Page 150 of Lethal in Pink

“You’ve fulfilled your obligations,” she says.

I take the check. Fold it. Slide it into the inner pocket of my coat where the release document is already sitting, because I picked it up the moment she signed it, because I am not leaving this room without that damned piece of paper in my possession, because that piece of paper is the difference between a life I chose and a life that was chosen for me, and I have spent twenty-six years living in the space between those two things and am profoundly, catastrophically ready to stop.

I stand. Cross toward the door. My hand finds the handle—cold brass, polished to a shine that reflects nothing because good brass doesn’t reflect, it absorbs, the warm density of a metal that has decided it would rather hold light than throw it back—and I am almost through when she says my name.

I stop. Turn.

“Good luck.” Two words, delivered with the warm gravity of a someone who means them with her whole chest. Then, quieter, the weighted quality of a sentence that has been sitting in her throat for much longer than this conversation: “I love you.”

I exhale. A small, tired, genuinely affectionate sound that comes from somewhere beneath my sternum that I did not know could produce sound at all. My face does something I am not controlling—the left corner of my mouth tilting up, the crease between my brows softening, the warm collapse of a wall I have been maintaining for approximately eighteen months and have just discovered I no longer have the energy to hold.

“I love you too, Grandma.”

I turn back one more time.

The question has been sitting in my chest since approximately the moment Penelope’s secure call hit my inbox with the replacement threat, and it has grown teeth, and it has learned to breathe, and it will not let me leave this room without asking the damn thing.

“Would you really have had me killed?”

The Director rises, crossing the room and then pulls me into a hug. One arm around my shoulders, her palm warm against my back, her chin resting against the top of my head the way it has rested there since I was small enough to carry. She kisses my hair. The dry press of lips against the crown of my skull, a gesture so familiar that my body responds to it before my brain has time to register what’s happening.

“Of course, sweetheart.” She says with the bone-deep honesty of a woman who has never seen the point in lying to family, even when the truth is the kind of thing that would make a therapist require hazard pay. “I would’ve killed you myself.”

A pause. The room holds its breath.

Then, a faint smile at the corner of her mouth—the upward tilt that means she has thought about this moment, rehearsed it, and is now allowing herself the small luxury of enjoying it. “Besides, I have other grandchildren.”

I pull back. Shake my head. Half amused, half devastated, the complicated affection of a woman who loves someone who would have murdered her without hesitation and is somehow, against all available evidence, okay with that fucked-up fact.

“Goodbye, Grandma.” My voice is steady with the certainty that comes from having made a decision and being at peace with it, even when the decision hurts like hell. “I hope I never see you again.”

Her smile is proud, sad, and knowing all at once.

“That’s the idea,” she says.

I open the door. Walk out. The door closes behind me with the solid, final sound of good craftsmanship—a click, then silence, then the enormous quiet of a hallway that contains nothing but me, the coat on my back, the documents in my pocket, and the weightless quality of a life that is now, officially, mine.

I don’t look back. Looking back is for people who are still deciding, and I decided approximately seventy-two hours ago on a cliff edge in the rain, and then I decided again in a parking structure in Seoul, and then I decided a third time in an office with a north-facing window, a pale ash desk, and a woman who kissed the top of my head the way she has been kissing the top of my head since before I had teeth. Three decisions are two more than this equation required, and I am done deciding. I am done. I am walking down a hallway with a release document in my pocket, a check in my hand, and a door shut firmly at my back, and the quiet around me is so complete, so specific, so entirely mine that for the first time in twenty-six years, I can hear myself think, and what I am thinking is nothing at all, which is exactly what freedom is supposed to sound like.

Epilogue

Amiyah

Two years later:

Barking fills my ears.

Not the polite kind. Not the tentative, questioning bark of a dog who’s maybe heard something and wants to check if it’s worth getting worked up about. This is the full-body commitment kind. The kind that starts in the diaphragm and comes out with enough force to rattle the windows in their frames. Relentless. Rhythmic. Completely without mercy, like the dog has decided that whatever’s happening downstairs requires the sonic equivalent of a fire alarm, and he is the only one qualified to pull it.

I stare at the ceiling. One beat. Two. A smile pulls at the corner of my mouth anyway, and I bury my face in the pillow to smother it, which accomplishes absolutely nothing because the pillow does not have noise-canceling properties and Atlas does not have volume control.

A crash from downstairs. The particular metallic clatter of something that was previously on a counter and is now on a floor, followed by a string of cussing that starts in Korean, switches to English somewhere around the third syllable, and ends on a note that suggests whatever fell has personally offended him on a molecular level.

“Are you okay, my love?” I call.

Jae’s laugh drifts up the stairs—deep, warm, unmistakably alive, the kind of sound that still, after two years, makes something in my chest do a slow turn that I have stopped trying to name because naming it would require acknowledging that I am the kind of person who gets soft about a laugh, and I have a reputation to maintain.

“I’m fine,” he calls back. “We’re fine.”