The Likeness

22

Frank, the utter fuckbucket, dumped me in an interview room (“We’ll have someone with you in a minute, Miss Madison”) and left me there for two hours. It wasn’t even one of the good interview rooms, with a watercooler and comfy chairs; it was the crap little one that’s two steps up from a holding cell, the one we use to make people nervous. It worked: I got edgier every minute. Frank could be doing anything out there, blowing my cover, telling the others about the baby, that we knew about Ned, anything. I knew I was reacting exactly the way he wanted me to, exactly like a suspect, but instead of snapping me out of it this just made me madder. I couldn’t even tell the camera what I thought about this situation, since for all I knew he had one of the others watching and was banking on me doing exactly that.

I swapped the chairs around—Frank had of course given me the one with the cap taken off the end of one leg, the one meant to make suspects uncomfortable. I felt like yelling at the camera, I used to work here, dickhead, this is my turf, don’t try that shit on me. Instead I found a pen in my jacket pocket and kept myself amused by writing LEXIE WAS HERE on the wall, in fancy letters. This didn’t get anyone’s attention, but then I hadn’t expected it to: the walls were already scattered with years’ worth of tags and drawings and anatomically difficult suggestions. I recognized a couple of the names.

I hated this. I had been in this room so many times, me and Rob working suspects with the flawless, telepathic coordination of two hunters circling their moment; being there without him made me feel like someone had scooped out all my organs and I was about to cave in on myself, too hollow to stand. Eventually I dug my pen into the wall so hard that the point snapped off. I threw the rest of it across the room at the camera and got it with a crack, but even that didn’t make me feel any better.

By the time Frank decided to make his big entrance, I was seething in about seven different ways. “Well well well,” he said, reaching up and switching off the camera. “Fancy meeting you here. Have a seat.”

I stayed standing. “What the fuck are you playing at?”

His eyebrows went up. “I’m interviewing suspects. What, I need your permission now?”

“You need to bloody well talk to me before you throw a curveball straight at my head. I’m not just having a laugh out there, Frank, I’m working, and this could wreck everything I’m trying to do.”

“Working? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

“That’s what you called it. I’m doing exactly what you sent me in there to do, I’m finally getting somewhere, why the hell are you shoving a spoke in my wheels?”

Frank leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. “If you want to play dirty, Cass, I can play too. Not as much fun when you’re on the receiving end, is it?”

The thing was that I knew he wasn’t playing dirty, not really. Making me sit in the naughty corner and think about what I’d done was one thing: he was furious enough—and with good reason—that he probably wanted to punch me in the eye, and I knew well that unless I pulled off a spectacular last—minute save I was going to be in big trouble when I came in the next day. But he would never, no matter how angry he was, do anything that might jeopardize the case. And I knew, cool as snow under all the spitting mad, that I could use that.

“OK,” I said, taking a breath and running my hands over my hair, “OK. Fair enough. I deserved that.”

He laughed, a short, tight bark. “You don’t want to get me started on what you deserve, babe. Trust me on that one.”

“I know, Frank,” I said. “And when we’ve got the time, I’ll let you give me hell for as long as you want, but not now. How’re you doing with the others?”

He shrugged. “As well as could be expected.”

“In other words, you’ve got nowhere.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, I do. I know those four. You can keep going at them till you have to retire, and you’ll still get nowhere.”

“It’s possible,” Frank said blandly. “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? I’ve got a few years left in me.”

“Come on, Frank. You’re the one who’s said that, right from the beginning: those four stick together like glue, there’s no point in going at them from the outside. Wasn’t that why you wanted me on the inside to start with?”

A noncommittal little tilt of his chin, like a shrug.

“You know well you’re not going to get anything good out of them. You just want to rattle them, right? So let’s rattle them together. I know you’re pissed off with me, but that’ll keep till tomorrow. For now, we’re still on the same side.”

One of Frank’s eyebrows flickered. “We are?”

“Yeah, Frank, we are. And the two of us together can do a lot more damage than you can on your own.”

“Sounds fun,” Frank said. He was lounging against the wall with his hands in his pockets, eyes hooded lazily to hide the sharp, assessing glint. “What kind of damage did you have in mind?”

I moved round the table and sat on the edge, leaning in towards him, as close as I could get. “Interview me and let the others eavesdrop. Not Daniel—he doesn’t rattle, all that’ll happen if we push him is he’ll walk out—but the other three. Switch on their intercoms to pick up this room, put them near monitors, whatever—if you can make it look accidental, great, but if you can’t it doesn’t matter. If you want to keep an eye on their reactions, then let Sam do the interview.”

“While you say what, exactly?”

“I’ll let it slip that my memory’s starting to come back. I’ll keep it vague, stick to stuff I can’t get wrong-running for the cottage, blood, that kind of thing. If that doesn’t rattle them, nothing will.”

“Ah,” Frank said, with a wry tip of a grin. “So that’s what you were setting up, with the sulks and the temper tantrums and the whole prima-donna bit. I should have guessed. Silly me.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, sure, I was going to do it anyway. But this way’s even better. Like I said, we can do a lot more damage together. I can get edgy, make it obvious that there’s more I’m not telling you… If you want to script it for me, then fine, do it, I’ll say whatever you want. Come on, Frankie, what do you say? You and me?”

Frank thought this over. “And what do you want in exchange?” he inquired. “Just so I know.”

I gave him my best wicked grin. “Relax, Frank. Nothing that’ll jeopardize your professional soul. I just need to know how much you’ve told them, so I don’t shove my foot in my mouth. And you were planning to share that with me anyway, right? Since we’re on the same side and all.”

“Yeah,” Frank said dryly, on a sigh. “Naturally. I’ve told them sweet fuck-all, Cass. Your arsenal is still intact. That being the case, it would make me a very happy camper if you were to actually use some of it, sooner or later.”

“I’m going to, believe me. Which reminds me,” I added, as an afterthought. “The other thing I need: can you keep Daniel out of my hair for a while? Whenever you’ve finished with us, send the rest of us home—don’t tell him we’re gone, though, or he’ll be out of here faster than a speeding bullet. Then give me an hour, two if you can, before you cut him loose. Don’t spook him, just keep it routine and keep him talking. OK?”

“Interesting,” Frank said. “Why?”

“I want to have a chat with the others without him around.”

“That much I got. Why?”

“Because I think it’ll work, is why. He’s the one in charge there, you know that; he decides what they say and don’t say. If the others are shaken up and they don’t have him around to keep a lid on them, who knows what they’ll come out with?”

Frank picked at something between his front teeth, examined his thumbnail. “What exactly are you aiming for?” he asked.

“I won’t know till I hear it. But we’ve always said they were hiding something, right? I don’t want to walk off this case without doing my best to get it out of them. I’m going to hit them with everything I’ve got—guilt trips, tears, tantrums, threats, the kid, Slow Eddie, you name it. Maybe I’ll get a confession—”

“Which I’ve said from the beginning,” Frank pointed out, “is not what we need from you. What with that annoying little admissibility rule, and all.”

“You’re telling me you’d turn down a confession if I brought you one on a silver platter? Even if it’s not admissible, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. You pull them in, play them the tape, go at them hard—Justin’s cracking already, one good tap and he’ll fall apart.” It took me a second to realize where the déjŕ vu was coming from. The fact that I was having the exact same argument with Frank that I had had with Daniel gave me a strange cold twist in my stomach. “A confession may not be exactly what you asked Santy to bring you, but at this stage, Frankie, we can’t afford to pick and choose.”

“I’ll admit it would be better than what we’ve got now. Which is a big heaping plate of fuck-all.”

“There you go. And I could end up with something a lot better than that. Maybe they’ll give us the weapon, the crime scene, who knows?”

“The old ketchup technique,” Frank said, still inspecting his thumbnail with interest. “Turn ’em upside down, give ’em a good shake and hope something comes out.”

“Frank,” I said, and waited till he glanced up at me. “This is my last shot. Tomorrow I come in. Let me have it.”

Frank sighed, leaned his head back against the wall and had a leisurely look around the room; I saw him take in the new graffiti, the bits of exploded pen in the corner. “What I’m curious about,” he said eventually, “is how you’re so sure that one of them did it.”

My blood stopped moving for a second. All Frank had ever wanted from me was one solid lead. If he found out I had that already, I was toast: off the case and into big trouble, faster than you can say Up Shit Creek. I would never even make it back to Glenskehy. “Well, I’m not sure,” I said easily. “But, like you said, they’ve got motive.”

“Yeah, they’ve got motive. Of a kind. But then, so do Naylor and Eddie and a whole bunch of other people, some of whom we presumably haven’t even identified yet. This girl put herself in harm’s way on a regular basis, Cass. She may not have ripped people off financially—although that’s debatable: you could argue that she got her share of Whitethorn House under false pretenses—but she ripped them off emotionally. That’s a dangerous thing to do. She lived at risk. And yet you’re very, very sure which risk caught up with her.”

I shrugged, hands going out. “This is the only one I can go after. I’ve got one day left; I don’t want to ditch this case without giving it everything I’ve got. What are you bitching about, anyway? You’ve always liked them for it.”

“Oh, you picked up on that? I underestimated you, babe. Yeah, I’ve always liked them. But you haven’t. A few days ago you were claiming these four were a bunch of fluffy little bunnies who wouldn’t hurt a fly between them, and now you’ve got that steel-trap look in your eye and you’re working out the best way for us to fuck with their heads. So I’m wondering what it is that you’re not telling me.”

His eyes were on me, level and unblinking. I gave it a second, ran my hands through my hair like I was trying to figure out how to put this. “It’s not like that,” I said, in the end. “I’ve just got a feeling, Frank. Just a feeling.”

Frank watched me for a long minute; I swung my legs and tried to look open and sincere. Then: “OK,” he said, suddenly all business, shoving himself off the wall and heading over to switch the camera back on. “You’ve got a deal. Did you lot bring two cars, or am I going to have to drive Danny Boy all the way back to Glenarsefuck when I’m done with him?”

“We brought both cars,” I said. Relief and adrenaline were making me giddy; my mind was racing through how to work this interview and I wanted to shoot straight up in the air like a firework. “Thanks, Frank. You won’t regret it.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, “well.” He swapped the chairs back around. “Sit. Stay. I’ll get back to you.”

He left me there for another couple of hours, presumably while he gave the others everything he’d got, in the hope that one of them would crack and he wouldn’t need to use me after all. I spent the time smoking illegal cigarettes—no one seemed to care—and working out the details of how to do this. I knew Frank would be coming back. From the outside, the others were impregnable, seamless; even Justin would be holding up cool as ice in the face of Frank’s worst. Outsiders were too far away to shake them. They were like one of those medieval fortresses built with such fierce, intricate, defensive care that they could only ever be taken from the inside, by treachery.

Finally the door flew open and Frank stuck his head in. “I’m about to link you up to the other interview rooms, so get in character. Five minutes to curtain.”

“Don’t link Daniel in,” I said, sitting up fast.

“Don’t fuck up,” Frank said, and vanished again.

When he came back I was perched on the table, bending the ink tube of the Biro into a catapult and flipping the broken bits at the camera. “Hey,” I said, brightening up at the sight of him. “I thought you’d forgotten all about me.”

“Now how could I ever do that?” Frank asked, giving me his very best grin. “I even brought you coffee—milk and two sugars, am I right? No, no, don’t worry about that”—as I hopped off the table and went for the Biro bits—“someone’ll get them later. Sit down and we’ll have a chat. How’ve you been?” He pulled out a chair and shoved one of the Styrofoam cups across to me.

He started out sweet as honey—I’d forgotten what a charmer Frank can be, when he feels like it. You’re looking wonderful, Miss Madison, and how’s the old war wound getting on, and—when I played up to him, gave a stretch to show him how well the stitches had healed—isn’t that a lovely sight, and just the right amount of flirtation in his grin. I threw in eyelash-and-giggle touches, just little ones, to piss Rafe off.

Frank took me through the whole John Naylor saga, or anyway a version of it—not exactly the version that had originally happened, but definitely a version that made Naylor sound like a good suspect: soothing the others down, before we started detonating things. “I’m all impressed now,” I told him, tilting my chair back and giving him a mischievous sideways look. “I thought you’d given up ages ago.”

Frank shook his head. “We don’t give up,” he said soberly. “Not on something as serious as this. No matter how long it takes. We don’t always want to be obvious about it, but we’re always working away, putting the pieces together.” It was impressive; he should have come with his own soundtrack. “We’re getting there. And right now, Miss Madison, we need a little help from you.”

“Sure,” I said, bringing my chair down and doing focused. “Do you want me to look at that guy Naylor again?”

“Nothing like that. It’s your mind we need this time, not your eyes. You remember how the doctors said your memory might start coming back, as you recovered?”

“Yeah,” I said, uncertainly, after a pause.

“Anything you remember, anything at all, could help us a lot. I want you to have a think and tell me: has anything come back to you?”

I left it a beat too long before I said, almost convincingly, “No. Nothing. Just what I told you before.”

Frank clasped his hands on the table and leaned towards me. Those attentive blue eyes, that gentle, coaxing voice: if I’d been a genuine civilian, I’d have been melting all over my chair. “See, I’m not so sure. I’m getting the impression you’ve remembered something new, Miss Madison, but you’re worried about telling me. Maybe you think I might misinterpret it, and the wrong person could get in trouble? Is that it?”

I threw him a quick looking-for-reassurance glance. “Sort of. I guess.”

He smiled at me, all crinkling crow’s-feet. “Trust me, Miss Madison. We don’t go around charging people with serious crimes unless we have serious evidence. You’re not about to get anyone arrested all by yourself.”

I shrugged, made a face at my coffee cup. “It’s nothing big. It probably doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

“You let me worry about that, OK?” Frank said soothingly. He was about one step from patting my hand and calling me “love.” “You’d be surprised what can come in useful. And if it doesn’t, then there’s no harm done, am I right?”

“OK,” I said, on a breath. “It’s just… OK. I remember blood, on my hands. All over my hands.”

“There you go,” Frank said, keeping that reassuring smile switched on. “Well done. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I shook my head. “Can you remember what you were doing? Were you standing up? Sitting down?”

“Standing up,” I said. I didn’t have to put the shake in my voice. A few feet away, in the interview rooms I knew inside out, Daniel was waiting patiently for someone to come back and the other three were slowly, silently, beginning to wind tighter. “Leaning against a hedge—it was prickly. I was…” I mimed twisting up my top, pressing it against my ribs. “Like that. Because of the blood, to make it stop. But it didn’t help.”

“Were you in pain?”

“Yeah,” I said, low. “It hurt. A lot. I thought… I was scared I was going to die.”

We were good together, me and Frank; we were on the same page. We were working together as smoothly as Abby and me making breakfast, as smoothly as a pair of professional torturers. You can’t be both, Daniel had told me. And: She was never cruel.

“You’re doing great,” Frank told me. “Now that it’s started coming back to you, you’ll have the whole lot remembered in no time, you’ll see. That’s what the doctors told us, isn’t it? Once the floodgates open…” He flipped through the file and pulled out a map, one of the ones we’d used during our training week. “Do you think you could show me where you were?”

I took my time, picked a spot about three-quarters of the way from the house to the cottage and put my finger on it. “Maybe there, I think. I’m not sure.”

“Great,” Frank said, doing a careful little scribble in his notebook. “Now I want you to do something else for me. You’re leaning against that hedge, and you’re bleeding, and you’re scared. Can you try and think backwards? Just before that, what had you been doing?”

I kept my eyes on the map. “I was all out of breath, like… Running. I was running. So fast I fell over. I hurt my knee.”

“From where? Think hard. What were you running away from?”

“I don’t—” I shook my head, hard. “No. I can’t tell what bits happened, and what bits I just… dreamed, or something. I could’ve dreamed all of it, even the blood.”

“It’s possible,” Frank said, nodding easily. “We’ll keep that in mind. But, just in case, I think you need to tell me everything—even the parts you probably dreamed. We’ll sort them out as we go. OK?”

I left a long pause. “That’s all,” I said at last, too weakly. “Running, and falling over. And the blood. That’s it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m positive. There’s nothing else.”

Frank sighed. “Here’s the problem, Miss Madison,” he said. A fine, steely sediment was slowly building up in his voice. “Just a few minutes ago, you were worried about getting the wrong person into trouble. But nothing you’ve said so far points towards anyone at all. That tells me you’re skipping something, along the way.”

I gave him my defiant Lexie glare, chin out. “No I’m not.”

“Sure you are. And the really interesting question, as far as I’m concerned, is why.” Frank shoved his chair back and started a leisurely stroll around the interview room, hands in his pockets, making me shift again and again to watch him. “See, call me crazy, but I figured we were on the same side here, you and me. I thought both of us were trying to find out who stabbed you and put that person away. Am I crazy? Does that sound crazy to you?”

I shrugged, twisting to keep an eye on him. He kept circling. “Back when you were in hospital, you answered every question I asked—not a bother, no hesitation, no messing about. You were a lovely witness, Miss Madison, lovely and helpful. But now, all of a sudden, you’re not interested any more. So either you’ve decided to turn the other cheek on someone who almost killed you—and forgive me if I’m wrong, but you don’t look like a saint to me—or there’s something else, something more important, getting in the way.”

He leaned against the wall behind me. I gave up on watching him and started picking nail polish off my thumbnail. “So I have to ask myself,” Frank said softly, “what could possibly be more important to you than putting this person away? You tell me, Miss Madison. What’s important to you?”

“Good chocolate,” I said, to my thumbnail.

Frank’s tone didn’t change. “I think I’ve got to know you pretty well. When you were in hospital, what did you talk about, every day, the second I got in your door? What was the one thing you kept asking for, even when you knew you couldn’t have it? What was the one thing you were dying to see, the day you got out? What had you so excited you nearly burst your stitches jumping around at the thought?”

I kept my head down, bit at the nail polish. “Your friends,” Frank said, very quietly. “Your housemates. They matter to you, Miss Madison. More than anything else I can think of. Maybe more than getting the person who stabbed you. Don’t they?”

I shrugged. “Course they matter to me. So?”

“If you had to make that choice, Miss Madison. If, let’s just say, just for the hell of it, you remembered that one of them had stabbed you. What would you do?”

“I wouldn’t have to make that choice, because none of them would hurt me. Ever. They’re my friends.”

“That’s exactly my point. You’re protecting someone, and I don’t see that being John Naylor. Who is there that you’d protect, except your friends?”

“I’m not protecting—”

Before I even heard him move he had come off the wall and slammed both hands down on the table beside me, his face inches from mine. I flinched harder than I meant to. “You’re lying to me, Miss Madison. Do you honestly not realize how bloody obvious that is? You know something important, something that could blow this case wide open, and you’re hiding it. That’s obstruction. It’s a crime. It can land you in jail.”

I jerked my head back, shoved my chair away from him. “You’re going to arrest me? For what? Jesus, I’m the one who got hurt here! If I just want to forget all about it—”

“If you want to get yourself stabbed every day of the week and twice on Sunday, I don’t give a flying fuck. But when you waste my time and my officers’ time, that’s my business. Do you know how many people have been working this case for the past month, Miss Madison? Do you have the faintest clue how much time and energy and money we’ve put into this? There’s not a chance I’m going to let all that go down the toilet because some spoiled little girl is too wrapped up in her friends to give a fuck about anything or anyone else. Not a chance in hell.”

He wasn’t faking. His face thrust hard up to mine, the hot blue sizzle in his eyes: he was raging and he meant every word, to me, to Lexie, probably even he didn’t know which. This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got. “I’m going to break this case,” Frank said. “I don’t care how long it takes: the person who did this is going down. And if you don’t pull your head out of your arse and realize how important this is, if you keep playing stupid little games with me, you’re going down right alongside him. Is that clear?”

“Get out of my face,” I said. My forearm was up between us, blocking him. In that second I realized that my fist was clenched and that I was as angry as he was.

“Who stabbed you, Miss Madison? Can you look me in the eye and tell me you don’t know? Let’s see you do it. Tell me you don’t know. Come on.”

“Fuck that. I don’t have to prove anything to you. I remember running, and blood on my hands, and you can do whatever you want with that. Now leave me alone.” I slumped down in my chair, shoved my hands in my pockets and stared at the wall in front of me.

I felt Frank’s eyes on the side of my face, his fast breathing, for a long time. “Right,” he said, at last. He eased back slowly, away from the table. “We’ll leave it at that, then. For now.” And he left.

It was a long time before he came back—another hour, maybe, I’d stopped watching the clock. I picked up the Biro bits, one by one, and arranged them in pretty patterns on the edge of the table.

“Well,” Frank said, when he finally decided to join me. “You were right: that was fun.”

“Poetry in motion,” I said. “Did it do the job?”

He shrugged. “It rattled them, all right; they’re antsy as hell. But they’re not cracking, not yet. Another couple of hours might do it, I don’t know, but Daniel’s starting to get restless—oh, very politely, of course, but he’s been asking how much longer we think this might take. I figure if you want any time with the other three before he walks out, you’d better take them now.”

“Thanks, Frank,” I said, and meant it. “Thank you.”

“I’ll keep him as long as I can, but I’m not guaranteeing anything.” He took my coat off the back of the door and held it for me. As I slid into it he said, “I’m playing fair with you, Cassie. Now let’s see you play fair with me.”

The others were downstairs in the lobby. They all looked gray and eye-baggy. Rafe was at the window, jiggling one knee; Justin was huddled in a chair like a big miserable stork. Only Abby, sitting up straight with her hands cupped in her lap, looked anything like composed.

“Thanks for coming in,” Frank said cheerfully. “You’ve all been very, very helpful. Your mate Daniel is just finishing up a few things for us; he said you should go ahead, he’ll catch you on the way.”

Justin started upright, like he’d just been woken up. “But why—” he began, but Abby cut him off, her fingers coming down across his wrist.

“Thanks, Detective. Call us if there’s anything else you need.”

“Will do,” Frank said, giving her a wink. He had the door open for us, and was holding out his other hand to shake good-bye, before anyone caught up enough to argue. “See you soon,” he said to each of us, as we passed.

“Why did you do that?” Justin demanded, as soon as the door closed behind us. “I don’t want to leave without Daniel.”

“Shut up,” Abby said, giving his arm a squeeze that looked casual, “and keep walking. Don’t turn around. Mackey’s probably watching us.”

In the car, nobody said anything for a very long time.

“So,” Rafe said, after a silence that felt like it was filing my teeth. “What did you talk about this time?” He braced himself, a tiny jerk of his head, before he turned to look at me.

“Leave it,” Abby said, from the front.

“Why Daniel?” Justin wanted to know. He was driving like someone’s lunatic granny, switching back and forth between bursts of suicidal speed—I was praying we wouldn’t run into a traffic cop—and patches of obsessive carefulness, and his voice sounded like he might be about to cry. “What do they want? Have they arrested him?”

“No,” Abby said firmly. There was obviously no way she could have known that, but Justin’s shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

“He always is,” Rafe said, to the window.

“He figured this would happen,” Abby said. “He wasn’t sure which one of us they’d hang onto—he thought probably Justin or Lexie, maybe both of you—but he figured they’d split us up.”

“Me? Why me?” Justin’s voice was getting a hysterical edge.

“Oh for God’s sake, Justin, act like you have a pair,” Rafe snapped.

“Slow down,” Abby said, “or we’ll get pulled over. They’re just trying to shake us up, in case we know anything we’re not telling them.”

“But why do they think—”

“Don’t get into that. That’s what they want us doing: wondering what they’re thinking, why they’re doing stuff, getting all freaked out. Don’t play into their hands.”

“If we let those apes outwit us,” Rafe said, “then we deserve to go to jail. Surely to God we’re smarter than—”

“Stop it!” I yelled, banging my fist against the back of Abby’s seat. Justin gasped and nearly sent the car off the road, but I didn’t care. “You stop it! This isn’t a competition! This is my life and it’s not a fucking game and I hate all of you!”

Then I startled the living hell out of myself by bursting into tears. I hadn’t cried in months, not for Rob, not for my lost life in Murder, not for any of the terrible fallout of Operation Vestal, but I cried then. I pressed the sleeve of my sweater over my mouth and bawled my eyes out, for Lexie in every one of her changing faces, for the baby whose face no one would ever see, for Abby spinning on moonlit grass and Daniel smiling as he watched her, for Rafe’s expert hands on the piano and Justin kissing my forehead, for what I had done to them and what I was about to do, for a million lost things; for the wild speed of that car, how mercilessly fast it was taking us where we were going.

After a while Abby reached into the glove compartment and passed me a packet of tissues. She had her window open and the long roar of the air sounded like high wind in trees, and it was so peaceful, in there, that I just kept crying.