Chapter 21: The Empty Ballroom

Briggs's POV

I found Alister on the edge of the loading dock, sitting with his feet hanging over the concrete.

The ambulance had gone. Its tire marks showed wet in the light from the kitchen door.

He did not look up when I stopped beside him.

"Come to gloat?" he said.

"No."

"Come to check I haven't gone off the end?"

"The drop is four feet," I said. "You'd sprain something."

He laughed, once, without any air in it.

I sat down on the other side of a stack of crates.

We had sat like this on a hundred job sites in the early years, eating sandwiches out of paper.

"I keep thinking about the mountain," Alister said.

"Which part?"

"The part where I couldn't breathe, and then someone put his mouth over mine."

He looked at his hands.

"I thought it was a dream. I thought it was her."

"It was me."

"I know that now."

He turned his head.

"You'd never have told anyone, would you? You'd have let me keep it, if I hadn't built her a foundation."

"I'd have let you keep it," I said. "I didn't want anything for it."

"That's the thing about you."

He said it without malice. That made it worse.

Behind us, through the kitchen door, someone laughed and someone else shushed them.

The gala had broken into groups, a hundred conversations about one man.

"Carina's gone back to her husband," Alister said. "I saw her leave."

"She went with him to find a lawyer."