He picked up his tool bag from beside the lobby desk where Gerald had apparently held it for him since he'd left it on floor two. He shouldered it, walked toward the service entrance. "Daras," he stopped, turned. She was looking at him across the lobby with her phone in her hand. And the morning city behind her through the glass and an expression on her face that was already reorganizing itself already moving back toward the version of Victoria Hayes that the world was familiar with but not quite there yet.
This isn't over. She said what comes next? The investigation, the board, the restructuring, all of it. It's going to be a long road. I know.
He said I'm going to need people around me who I can trust. She said, "People who have demonstrated specifically and under pressure that they mean what they say. " He looked at her. "Miz. " "Hazy" said. "Victoria," she said. He nodded slowly.
"Get some rest," she almost smiled. He walked out into the rain. It was 3:22 a.m. And the storm was finally passing and Darius Coleman drove home through a city that was beginning to show the first almost invisible edges of morning light. He drove with both hands on the wheel and the windows slight cracked because he needed the cold air.
And he thought about Calvin Briggs and he thought about Maya. And he thought about the look on Victoria Hayes's face when she had pressed her hand against his chest in the dark elevator and said, "Relax. Stay with me. " in a voice that was half instruction and half prayer. He thought about how she had not known his name then. He thought about how she knew it now.
He pulled onto his street at 3:47 a.m. Parked in front of his building, sat in the truck for 90 seconds with his head back his and let everything from the last 4 hours settle through him. The way water settles into cracks in concrete into every part of him, finding its level, becoming part of the structure. Then he got out, walked up the stairs, let himself in quietly. The apartment was dark and warm and smelled like the cold pasta he hadn't finished and the particular familiar smell of a home that knows you.
He set his tool bag by the door, took off his boots without sitting down the old habit of a man who didn't want to make noise when his child was sleeping. He walked to Maya's door, cracked it open. She had turned over since midnight. She was on her back now, one arm behind her head, the homework worksheet pushed to the floor. Her face in sleep had no armor on it at all.
Just his daughter, 12 years old, entirely herself, entirely safe. He pulled the door almost closed, went to the kitchen, drank a full glass of water standing at the sink, looked out the window at the wet st where the storm drains were still running hard, but the rain had stopped. His hands flat on the counter were steady. That was the thing about getting through something. The hands that shook before became the hands that held afterward.
He had learned that a long time ago in a parking structure in Riverside, standing over the place where Calvin Briggs had saved a woman's life and lost his own. You get through it and then you figure out what it meant. He would figure out what tonight meant. Not right now. Right now.