by Kate Aeon
“How’s Phoebe now?”
“Well... they were going to amputate her leg because it would have been less expensive and apparently she doesn’t have any money. But we told your hospital that we would cover any costs that you couldn’t — to save her leg if they could. We figured she’d saved your life. We owed her that much. We didn’t know about the two of you.” And his mother smiled again. “You’re really in love with her? I’m so happy. I thought after Janet and Chick...” And she faltered, tears in her eyes. “I didn’t think you would ever find anyone again.”
“I don’t know that I have, Mom. I’ve never told her how I feel about her. I can’t swear that she feels about me the way I feel about her. I think she does. But, it... wasn’t something we talked about.”
Somewhere else in the unit Alan heard a flurry of activity: hurrying of feet, voices speaking low and fast and urgent, the movement of heavy equipment, the ward secretary going from room to room, closing doors and asking visitors to leave.
“They have another code, Mom,” he said. “You’d better go.”
She kissed him. And smiled. And said, “Believe, Alan.”
And then she was gone, leaving him to consider all the things he might possibly believe in.
Chapter Forty-Three
Phoebe stared out the window of her hospital room at the bleak, hard sunlight, the weary palm trees, the unending traffic. Too hot, too flat, too bleached, she thought. She was waiting for Brig, who’d said he would come by to take her home, since she didn’t have anyone else. He said he’d found a place for her to stay — at least temporarily — since she couldn’t go back to the place where she’d been.
Brig was running late. More than an hour late last time she checked. Not that it mattered.
Discharge day had rolled around at last, and she should have been glad. She had her leg. It hurt, but it was better than it had been, and it would keep getting better with continued physical therapy.
A pin had slipped loose and punctured an artery that day on the dock. She’d been sure she was going to lose her leg. But her orthopedic surgeon had put in an artificial joint for her that used fixative. And no pins. And told her that she would get to keep her leg after all.
She had a long way to go, but she was sure she would get there.
“What’s wrong?”
Phoebe jumped a bit. Brig was quieter than a big man ought to be. She turned away from the window. “I’m just blue,” she said. “Nothing important.”
He said, “Sorry I’m late. But I have to thank you.”
“For what?”
“I investigated that lead you gave me.”
“Lead?”
“The one about the missing girl, and the diary. And the lockers.”
Phoebe hadn’t thought about that since she’d done the reading for Alan. Her mind had been on other things. “What did you find?”
“I found my missing girl.” Nothing in his stance suggested that his news was any happier than her reading would have led her to believe. “Her father killed her. He’d been molesting her for some time, but she was getting older. And she had a younger sister. When he started looking at her sister, she threatened to tell, and in fact wrote down what had been happening in a school journal. She figured her father wouldn’t read it, because it was where she kept her homework. She was wrong.”
“What about the lockers?”
“There is a very exclusive private gym in Coral Springs that her father belonged to. I had another case there once. They have these classy brushed-aluminum lockers — never saw anything like them anywhere else. Big things. What was left of his kid after he burned her to ash was in his. And my partner just located her journal in the bastard’s safe at work, which seals the whole deal for us. Wanted a couple of souvenirs, I guess. He gave us motive, method, and body. We’ve got the guy.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t turn out any happier,” Phoebe said. “It would have been nice if I’d been wrong about her being dead.”
Brig said, “Neither you nor I could have saved her. By the time she was reported missing, she was already dead. But her sister has a chance now, and she wouldn’t have if we hadn’t found out what happened to our victim.” He paused. “Your nurse been in to do all that paperwork with you?”
“Yes. She said I’m just waiting on some prescription, and then I can go home.”
“You really do look down.”
“I am, I guess. I kept hoping we’d at least be able to stop by and see Alan, but his brother said he still isn’t up to visitors.” She sighed. “I don’t belong in this place.”
“I’ll go get a wheelchair for you, then, and we’ll get you out of here.”
Phoebe hadn’t been talking about the hospital when she said that, but she didn’t correct Brig. He’d been very kind the whole time she’d been in the hospital. So why make him feel like nothing he could do would help her?
She turned back to the window. She wanted to be far away from Fort Lauderdale, but she didn’t have anywhere to go or any way to get there. She had been in the hospital for twelve days — three times as long, the nurses told her, as someone who’d had a knee replacement usually needed. But Phoebe had come in with complications — nearly bleeding out, nearly losing her leg. The nurses assured her that considering everything she’d had to contend with, she was doing great.
But she’d spent twelve days not working. During her hospital stay she hadn’t logged on once. She hadn’t kept up her time in the days before her last encounter with Michael, either. Which meant she had destroyed her priority ranking with Psychic Sisters. She also hadn’t made rent, hadn’t covered the cost of those locks in her bank account. Hadn’t pulled in enough to pay electric, or water, or phone.
Not that she could have gone home if she’d had the money, because her home was a crime scene and it was going to be months before anyone could live there. Phoebe never wanted to walk through those doors again.
Brig said he’d found her a temporary place where she could stay for free for a while. That helped. But what was she going to do long term? She didn’t know.
And she didn’t know how her situation with her life would affect her relationship with Alan.
Alan had moved out of ICU a few days earlier, and she had been able to talk to him by phone a couple of times. He said he was doing pretty well for a guy who’d been ripped from stem to stem. She told him about how her leg was doing and thanked him along with his family for covering her bills. She kept the conversations light — he didn’t need her worries when he was fighting so hard to get better.
He hadn’t been strong enough to talk for long, either, and she could always hear people in and out of his room, which made it impossible for them to talk about anything that really mattered.
Alan had mentioned that he had some important things to tell her when they were both out of the hospital — he said that they weren’t the sort of things one said on the phone.
She had wanted so much to tell him that she loved him. To say it when he could hear her. When he could tell her how he felt, too.
She knew she loved him. She hoped he felt the same way about her.
But she didn’t know how he felt. And the waiting, and the uncertainty mixed with the absolute bewilderment she felt facing her own future were almost more than she could take.
Behind her, the rattle of a wheelchair, and a thud as it bumped into the heavy hospital door. Brig moved quietly enough on his own, but Phoebe didn’t think he sounded like he knew how to drive a wheelchair.
“Hey. You ready to get out of here?”
And it wasn’t Brig behind her. Her heart thudded, and suddenly the air in the room was so thin she almost couldn’t breathe.
She turned, not daring to hope for anything good from this, praying that she wouldn’t show too much of what she felt in her face. “Alan,” she whispered. “Your brother told me you were too weak to have visitors.”
He looked thinner. He looked pale. But he was standing up, even if he d
id look suspiciously like he was leaning on the wheelchair to do it. He was smiling at her. He was alive.
And he was there. He grinned. “He lied. I told him to. I wanted to surprise you.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Can you stand to be in this room for a few more minutes?” he asked. “I wanted to talk to you as soon as I could. Brig has promised to keep everyone else out of here until I yell for him. I’m not sure when we’ll have any time alone again for... well, quite a while. And this really shouldn’t wait.”
She nodded, and swallowed hard, and carefully made her way to the hard hospital bed. She sat on the edge of it.
He sat on the bed, too, but not right beside her. Not touching her.
“I died out there on the dock,” he said.
“I know.”
“I found that window again. The one you said I shouldn’t go through. The one where Chick... where she was waiting for me. She was waiting to tell me good-bye. Things happened while I was there that I can’t explain.”
Phoebe thought about Chick begging her to save Alan, and the disappearing pain in her leg right before she ran for the knife.
Alan pulled a wallet that had seen better days out of his pocket. “In the place where she and I met, Chick asked me to give her back her lucky stone. To let go of her, so that she could move on to whatever was waiting for her, and so that I could move on with my life.”
He opened the wallet, and Phoebe could see the dent where the lucky stone had been. But the stone wasn’t there anymore.
“It was gone when they brought me to the hospital. The admitting nurse wrote down the contents of the wallet, and she swears there was not a stone in there when I was admitted.” He looked down at his hands, at the worn leather in them, and he sighed. “I can think of a dozen logical explanations for how that stone came to not be in the wallet.” He took a deep, unsteady breath, and looked up into her eyes. “And I don’t believe a one of them. I think Chick took her stone back. And moved on. That she’s safe and well somewhere. That she is always going to be safe. And well. I know it doesn’t make sense. But I believe it.”
“Something happened to me while we were out there, too. I don’t have an explanation for it either. Not one. And so far nobody has asked me about it, so I haven’t had to say anything.”
“What happened?”
She told him about Chick’s voice. About her knee. About that last single message: Believe.
He nodded. “She was there. She was there for both of us, because...” He fell silent for a moment. “She told me something about the future. My future. And how it’s supposed to be. But she made some... some assumptions. And despite everything that’s happened, I can’t just make those assumptions.” He cleared his throat, and her heart skipped a beat “I have to ask. I have to know,” he said.
Phoebe nodded, her mouth dry.
“I love you, Phoebe. And... I have to know if you love me.”
“I love you,” she whispered.
He let out a short breath, and she saw his shoulders relax. “Then I can get through the rest of this. I know we haven’t known each other long, but we’ve already had our ‘for worse.’ We made it through that. And I love you more now than I did before. But I want to have you for better, too. I don’t want to spend a single day of my life not seeing you, not holding you, not touching you. I don’t ever want to be away from you again.”
Phoebe was trying hard to hear him over the roaring in her ears. Trying to believe what he was saying.
And then he said, “You may not be ready to marry me yet, Phoebe. You may not be ready to trust anyone that much again. But I want you to know that I’ll wait. I’ll wait as long as it takes, I’ll wait forever if that’s how long you need to make up your mind. But I want to be with you every day while I’m waiting.” He very carefully dropped down on one knee and looked into her eyes. “I love you,” he said. “I have never loved anyone the way I love you, and I never will again. Be with me. Be with me in whatever way you’ll have me. Come with me and love me, and I promise if you say you don’t want to marry me and you don’t want me to ask you, I’ll never ask you again.”
He pulled something out of his back pocket. “But... just this once, let me ask.” He opened a black velvet box and held a ring up to Phoebe. And Alan said, “Marry me, Phoebe. For now and forever.”
Stillness hung between them. Unimaginable risks loomed before them, chasms of uncertainty sprawled between them. There were a million things Phoebe would never know about Alan, and every one of them was a risk. That someday, somehow, he could hurt her.
And yet inside her heart, Chick’s final admonition still echoed.
Believe.
Phoebe looked into Alan’s eyes and whispered, “Yes.”
Alan pulled her close and held her carefully.
“Why didn’t you want to wait until we were out of here to ask me?”
“Because my whole family is outside those doors waiting for us. And my friend Morrie, too — finding a snack machine, I think — but he wants to meet you as soon as we can get by his place.” Alan rubbed his forehead. “You and I are going to be lucky to get another moment alone before... well... tonight now, I guess, but I wasn’t sure if I could talk you into coming home with me.”
“Do you want me to? Right away, I mean? Are you ready for me to... be there?”
“Phoebe, I’ve been waiting for you my whole life, though I didn’t know it. I’ve been waiting even longer than that, I think. And I want the rest of forever to start right now.”
They delayed the wedding until everyone who mattered to them could be there: Brig to give her away, Morrie as Alan’s best man, Toeller from the FBI as guest of honor.
They held a quiet service, celebrating those who were there, but remembering the price of their happiness. The price of their love.
Alan found them a place in western Kentucky, and after the wedding the two of them traded the noise and overcrowding and endless heat of South Florida for seasons and green hills and small-town life. A family of their own if they were lucky, time with Alan’s family and their friends and the families they would eventually have if fortune didn’t favor Alan and Phoebe with babies of their own.
Phoebe walked down the aisle with Brig and stood with Alan before the minister. Took Alan’s hand. Said her vows. And sent a prayer of thanks to Chick, who had reached beyond death to give Alan and her the gift of each other. Who had given them her love and helped them find their own.
Love, Phoebe thought, was stronger than evil, and stronger than death. Love could move the stars in the heavens, or a single pebble in a man’s wallet.
She squeezed Alan’s hand and felt him squeeze back.
Love, real love, lived forever.
For her. For him. Until the end of time.
2017 Reprint Acknowledgements
Independent publishing brings you up close and personal with your books, and the team of folks who helps you make them better. My team for this reprint was large, talented, funny, fun, and hard-working.
To Ky Moffet, my second-printing editor, thanks for the massive effort of pulling this manuscript out of a rough scan and returning it to human-readable text, and for then editing that text to remove almost of the bugs… and some errors that I wish had been bugs (but that were my mistakes that stealthed their way past pro editing in the first commercial printing).
To my manuscript bug-hunters, who went through with fresh eyes and found the remaining errors that neither Ky nor I spotted:
Charlotte Lenox, William Stilianessis, Ann Beardsley, Sarah Warren, and Amy Laurens
To Tammi Labrecque, who threw herself into helping me find cover art and a cover artist, hooked me up with software to make this book look beautiful, who taught me a ton of things I just did not know about getting books out of mothballs and bringing them back to life, and who has been a reader, a cheerleader, a coach, and a lifesaver, and without whose encouragement, assistance, and massive support this book would STILL be
sitting on my hard drive.
And last but in no way least, my Patreon patrons, whose funding pays me monthly to write fiction, and whose notes, comments, and encouragement make every day I work on fiction a joy.
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