This Is Where We Stop novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Open Hand

Padraig's POV

Colson Teale stood at the curb in the rain with his right hand held out to me.

It was a good hand.

It was a big, square, capable hand, the kind that had pressed a thousand headset buttons and signed a thousand logs.

I looked at it, and I did not move.

"Padraig," he said. "Dr. Lowry. Please."

The doormen had stopped pretending not to watch.

Behind the glass, two women in evening dresses held up their phones.

"I wasn't going to hurt anybody," Colson said. "I want you to know that. I would never have..."

"You pulled an ambulance off my brother."

"I thought it would be six minutes."

"It was nineteen."

His hand wavered, and he kept it out anyway.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I have wanted to say it for six years."

"You had six years."

"I..."

"You had my mother's address, because it was in the police report. You could have written her a letter."

"I didn't know how."

"You knew how to write 'unit unavailable.'"

His face folded.

He was thirty-five, and he looked fifty, and I felt nothing about it at all.

That was the surprise.

I had pictured this for eight months. I had pictured it in the supply tent at night, with the generator coughing, and in the plane over the Pacific.

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