Page 41 of Ghost’s Awakening

"That's enough for today." I stepped off the mat and grabbed my towel, and my voice came out level, which took work. "Boring achieved."

"Caleb—"

"Good session." I was already at the door.

He knocked on the guest-room door at nine.

I'd showered, eaten with the second dinner shift, said maybe eleven words to anybody, and spent an hour on the narrow bed watching the ceiling and building the conversation in advance the way I'd build a fight plan, entries and counters. So when the knock came, two fast raps and then a third like an afterthought, unmistakably his, I already had my opening line ready.

I opened the door. The hallway light was cheap and yellow and made everybody look tired, and it caught him standing there in a gray T-shirt with his hands jammed in his pockets, hair still damp from a shower, the smell of plain soap and the night's cold coming off him in equal parts, like he'd stood outside somewhere gathering himself before he came in. His eyes had trouble in them. I didn't let him start.

"If last night was a mistake, say it standing still." I kept the door wide and my voice flat. "You've been running from me since two o'clock. You don't run, so whatever it is, look at me and say it, and I'll take it fine."

His mouth opened. Closed. And then his face did something I hadn't built a counter for, it fell, the trouble in his eyes doubling, and he pulled his right hand out of his pocket and there was a folded paper in it, soft at the creases like it had been opened and closed all day.

"It's not the kiss." His voice had none of its speed. "God, Caleb, it's the opposite of—I've been trying to find the second all day and every second had thirty people in it or had your hands on me, and there was no—can I come in? Please."

I stepped back. He came in past me, bringing the soap and the cold with him, and I shut the door, and the room was suddenly very small, a bed, a chair, a narrow window with the yard lights making bars on the floor. The heater tick-ticked in the wall. He stood in the middle of the little room and didn't move.

He held out the paper.

"Tyler was in the county systems yesterday, chasing the wire. Records started falling out. He confirmed it this morning, before Church, and I've been carrying it since." His hand was steady. His voice wasn't. "Read it."

I unfolded it. Two pages. The top one was a coroner's intake sheet, Clark County header, a name I didn't know, a date I knew like my own birthday. And a line of typed text under CAUSE that my eyes went over four times.

Blunt force craniofacial trauma. Massive frontal impact consistent with unbroken fall onto concrete surface.

Frontal. Facial. Face-first.

The hallway came back the way it always came back, in pieces I'd handled so many times the edges had gone smooth. My spin. My heel. His chin. The cinder-block wall behind him, and the back of his skull meeting it, and the way he'd folded down the block like his strings were cut. The back of his skull. I'd thrown a man's head backward into a wall.

The man on this sheet had gone face-first into a floor.

"That's not my kill." My voice came out of somewhere far away. "That's⁠—"

"Mine." Ghost stood very still in the middle of the small room. "Both hands on his ankles. I ripped the feet out from under a two-hundred-pound man who never heard me coming and he hit the concrete with his face and I dragged you through the door and never looked back at him." His jaw worked. "The enforcer at the hospital told you one dead, one gone. You did the math with the only numbers you had. But it was my man who died, Caleb. Second page."

The second page was a printout, a hospital record, a facility up in Summerlin. A name. Admitted the morning after the pit. And a block of chart language I read three times to be sure I was reading it right.

Severe traumatic brain injury. Comatose. Intracranial swelling decreasing. Neurological responses improving. Prognosis: gradual recovery anticipated with rehabilitation.

The enforcer had said vegetable. The enforcer had said his life was over. The chart said a coma, swelling on its way down, a man expected to wake up and come back, slowly, over months, but back. Even their cruelty had been sloppy. They'd rounded a sleeping man up to a ruined one because it made a better story to beat me with.

My man. Alive. And one day going to wake up.

I sat down on the edge of the bed because my legs offered me a choice between sitting and something less dignified. The papers shook slightly, and I watched them shake, and understood distantly that the shaking was coming from my hands.

Five days. Since that morning in the hospital parking lot, five days I had carried a dead man everywhere I went. Through a hospital, through a vote, through a kiss. I'd built a version of myself around his weight, the man who killed somebody in a dark hallway, I'd rehearsed how I'd say it to Liam someday and never found words that survived the rehearsal. And now the weight came off all at once, so fast it hurt, like a rope going slack after five days of pulling.

What poured into the empty space wasn't entirely clean. Because the truth the chart told was an inch wide. A wall instead of a floor. The back of a skull instead of the front. The same kick, the same spin, the same night, and the only reason my man would wake up in Summerlin and Ghost's man never would was luck and an inch of angle, nothing I'd chosen, nothing I could take credit for. I'd walked up to the one line I'd sworn I'd never cross and stopped a single inch short, and the inch hadn't been mine.

But he was going to wake up. Somewhere north of the city a man was going to open his eyes again, and I got to put the body down.

And then the other thing arrived, riding right behind the relief.

"You've known since this morning." I looked up at him. "Before Church. You sat next to me at that table for an hour. You trained with me for two more. You watched me look at Tyler's folder and go white, and you asked me if I was good."

"Yes." He didn't move, didn't soften it, took it standing the way I'd told him to. "I had it in my pocket the whole day, and every time I got near it, I—the planning session wasn't the place, thirty people, and then the mat, and on the mat you kept touching me and I kept thinking, if he touches me one more time I'm going to either tell him or kiss him, and both of those needed a door that closed, and I—" His hands came out of his pockets and did a helpless thing in the air. "I pulled back because I couldn't stand being that close to you while I was holding it. It felt like lying with my whole body. And you read it as regret, I watched you read it as regret and leave, and I stood in that gym for an hour calling myself things Irish would be proud of."