Chapter 22: Sold Out

Hallie's POV

My father looked at Tommy Dunne as if he had never seen him before.

I watched it happen from three feet away, with Declan's blood warm against my arm.

It took one second, and it was the cruelest thing I ever saw him do.

"Officer," Dad said, into the microphone, in his reasonable, carrying voice. "I don't know what's wrong with this man."

Tommy's face moved.

"Mr. C."

"He's been unwell since his wife passed. I've been worried. Nobody has ever seen him armed, and God help me, I would never..."

"Mr. C," Tommy said again. "It's me."

"I'll cooperate fully," my father told the room. "Whatever my driver has done, he did on his own."

"On my own."

"He's a good man gone wrong."

Tommy took his hand out of his jacket.

It was empty.

He had never drawn the gun.

It was still in its holster, against his ribs, where it had been when he took my arm.

He looked at it, and then at his hand, and then at the man in the navy cummerbund.

I had known his face for twenty-three years.

I watched it break.

"Twenty years," Tommy said.

The microphone caught it, and the speakers threw it across three hundred silent faces.

"I drove your girl to school for twelve of them. I taught her to ride a bike."

"Tommy, sit down," Dad said.

"You told me she was your whole world. You said, if the Maine woman keeps her from coming home, make it clean."

"That's enough."

"Make it clean, Tommy. That's what you said. In your kitchen, with your tea."

Brendan's hand went to the watch.

The thumb crossed the crystal, and crossed it again, and he did not seem to know that he was doing it.