Chapter 180: What Remains

Chapter 180: What Remains
Del sat on the road for a while.
She didn't know how long exactly. Long enough for the crying to stop on its own and for her face to go tight and swollen.
Then she got up and started walking.
The road went in two directions. She picked the one that felt like it went toward something rather than away from it. The asphalt was hot under her shoes, and the sun was full on her, and the bag was heavier than she remembered it being.
She walked for twenty minutes before a car slowed.
A woman, fifties, with reading glasses pushed up on her head and a concerned expression. "Honey, what happened to you?"
"Car accident," Del said. "I need to get to a hospital."
The woman looked at the bag, at Del's face, at the empty road in both directions. She didn't ask follow-up questions, which Del was grateful for. She just said "get in" and Del got in.
The hospital in Presidio was small, and the waiting room had three people in it when Del came through the door, which meant she was seen faster than she expected.
A nurse took one look at her, put her in a room, and started asking questions that Del answered as plainly as she could. The wound in her side had held. The rest of it was shock and dehydration, and the particular physical wreckage of having cried that hard for that long.
She gave them her real name.
Delilah Teller. She was done with names that weren't hers. She spelled it without being asked.
The police came within the hour. Two officers first, and then a detective named Sosa. He pulled a chair to the side of her bed and sat in it.
"Ms. Teller," he said. "I'm going to need you to walk me through what happened. Take your time."
So she did.
She talked for a long time. She told him about the cabin and Oliver. She told him about George Harvey in a motel bathroom and about a property outside Presidio where a couple named Ruth and Carl had been keeping a woman named Mara, and about sixteen crates in a barn with first names on the labels. She told him about the crossing plan and the passports in the glove compartment, and the cash in the bag that was sitting on the floor beside her hospital bed.
She told him most of it.
There were parts she kept. Her conversations with Oliver, his plans he shared with her, and their intimate moments together. Those parts she kept because they were hers.
Sosa listened without interrupting much. He took notes. Occasionally, he'd ask her to clarify something or go back to a detail, and she would.
The hours moved. Someone brought her water, and she drank it. Someone else brought food, which she mostly didn't eat.
Sosa looked at her. "About the crash. We have people at the scene," Sosa told her later, closer to evening.
"But have they found —"
"We'll let you know when we have confirmed information," he said. "Is there anything else you want to tell us? Anything you feel like you might have left out?"
Del looked at her hands in her lap.
"No," she said. "That's everything."
Sosa held her gaze for a moment. Then he nodded and stood and told her someone would be back in the morning. She nodded and lay back on the narrow hospital bed, looked at the ceiling, and waited for sleep to take her.
Winston arrived the next afternoon.
Del was sitting up in the bed when the nurse told her she had a visitor, and when Winston came through the door, she felt something strange happen in her chest, some reaction she hadn't expected.
He looked like someone who existed in the world she hadn't seen in so long. 
"How are you?" Winston asked as he pulled the visitor's chair over and sat down. 
He was not a man who was usually at a loss, and it showed the discomfort of someone who talked easily and was finding the words weren't there.
"I've been better," Del said.
"Yeah." He nodded slowly. "Yeah, I imagine. But they said you have a stab wound —"
"It's fine. It was already healing before any of this. How did you know I was here?"
"Reyes. The FBI agent. She called me. I've been working with them for a while."
"I'm glad you're alive," he added finally. "I just — I'm really glad you're alive, Del."
Del looked at him. "The crash. Do you have any updates?"
"Oliver didn't make it, Del."
Del nodded. She'd known since she walked away from the road, but hearing it said out loud by another person was a different thing from knowing it.
"I'm sorry," Winston said. "I know that's — I don't know what that is for you, actually. I don't know how to —" He stopped. "I just. I'm sorry."
"It's okay," Del said.
"It's really not."
"No," she agreed. "It's not. But thank you anyway."
"Del, I had no idea," he said. "About who he was. I want you to know that. I've been going through every conversation we ever had, and I can't find — there was nothing I saw that told me what he actually was."
Del thought about how Oliver had chosen the people around him with the same attention he brought to everything, how being close to Oliver had always been something he'd decided rather than something that just happened.
"None of us really knew him,” she said, and then looked at the window. "That's just what he was. He was very good at being known just enough."
"Are you going to be okay?" Winston said. "And I don't mean right now, because obviously right now is a disaster. I mean… you know."
Del thought about it honestly. "I think so," she said. "I don't know what that looks like yet. But I think so."
Winston nodded. He looked like he had more to say and wasn't sure any of it was useful. He looked like a person sitting in a hospital room with someone he barely knew, who was connected to someone he'd thought he knew well, and he was doing his best with that.
"You should go home," Del said. "You look like you haven't slept."
"I'm fine."
"You look terrible, Winston."
He looked at her and then laughed. "Yeah," he said. "Probably."
He stood. He looked at her for a moment.
"Take care of yourself," he said.
"You too," Del said.
He left.