Chapter 68 It Can’t Be
Grace stayed by the banister for exactly as long as it took her heart to remember how to breathe at a normal pace, and then she pulled herself back from the edge and returned to Molly's room on feet that moved quietly out of instinct rather than decision.
She sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her hands together in her lap and stared at the string of lights along the headboard without seeing them.
Ryan. Molly's mother had called him Ryan, and the name was new information that she filed away automatically while the rest of her mind worked through what she'd already confirmed. The face, the posture, the voice that had pulled at her memory like a thread she couldn't stop following, it was him, he was the policeman.
Grace was certain of it, he was the one who had questioned her before the shootout in the hospital.
She had been very aware of him in the specific way you became aware of someone whose proximity represented a particular kind of danger, and she had filed his face away in the part of her memory reserved for things that had been related to that string of incidents.
He had been at the hospital the night everything had gone sideways, the night she and Enzo had left—or rather, were abducted. And now, here he was in Molly's hallway very early in the morning.
Grace didn’t know much but she was sure it wouldn’t be a good idea if he were to see her, maybe he was already looking for her. For her and Enzo both. He'd been at the hospital and his partner was shot.
‘Wait a minute!’
Molly said her brother was shot, the only person she knew to be shot was the younger policeman. ‘He was with Ryan on that day. He’s Molly’s brother?!’ But he wasn’t supposed to die, it was a shoulder wound.
When Molly's footsteps came back up the stairs, Grace had managed to arrange herself into something that approximately resembled a person sitting normally on a bed, and she looked up when the door opened.
"Sorry about that," Molly said, coming back in and pulling the door closed behind her. She sat back down in her previous spot on the floor and tucked her legs under her, something about the settling of her expression told Grace that the visit downstairs had added its own weight on top of everything else she was already carrying tonight.
"Don't apologise," Grace said. Then, purely because not asking would have been more suspicious than asking, she kept her voice light and said, "Is everything okay? It's pretty early for a visitor."
Molly nodded slowly. "It's Ryan. He's kind of become a regular since Daniel—" She stopped and started again. "He was Daniel's partner in the force actually." A pause, and Grace could see her navigating something complicated in how she felt about that fact.
“He was there when it happened. When Daniel was shot. He said he saw the shooter's face and he's been working with the forensics people to get an accurate image of what the person actually looks like." Her voice picked up slightly, something that wasn't quite hope but was hope adjacent.
‘Saw the shooter's face? Thought it was rogue wolves, weren’t they hidden?’
"He said they're close. Like, they might have something by tomorrow. An actual face."
Grace felt something move through her that was genuinely warm, she was genuinely glad for Molly, and she let herself feel it before the other layer arrived underneath it—the awareness that if there was a face, and if that face connected to any part of the chain of events she'd been living inside, then the information was something she needed as well. Not for bad reasons, just because she needed to understand what was coming and from which direction.
"That's really good, Molly," she said, and meant it, "that's—I hope it gives you some answers."
"Me too," Molly said quietly. She looked at her hands for a moment. "Me too..."
They talked for a while longer, or rather they sat in the comfortable silence of two people who had exchanged enough that night to be past the point of needing to fill every gap with words. Eventually, Molly urged her to shower saying she stunk, gave her a nice pair of black shorts with a blue T-shirt and they slept, Molly absolutely refused her sleeping in anything else that wasn’t her bed.
Grace lay in the dark with her bandaged arm resting carefully above the covers because Molly had still insisted on covering the wound incase the ‘healing abilities’ stopped as she called it, Grace listened to Molly's slow breathing as she drifted in and out of fitful sleep and tried to make her own mind follow.
It took a long time. But eventually it did.
Ryan came back the next morning.
Grace heard the doorbell from upstairs, and heard Molly's mother's voice in the entryway, and then the lower, familiar register of his response.
She sat up on the bed and looked at Molly who was already awake and staring at the ceiling with unshed tears. She looked at Grace with an expression that acknowledged the situation without making it strange.
"He's probably here with an update," Molly said quietly. "You okay up here?"
"I'm fine," Grace said. "Go."
Molly took a deep breath and got out of bed, left the room, pulling the door most of the way closed behind her, and Grace sat in the returned quiet of the room and listened to the sounds of movement below, there were footsteps and voices.
She sat with her knees pulled up and her back against the headboard and listened.
“…had breakfast?”
“…sleep Molly?…”
“…want to know…”
“…portrait.”
The last word was enough to convince Grace that she had to know who it was.
Not out of morbid curiosity but out of the same practical need that had been driving most of her decisions for the past several weeks. Someone had come after her and Enzo at the hospital and had opened fire on them, even killing Daniel Marsh, Molly’s brother.
But she stayed upstairs. Molly and her mother deserved privacy, so she stayed upstairs and waited, she told herself that whatever the face on that paper looked like, she would find out eventually. One way or another.
Downstairs, Ryan had come to the house to tell them about the face of the shooter.
“It would be announced on TV in some hours, but I already have a picture here with me.”
Molly’s mom grabbed the paper before Ryan could finish handing it out, she stared at the paper and cursed whoever’s picture was on there.
“Let me see it, mom” Molly said and took the paper from her mom who immediately went to the kitchen to grab a bottle of wine.
Molly looked at the paper and her body immediately froze up because she knew that person, she’d seen that person one too many times. He had come to her school to pick up her friend many times.
The face in the picture was Maddox Barker, Grace’s best friend, with whom she’d grown up.