Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Danny responds. “Let’s just, I dunno, get up to our suites and… Everybody grab up whatever weaponry we didn’t bring to the warehouse. I have no idea what or who Brasil is going to be coming with, but we should be ready for the apocalypse.”
“Grand,” Russell says with more than a little sarcasm. “Lize?”
I watch the back of Eliza’s head move ever so slightly, like she’s trying to figure out where she is. Then she turns around in her seat and faces me, Danny, and Alec. I try to imagine what she’s seeing. Does she see three cold-hearted assassins? Three used-to-be-friends-turned-enemies-turned-allies-out-of-necessity? Or just three assholes she regrets ever having met in the first place?
Probably all of the above.
“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Yeah. Grand.”
She presses the button on the passenger door of the van and it slides open. She steps out, jumps up onto the loading dock platform, and presses the button for the service elevator. And, once again, for reasons I couldn’t possibly explain, I push by Alec’s knees and go trotting after her. I catch up just as the elevator doors ding open.
She steps on and I follow, turning around just in time to see the confused and concerned faces of Alec, Danny, and Russell as the doors close.
We stand in silence for a second. Neither of us does that phony thing of staring at the numbers lighting up as the elevator passes each floor. We knew each other once and we know each other differently now, and there’s no value in pretending otherwise.
It’s me who breaks the quiet. “We’ll get her.”
Eliza doesn’t say anything or look over at me. Just keeps staring ahead, blankly.
I repeat myself. “We’ll get her. We’ll find her and we’ll get her back. I promise.”
I suppose it’s the “I promise” that gets her attention because now she does turn her head to look at me. And then she says something that I’m not expecting. At all.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
She means it. There’s a sadness to it. An exhausted, broken sorrow.
It takes me a moment before I respond with, “For what?”
She doesn’t answer right away either. Just keeps looking at me for a tick. And then she simply repeats herself. Even more earnestly. “I’m sorry.”
Ding.
The elevator stops and the doors open. We both step off; she heads one way to her suite, I head the other way to mine. At the door, I reach for the handle, stop, and look back to see her stopped by her own door. Head resting against the wall.
“Eliza?” I say. She turns to see me. There are a dozen things I could say to her. Maybe even more that I want to say. And maybe someday we’ll have the time. But today is not that day. So I just say, “I’m sorry too.”
She gets a slight grin, nods almost imperceptibly, and then unlocks the door to her room and heads inside.
Our entire personal history sprints through my brain in a matter of nanoseconds. Everything. Meeting her and her brothers when I was still just a teenager. How cool I thought she was. How I kind of looked up to her. How I felt betrayed by her love affair with Alec. How I felt especially betrayed when she and Alec had the baby he and I should have had together. All of it a tumbling, rumbling somersault of recollections crashing past my mind’s eye. And the feeling I come away with is…
Nothing.
Nothing at all. No resentment or wistfulness or bitterness. Nothing.
Fact is, what happened then is no more real than a dream I had once upon a time. And what might be in the future is just imagination. It’s play pretend.
The only thing real is now. And right now, Eliza is suffering in a real and incomparable way, pretty much alone. So, if there is such a thing as karma, it’s doing its work at this moment. The past is past. The future is fiction. Right now is what matters. Right now. Today.
And when this day is over and all is said and done, there are going to be dead bodies marking the occasion.
Whose bodies? Well, that’s anyone’s guess.
I’d like to have that talk with Eliza someday, I think. I’d like to be able to know her again. Or not. But it would be nice to walk away from this period of my life knowing that I did everything I could to make things right and clean up a mess that, even though I didn’t make it, I definitely didn’t do much to stop it from spreading.
Yeah. I think that would feel nice.
“Christine?” Alec says. I didn’t even see him and Danny coming up on me, so I spin, ready to fucking fight.
“Whoa,” Danny says, “all good. It’s just us. You okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Alec answers, “Because you’re standing here staring down the hall at nothing.”