Chapter 8: Saint Brendan's
The church was smaller than I expected.
A narrow brick building pressed between two rowhouses on a steep street, its wooden doors painted dark green, a single light burning above the entrance.
Daniel parked half a block down.
The street was quiet — mid-morning, a weekday, the neighborhood still and grey under a flat sky.
"I go in first," Daniel said.
"No." I unbuckled my seatbelt.
"Logan and I go in first."
"Catherine—"
"If David is inside and he sees you walk through that door, he doesn't know if you've been followed.
He doesn't know if you're still clean." I looked at him steadily.
"But if he sees Logan, he'll come out."
Daniel held my gaze for a long moment.
Then he nodded.
"I'll be at the side entrance.
Marsh says there's a door off the alley on the left.
If anything moves wrong, come out that way."
I lifted Logan out of the car.
He was awake now, quiet, picking up something from the air around him the way small children do.
"Are we going to church?" he asked.
"Just for a minute."
"Is it Sunday?"
"No, baby."
"Then why?"
"Because someone is waiting for us inside."
He accepted this.
He took my hand.
The church was dim and cool.
Wooden pews, a faint smell of candle wax, late morning light coming through plain windows.
A priest near the altar looked up when we entered.
He was older, white-haired, with careful eyes.
He looked at Logan.
Then at me.
He nodded once toward a door at the side of the nave and went back to what he was doing.
The door opened before I reached it.
David stepped through.
He was thinner.
The grey jacket from the photograph.
Shorter hair.
But his eyes — his eyes were the same, and they went straight to Logan, and whatever two years had done to him, whatever it had cost him, it broke open in his face all at once.
"Hey, buddy," he said.
His voice cracked on the second word.
Logan stared at him for three full seconds.
Then: "Daddy?"
David went to his knees on the stone floor.
Logan crossed the distance between them at a run, and David caught him and held him, and I stood there with my hand over my mouth and let myself feel it — all of it, the two years of soup and collection calls and explaining to a three-year-old why other children had fathers, all of it pressing up through my chest at once.
David looked up at me over Logan's shoulder.
"Catherine." His voice was wrecked.
"I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I tried—"
"I know," I said.
"Daniel told me."
"I couldn't reach you.
Every time I—"
"I know." I crossed the floor and put my hand against his face.
He closed his eyes.
"We have to move.
Reeves's people had you forty minutes ago."
He nodded.
He didn't let go of Logan.
"I have everything," he said.
"The records.
The recording.
All of it."
"Marsh has someone.
A DOJ prosecutor named Adler."
David pulled back and looked at me.
"Adler.
You've spoken to Marsh?"
"He's been helping Daniel get to you."
Something shifted in David's expression.
Relief, but also something tighter underneath it.
"Adler is good," he said.
"If Marsh trusts her, she's clean." He stood, Logan still in his arms, and looked toward the door.
"Where's Daniel?"
"Side entrance."
David moved.
I followed.
We were almost to the alley door when it opened from the outside.
Daniel stood in the frame.
Behind him, one hand on Daniel's shoulder and a g*n pressed to the back of his neck, was a man I had never seen.
He was wearing a suit.
He had the posture of someone who had spent years being the most powerful person in any room he entered.
He looked at David.
Then at me.
Then, for one long moment, at Logan.
May you like
"David," he said pleasantly.
"I've been looking for you."
