline, toward a freshly busted lip that lined up almost perfectly with the scar that runs down his chin.

A scar his father caused the first time he hurt him, back when we were just little kids. ‘He’s going to be a man someday,’ Cormac used to say. ‘Might as well start treating him like one.’ By treating, he’d meant beating. And by a man, he meant one of his guys that run the streets. Cody was never a
son
to him. Cody was just flesh and blood … the pieces that make up a person. Cormac never cared what else existed inside of the boy.

He never cared Cody wanted more than his neighborhood.

But looking at Cody at that moment, I knew the neighborhood had finally gotten its claws into him. There wouldn’t be any secret smiles from him this time. No more whispered promises of ‘soon’.

Standing up, I gave a look around the quiet apartment out of pure instinct before walking over to the window and shoving it open, not caring about the noise it made. There was nobody there with me. I pushed it open as far as it would go, a blast of cold air hitting me right away. Two weeks were all it took for the warmth to move out and the cold to seep in, like his absence made more than just
me
mourn. The temperature finally dipped below freezing, the air damp and sky covered in clouds. I can tell the metal railing is slick, the steps icy.

I shivered, wrapping my arms around myself right away. I was wearing his hoodie. He never came back for it. I started to climb out to join him but his hands grasped my arms, stopping me before I could come through the window.

“It’s too cold,” he said. “Don’t come out here. You’ll freeze.”

“Do you … ?” I paused. “Do you want to come in?”

He didn’t answer that question.

He didn’t have to.

His ten second hesitation returned, turning to twenty … thirty … forty …

A minute later, after nothing from him, I knelt down on the floor, knowing he wasn’t going to move. He stared at me like he was looking through me, studying me, looking for answers to an equation he was desperate to solve.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I told him.

“I shouldn’t be,” he said. “I was told to stay away from you.”

“My father—”

“Not yours,” he cut in before I could even get it out. “Your father didn’t do it. He has no say over me.”

“Yours,” I whispered, reaching through the window for him. He didn’t stop me as my hand covered the massive bruise on his face. “He did this to you.”

Cody pulled his eyes away from me then, like I was just too painful to face. “Cormac figured since I wasn’t listening, pounding it into me was the only way to get his point across.”

“I just … I don’t understand it,” I said, fingertips trailing his jawline before tracing his lips, reaching the scar. “You’re his family.”

“Family doesn’t mean shit to him,” Cody said. “Family is just the people they go after when they want to send you a message. That’s it. They’re either a liability or an advantage, depending on which side of the game you’re playing. And Cormac? He doesn’t believe in hauling around dead weight. You know that.”

There was no bitterness to his voice. He spoke matter-of-factly, like this was normal for families, like fathers were supposed to treat their children this way. But I didn’t accept it and I never would. It wasn’t our fault they did the things they did. We shouldn’t have been the ones who faced punishment. “It’s not right.”

“But it’s life,” he said. “It’s my life.”

“You don’t want it to be.”

“But it is,” he said quietly. “It is.”

I wasn’t sure what to say.

I knew there was no room for argument, knew that any pleading or pestering from my lips would fall on deaf ears. We had been around in circles, back and forth, flipped upside down, and we ultimately ended up here after everything.

“It is what it is,” he continued, realizing I was conceding, that I wasn’t going to try to argue with him. I could almost see the relief on his face, but in his eyes there was something else … something I had never seen from him before:
surrender
. His eyes had always been full of spark, but there was nothing there now. There was no more fight left for his own life. “And like I said, I shouldn’t be here, but I really needed to give you your present.”

I frowned. “My birthday isn’t until tomorrow.”

Seventeen.

No longer sixteen, but it still wasn’t eighteen.

Not yet.

“Close enough,” he said, reaching into his pants pocket and grabbing something, pulling it out and concealing it in his fist. “I didn’t have a chance to wrap it, and well … fuck it. I’ve never been good at that shit.”

He held his hand out toward me as he opened it. There, in his palm, lay a silver necklace. A smile crept up on my lips when I reached for it, taking it from him. A locket. Perfectly round, a tad bigger than a quarter. On the front was a snowflake, the edges of it framed in diamonds. I would’ve asked if they were real, but I knew Cody. He’d never buy me something fake. Flipping it over, I ran my thumb over the back, feeling the grooves from the words engraved in it.

Gracie—

Soon.

—C

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.

He nudged my hand. “Open it.”

I flicked the locket open, my eyes meeting an old picture. It was Cody and I, back when we were just little kids, before we ever fell in love and realized what a harsh world we lived in. I was grinning at the camera, happy as could be, while Cody just stared at me.

“Couldn’t keep my eyes off you back then,” he said. “Guess I loved you even when I was ten.”

I traced the outline of our young faces before closing the locket again, clutching it tightly in my palm. Emotions swirled through me, heavy and tumultuous, like a brewing storm. I felt the tears building in my eyes, felt the lump in my throat. It was the greatest gift anyone had ever given me before.

I met his eyes, smiling. “Thank you.”

He nodded as if to say ‘you’re welcome’, but he didn’t say the words. Instead, he looked away from me, tilting his head up toward the sky. It was drizzling a bit, had been all day, the light rain hitting his long lashes. He blinked it away as he lowered his head again, once more meeting my gaze.

His expression of relief faded away. Reaching through the window, he cupped my chin with his cold hand, tilting my face toward him. Carefully, he leaned forward, kissing my mouth. It was barely a peck, but I was shaking, shivering, breathing in his warmth when he whispered against my lips, “I won’t see you for a while after this, Gracie.”

The coldness from his hand, the chilling tone of is voice, seeped through my skin, freezing my insides when I absorbed those words. I opened my eyes. “What?”

“It’s for the best,” he said, “that we don’t see each other for a while.”