Харлан Кобен - Win

“It isn’t over,” I tell him. “You need to run again.”

“Pardon?”

The back door of the farmhouse slams open. Calvin Sinclair hurries out. When he sees me, he starts to rush, obviously concerned by my intrusion, but the man with the Brooklyn accent puts up his palm to stop him.

“I figured out you’re still alive,” I say. “Someone else could too.”

The man looks as though he’s about to make denials or arguments, but instead he nods at me and says, “Thank you.”

My gaze moves to Calvin Sinclair, then back to Arlo Sugarman. I almost ask what they are going to do now. But I don’t. I have done my part. The rest is up to them. I turn and head back down the hill.

I still have one more stop to make.

As I pull off Hickory Place and up the long driveway, I see the old baronial mansion in the distance. I am back in New Jersey. Ema lives here with her movie star mother, Angelica Wyatt. I soon spot them both waiting for me by the front door.

I think by now you’ve guessed that I’ve told no one about Cousin Patricia. She gunned down a monster — a monster, per my own justification with Teddy “Big T” Lyons, who would have continued to maim and kill. There is no reason for Cousin Patricia, who ended up doing so much good, to pay any sort of price for that. I admit that I may be slightly biased because this decision also neatly fits into both my personal narrative and my own self-interest.

I don’t want my father and my family scandalized.

But regardless, I think this decision is just. You may disagree. Too bad.

When I park and get out of the car, Ema runs from the door to greet me. She doesn’t break stride as she wraps her arms around me, holding me tight, and I feel something in my chest crack open.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m groovy,” I say.

“Win?”

Ema buries her face in my chest. I let her.

“What?”

“Don’t ever use the word ‘groovy’ again, okay?”

“Okay.”

I look over her shoulder and see her mother watching us. Angelica is not happy to see me. I meet her eye and try to give her a reassuring smile, but that does little to placate her. She does not want me here. I understand.

Angelica spins away and heads inside.

Ema pulls back and looks at me. “You’ll tell me everything?”

“Everything,” I reply.

But I’m not sure that’s true.

As I look at my daughter’s face, I flash back to the night before.

I’m in bed with Username Helena. My phone rings. It’s Kabir.

“We have a big problem.”

“What is it?”

“We lost Trey Lyons.”

I snap up fast, startling Helena. “Details,” I say.

But you don’t need the details. You don’t need the details of how my men lost Trey Lyons’s SUV on Eisenhower Parkway. You don’t need the details of how I surmised that Trey Lyons had eyes on the Dakota, how those eyes must have spotted Ema, how they followed her back, how stupid I felt not to have realized that earlier. You don’t need the details on my call to Angelica at two a.m., how I told her to hide in the basement with Ema. You don’t need the details on how fast I rushed out here, how I parked on Hickory Place, how I ran up the drive wearing night goggles with a Desert Eagle.50 cal semiautomatic in my hand. You don’t need to know how I spotted Trey Lyons breaking in through a back window. You don’t need to know that I didn’t call out to him, didn’t tell him to put his hands up, didn’t give him a chance to surrender.

This one may seem to be another gray to you. But it is not.

This one was easy. This one was black and white.

He came for my daughter. My. Daughter.

“Come on,” Ema says. “Let’s go inside.”

I nod. It’s a warm, sun-kissed day. The sky is the kind of blue only something celestial could have painted. Ema leads the way. She is wearing a top with spaghetti straps, so I can see her upper back. As we get closer to the door, I spot what looks like a familiar tattoo peeking out from between her shoulder blades...

A Tisiphone abeona perhaps?

I almost stop, almost ask, but when my daughter turns and looks at me, all those grays suddenly vanish in the bright of her smile. For perhaps the first time in my life, I only see the white.

Am I being hackneyed? Perhaps.

But since when have I cared what you thought?

I am an expert in very little and thus rely on the kindness of strangers and friends. With that in mind, I would like to thank in alphabetical order James Bradbeer, Fred Friedman, Larry Gagosian, Gurbir Grewal, Shan Kuang, and Beowulf Sheehan. These people are top specialists in a variety of fields, and so if mistakes are found in this text, I feel comfortable throwing them under the bus.

Ben Sevier has been my editor/publisher for a dozen books now. The rest of the team includes Michael Pietsch, Beth de Guzman (reuniting with my editor on Tell No One after a lot of years), Karen Kosztolnyik, Elizabeth Kulhanek, Rachael Kelly, Jonathan Valuckas, Matthew Ballast, Brian McLendon, Staci Burt, Andrew Duncan, Alexis Gilbert, Joe Benincase, Albert Tang, Liz Connor, Flamur Tonuzi, Kristen Lemire, Mari Okuda, Kamrun Nesa, Selina Walker (heading up the UK team), Charlotte Bush, Glenn O’Neill, Lisa Erbach Vance, Diane Discepolo, Charlotte Coben, Anne Armstrong-Coben and, perhaps most important, Person I’m Forgetting Who Is Very Forgiving.

I’d also like to give a quick shout-out to Jill Garrity, Elena Randolph, Karen Young, Pierre-Emmanuel Claux, and Don Quest. These people (or their loved ones) made generous contributions to charities of my choosing in return for having their name appear in this novel. If you’d like to participate in the future, email giving@harlancoben.com for details.

Win is telling me that I’ve gone on long enough, but I know that he’d cut me some slack to thank you for requesting this book and taking the journey with us. You, dear reader, rock out loud. Articulate.