Chapter 213 The Verdict 7

Chapter 213 The Verdict 7
Our footsteps echoed off the concrete. The garage was nearly empty on this level. Most people had parked on the lower floors. Anderson's car sat alone near the far wall, under a fluorescent tube that buzzed and flickered.

Anderson walked three steps ahead of me. His pace had quickened the moment we cleared the door. His shoulders were high and tight, his arms rigid at his sides, his stride the kind of walk people adopt when they're trying to outrun something that lives inside their own chest.

He reached the car and pulled the keys from his pocket.

He dropped them.

The sound of metal hitting the ground bounced off the walls. Anderson stood looking down at the keys. He didn't pick them up.

His shoulders started shaking.

It began small. A tremor in his upper back that spread to his arms, then his hands, then his whole body. He braced one hand against the car door and the other against the roof, and his head dropped between his arms, and the sound that came out of him was something I'd never heard from another person.

Not crying. Not sobbing. Something deeper and more animal than that. A sound pulled from the bottom of a man who'd held himself together for five days in a courthouse hallway, for six weeks of trial, for months of knowing what was coming, and had finally run out of floor to stand on.

His knees buckled. He went down against the side of the car, sliding until he was sitting with his back against the driver's door, his legs out in front of him, his hands over his face.

The sobs came in waves. Full body. The kind that make it impossible to breathe between them. His chest heaved, and his shoulders jerked and the sounds bounced off the walls and low ceiling and came back at us from every direction.

I stood there.

For a moment, I didn't move. I watched him on the ground and felt the distance between us like a physical thing, three feet of floor that contained every conversation we'd had about partnership and boundaries and not being ready.

Then I sat down beside him.

Right beside him, my back against the car, my shoulder against his shoulder, the cold ground under my legs.

Anderson's hands dropped from his face. He turned toward me. His eyes were swollen, his face wrecked, his mouth open in a way that made him look younger than he was, like a boy who'd been told something too terrible to absorb.

"I don’t know why I feel this way," he said.

The words came out broken. Split apart by the sobs that kept hitting him in surges he couldn't control.

I put my arm around him. Pulled him toward me. He resisted for half a second, then he collapsed into me. His face pressed against my shoulder. His hand gripping the fabric of my jacket. His body shaking against mine with a force that made my teeth rattle.

I held him.

The garage was silent except for Anderson and the buzz of the light overhead. Somewhere below us, cars moved through lower levels, engines echoing up through the structure. The muffled sound of the city continued outside, traffic and sirens and the ordinary noise of a Saturday afternoon in Seattle.

None of it reached us.

Anderson cried. I held on. My hand moved to the back of his head without my deciding it should. His hair was still damp from this morning's shower at my estate. His body was warm and heavy against mine.

He said things. Fragments. Half sentences that dissolved before they finished.

"She's my mother."

I pressed my hand against his back, saying nothing.

His hand tightened on my jacket.

"I did the right thing," he said, and it came out like a question.

"Yes."

"Then why does it feel like this."

I didn't answer. Didn't have one. The right thing and the painful thing had been the same thing for so long in this story that the distinction had stopped mattering.

He cried harder. Pressed his face deeper into my shoulder. I felt the heat of his tears through the fabric.

Minutes passed. Five. Ten. The sobs came in cycles, building, cresting, subsiding, then building again when a new wave of reality hit. His mother convicted. His mother in custody. His mother walking out of that courtroom without acknowledging he existed.

His mother.

I understood grief for monsters. I'd grieved Timothy. Not the man who drugged me and stole my inheritance. The man before that. The one I'd loved at twenty-one. The one who'd made me laugh, who'd taken me to Paris, who'd looked at me across a dinner table and made me believe I'd found someone permanent.

That man never existed. Or he existed alongside the monster, occupying the same body, the same smile, the same voice. Grieving him meant grieving a fiction, and that was its own particular kind of loss.

Anderson was grieving a different version of the same thing. The mother who taught him chess was real. The mother who ordered six murders was also real. Both lived inside Eugenia. Both were convicted today. And the son who loved one and destroyed the other had to carry both for the rest of his life.

I held him tighter.

My back ached against the car door. My arm was going numb under his weight. I didn't move.

Twenty minutes. Thirty.

His breathing started to slow. The sobs spaced out. His grip on my jacket loosened, then tightened, then loosened again.

"I keep thinking she would have," he said. His voice was raw, scraped clean of everything except exhaustion. "If it was someone else's trial. If she was watching it on the news. She would have looked."

He pulled back enough to see my face.

"But it was me. Her son. And she walked past me like I was furniture."

I pressed my hand against the back of his head and held him there.

"She's not capable of what you want from her," I said quietly. "She never was."

He was still for a long time. His breathing against my shoulder, slow and uneven.

"Do you feel anything?" he asked finally. "About the verdict."

I looked at the wall across from us. The yellow parking lines faded on the floor. A water stain spreading from a crack in the ceiling.

"I have imagined this moment. What it would feel like when the foreperson said guilty. What my body would do. Whether I'd cry or scream or collapse." I paused. "And then it happened. And I sat there watching it like it was happening to someone else."

"Maybe it hasn't hit yet."

"Maybe."

"Or maybe this is what winning feels like when it costs everything."

I looked at him. At his red eyes and wet face and the new suit I'd bought him this morning, now wrinkled from sitting on a garage floor.

"She destroyed so many lives," I said. "And now she's convicted. Justice served. But it doesn't fix anything. Morrison is still dead. Thomas still grew up without a father. Mary still hid for twenty years. I was institutionalized for eight months. I was almost killed." I looked at my hands. "Twenty-three guilty verdicts. And none of it undoes a single thing she did."

Anderson wiped his face with both hands. Drew a long, shuddering breath.

"So what was it for," he said.

I leaned my head back against the car door and stared at the ceiling.

"Accountability," I said. "She did these things. And now the system says she did these things. That's what the verdict means."

"Is that enough?"

I thought about my father's study. The leather chair. The photograph of us at graduation.

"It has to be," I said. "Because it's all there is."

We sat for a long time after that. Anderson leaned against me, his head on my shoulder, his breathing steady now. My arm stayed around him.

At some point I checked my phone. Forty minutes had passed since we'd left the courtroom.

"We should go," I said.

Anderson nodded against my shoulder, but didn't move.

"Anderson."

"One more minute."

I gave him five.

Then I stood. Held out my hand to him. He took it and I pulled him up. He steadied himself against the car and wiped his face one last time.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Two people standing in a parking garage on a Saturday afternoon, both wrecked, both hollow, both still here.

He bent down and picked up the keys from where they'd fallen.

"Your place?" he asked.

"My place."

He unlocked the car. We got in. He started the engine.

Neither of us looked back at the courthouse as we pulled out of the garage and into the daylight.