Chapter 71 Chapter 71

Chapter 71 Chapter 71
The Hallway
They took her through the double doors and left him on the other side.
It happened quickly and orderly, the way things happen in a building where everyone works for his wife: a stretcher appeared out of nowhere, two nurses who knew her by name, someone took her purse from her hands, and someone else told him, “Sir, not here.” Ethan caught a glimpse of Laura’s face over a young woman’s shoulder, and she raised two fingers on her left hand before the doors closed.
Then the hallway.
He stood in the middle of it, hands hanging at his sides, his shoes stained all the way to the seams.
He was still wearing his wedding suit. The white shirt had dust from the warehouse floor from his elbow to his shoulder, and on the left side of his chest was a dark mark that wasn’t dust. He stared at it for a moment. Then he pulled his jacket over it to cover the stain, which was what a man did when there was nothing else he could do.
Twelve hours.
He had woken up that morning with a woman beside him and a badly rehearsed waltz, and night was falling with his mother in one body bag, his brother in another, and his wife behind that door.

His phone vibrated in his inner pocket.
He took it out, looked at the screen, and put it away again.
It vibrated again two minutes later. And again. On the fourth call, he left it out, faceup on the plastic chair beside him, so he could dismiss them without having to touch it.
The funeral home, needing a decision about two coffins and wanting to make it that same night.
The lieutenant from the Bronx, three times, needing a statement signed by the kidnapped woman’s husband.
An unknown number, then another, and ten minutes later a message from a journalist that began with the word condolences and ended with a question.
The family lawyer, who called twice in a row and, on the third attempt, sent a four-line message about the succession.
My mother has been dead for four hours, and there are already three men awake calculating what I’m going to inherit.
He turned the phone facedown so he wouldn’t have to look at the screen and left it there.

Derek appeared at the far end of the hallway and walked the fifteen meters without hurrying.
He stopped beside him, against the wall, hands folded in front of him, his eyes fixed on the double doors.
He didn’t speak.
Fourteen people had offered Ethan their condolences in the last four hours: two police officers, the medical examiner, three mansion employees, and the funeral director, who had said it as though he were reciting a price. None of it had been useful. The only thing helping him in that hallway was a man in a gray suit who had been at his side for twenty-five years and had understood, at some point during those twenty-five years, that men like him didn’t need to be spoken to.
“Mr. Manuel is on his way,” Derek said after a while.
“Who told him?”
“I did, Boss.”
“Good.”
“Do I stop him at the entrance?”
Ethan thought about it.
“No. Let him come up.”

He leaned his back against the wall and let his head fall backward.
And there, because the body doesn’t know how to do anything else when it’s left still, he started counting.
His mother, no. His brother, either.
He had one grandfather left, seventy-five years old, with high blood pressure, poorly managed diabetes, and a new mitral murmur that Vargas had been monitoring for four months. That man was going to walk into this hallway in twenty minutes, after burying a daughter-in-law and a grandson in a single night, and Ethan would have to look at his face and calculate how long he could remain standing.
He had a father who had appeared yesterday, after fifteen years, and who at that hour was sleeping in the west wing of a house he hadn’t set foot in since before Ethan had grown a beard.
And whatever else is behind that door.
He looked at his hands. They were dirty from the warehouse floor, grime embedded beneath his nails and in the creases of his knuckles, and it hadn’t occurred to him to wash them in four hours.
He shoved them into his pockets.

The double doors opened.
Vargas came out wearing a surgical cap and the green scrubs over the suit he had worn to the wedding. He crossed the hallway toward the office at the far end, looking at a sheet of paper, with two nurses behind him.
Ethan pushed away from the wall.
“Vargas.”
The old man raised his left hand without looking up, that doctor’s hand that meant not now, and kept walking.
Ethan was left with his mouth open halfway through the sentence.
He leaned back against the wall again.
Derek said nothing. He nudged the plastic chair two centimeters closer with his foot, without looking at him, and turned his attention back to the door.
Ethan didn’t sit.

Twenty minutes later, Vargas crossed back.
This time he was moving faster and had another nurse by the arm, speaking quietly to her. Ethan caught three words, and none of them helped him. They sounded like professional jargon, the kind his wife used in the kitchen when she called the clinic and he pretended to read the newspaper.
“Vargas.”
The old man went through the double doors without turning around.
Twice.
Ethan ran a hand over his mouth.
In twenty-five years, he had learned to read that man’s face better than his own father’s. He had read it when the doctor told him he wouldn’t make it to autumn. He had read it the morning he confirmed that the new heart was accepting, and the afternoon he told him his wife was pregnant, and the night of the bleeding.
You could read everything on that man’s face. Always.
And that morning he had crossed that hallway twice without looking at him.
“Derek.”
“Boss.”
“How long have we been here?”
Derek looked at his watch.
“Going on five hours.”
“My wife told me in the car that a first-time labor can take many hours.”
“Yes, Boss. That’s what she said.”
“Do you believe her?”
Derek took his time.
“I believe everything ma’am tells me, Boss. Except when she says she’s fine.”
Ethan let the air out through his nose.
Welcome to the club.

He finally sat down. Not in the chair Derek had moved closer: on the edge of the one farther away, elbows on his knees, dirty hands hanging between his legs.
And from down there, staring at the polished floor, the only thing he had spent five hours refusing to let himself think about came rushing back.
That his mother had stepped between two guns for him. That she had walked four steps into the middle of a warehouse with her arms open, nothing in her hands, and that the bullet that entered her left side had been meant for the woman standing behind that door.
Mom.
He squeezed his eyes shut between his thumb and forefinger.
Mom, if you made that calculation and it gave you that result, then the result better come true. Because if I lose both of them tonight, you died for nothing, and I don’t know how to live with that.

The double doors opened for the third time.
Ethan lifted his head.
Vargas was walking toward him, still wearing the surgical cap, without the sheet of paper in his hand and without the nurses behind him. He crossed the entire hallway looking him directly in the face, which was what he hadn’t done all night, and Ethan’s stomach clenched before the old man even opened his mouth.
He stopped in front of him.
And Ethan, who had spent twenty-five years reading that man’s face, didn’t know what it was telling him this time.
“Cavalier,” Vargas said. “Sit down.”