Chapter 113: The Hours After

Lara's POV

Richie woke up at half past ten asking for breakfast.

He came downstairs in his dinosaur pyjamas, hair everywhere, dragging his blanket behind him the way he always did, and stopped at the bottom of the stairs when he saw the number of people in the house.

He looked around slowly.

At the two officers sitting in the living room writing things in notebooks. At the woman from Detective Ade's team who was photographing something near the front door. At Chidi, who was still there because Chidi apparently lived in our kitchen now and none of us had told him he could leave.

Then he looked at me, sitting at the kitchen table with my tea, and at Damien standing by the window, and at Ethan across from me eating toast like it was a completely ordinary morning.

"Why are there so many people?" Richie asked.

"They came to help us with something," I said. "They're almost done."

He considered this.

"Are they staying for breakfast?"

"No baby. They've already eaten."

He accepted this and climbed into his chair and looked at Ethan's toast.

"Can I have toast?"

"Yes," Ethan said, already getting up.

And just like that, just with that small ordinary exchange about toast, something in my chest that had been clenched since the night before released slightly. Not fully. Not in the way it would take weeks and maybe months to fully release. But enough.

Damien caught my eye across the kitchen.

I looked back at him.

He looked tired in a way that went past the surface, the kind of tired that came from carrying something at full weight for too long and having finally been allowed to put it down but not yet having recovered from the carrying.

He looked tired and he looked relieved and he looked like my husband and that was enough for right now.

Marcus arrived just before noon.

I hadn't called him. Bode had, apparently, because Bode thought of everything, and Marcus had driven the four hours from where he lived without stopping, walking through the front door with his doctor's bag still over his shoulder and his face doing the particular thing it did when he was worried and trying not to show it.

He looked at me first.

Then at Damien.

Then at Ethan.

Then at Richie, who was in the living room watching cartoons, completely unbothered.

"Everyone is okay?" he said.

"Everyone is okay," I said.

He sat down at the kitchen table and I could see him doing the doctor thing, assessing without obviously assessing, checking things with his eyes that most people checked with instruments.

"The baby," he said quietly, so Richie wouldn't hear.

"Fine," I said. "I've already called Dr. Obi. I have an appointment this afternoon just to confirm everything."

He nodded slowly.

"And you?" he said. "Not medically. You."

I thought about it honestly the way I always thought about things when Marcus asked me directly, because Marcus had a way of asking that made dishonest answers feel pointless.

"I don't know yet," I said. "I think I'm okay. I think when everything settles and the house is quiet and I've had a proper sleep, I'll find out what I actually feel about all of this."

"That's a healthy answer," he said.

"Stop being a doctor for five minutes," I said.

"I can't," he said. "It's a medical condition."

Ethan, from across the table, made a sound that was definitely a laugh.

Marcus looked at him properly then, really looked at him, and something passed between them that I didn't have a word for, the particular look of a man seeing a boy he cared about on the other side of something difficult and finding him intact.

"You did well," Marcus said to Ethan.

Ethan shrugged. "I watched cameras and stayed on the phone."

"That's exactly what needed doing," Marcus said. "Don't minimise it."

Ethan looked at his toast and didn't argue, which meant he had heard it.

Detective Ade came to find me at one o'clock.

He sat across from me at the kitchen table, the same kitchen table that had held so many conversations this year that I had started to think of it as the place where the serious things happened, and he put a folder in front of him that he didn't open.

"Lucas is in surgery," he said. "The shoulder wound was significant but not fatal. They're optimistic about his survival."

I nodded.

"When he recovers enough," Detective Ade said carefully, "he will be transferred to police custody and formally recharged. The escape. The stalking. Breaking and entering your office. Everything." He paused. "He won't be coming back out, Lara. Not this time. Between the original sentence and everything he has done since the escape, he will be in prison for the rest of his life."

I sat with that for a moment.

The rest of his life.

I had spent so much of this year thinking about Lucas Ward that the idea of simply not having to think about him anymore felt almost too large to take in all at once.

"And Victor Cole?" I asked.

"Arrested this morning. His network is being dismantled. Diana Cole is cooperating fully and her cooperation will be taken into account when her case is reviewed." He paused. "It's over, Lara. Properly over."

I looked at the folder on the table that he still hadn't opened.

"What's in there?" I asked.

He looked down at it.

"Paperwork," he said. "Statements. Things that need signing and dating and filing." He pushed it slightly toward me. "None of it is urgent. It can wait until tomorrow or the next day. I just wanted you to see it."

"Why?"

"Because sometimes it helps," he said quietly. "To see that it has become paperwork. That it has become something administrative and manageable instead of something that lives in the air of your house."

I looked at the folder.

Then I reached out and put my hand on it.

He was right. It did help, a little.

After Detective Ade left, after his team finished what they needed to do and cleared out of the house one by one until only the people who belonged there remained, the house went quiet in a way that was different from the quiet of the past several weeks.

Not the quiet of holding its breath.

Just quiet.

The ordinary quiet of a house where a five year old had fallen asleep on the sofa watching cartoons and a fifteen year old had finally gone upstairs to lie down and a man was sitting in the garden looking at his roses and not checking the perimeter for the first time in months.

I went and stood in the doorway looking at Damien in the garden.

He was sitting on the low bench near the rose wall, not doing anything, just sitting, his forearms resting on his knees, looking at the roses in the afternoon light.

The garden gate was closed.

Bode's people had fixed the lock that morning and installed a new one and the gate was closed and locked and the key was in the kitchen drawer where it had always been.

I went out and sat beside him.

He didn't say anything.

Neither did I.

We sat there in the garden of my father's house on the afternoon of the day that had finally ended the thing that had been following us for so long, and we listened to the sounds of the neighbourhood going about its ordinary business, and we let the quiet be what it was.

After a while Damien reached over and took my hand.

I leaned my head against his shoulder.

The sun was doing something warm and particular to the roses.

They looked, as they almost always looked when Damien was paying attention to them, exactly right.

"Richie is going to wake up soon," I said.

"I know," he said.

"He's going to want to build something."

"He always wants to build something."

"And Ethan is going to come downstairs eventually and be hungry again."

"Ethan is always hungry."

"And Marcus is going to want to give me a medical briefing about stress and pregnancy even though I've already told him I'm fine."

"Marcus is going to Marcus," Damien agreed.

I laughed.

Quietly. Just a small laugh sitting in the afternoon.

But real.

"We're okay," I said.

"We're okay," he said.

We sat there a little longer in the garden, in the quiet, in the particular warmth of an afternoon that had arrived on the other side of something enormous, and we were okay, and we were together, and for right now that was everything.