Chapter 6 - The Long Walk Through the Hallway
The kitchen was empty when Rowan walked back out of the den.
Maribel was sitting at the end of the long mahogany table, her fingers still resting on the edge of the formica where the burnt piece of rye bread had left a small, dark smudge. She hadn't touched her coffee. Her face had the greyish, papery look of someone who had just realized the floor beneath her feet was made of glass and someone had started swinging a hammer.
“Is it... is it over?” Maribel asked. Her voice didn't have its usual acid snap. It sounded small—almost fragile—like an old woman talking through a screen door during a thunderstorm.
“The extraction was successful,” Rowan said, walking over to the sink to wash her hands.
“You...” Maribel swallowed hard, her throat clicking audibly in the quiet room. “You were talking to... to the military. Real military.”
“I’ve been talking to them for twenty years, Maribel,” Rowan said, turning off the tap and drying her hands on the clean linen towel. “That’s what a GS-5 does when she’s assigned to the Blue Room at Fort Meade. We answer the phone when people like Stellan get themselves into trouble in places you can’t find on a highway map.”
Stellan walked in behind her, his expression flat, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He didn't look at his mother. He walked straight to the coffee pot, poured himself another cup of the lukewarm black sludge, and took a long, slow sip.
“She’s not a secretary, Mom,” Stellan said quietly, not raising his voice. “Not the kind you put on a Christmas card list to make yourself feel sophisticated. She’s the reason half the guys I trained with came home with all their limbs attached. When we were in the dirt—when everything else was burning down around our ears—her voice was the only thing standing between us and a pine box.”
Maribel’s hands began to shake. She reached out, her fingers trembling as she tried to pick up her coffee cup, but her grip slipped and the white ceramic clattered against the saucer, spilling a dark puddle across the linen runner.
“I didn't know,” Maribel whispered.
“No,” Rowan said, walking back toward her chair by the kitchen doors. “You didn't. Because you never asked. And frankly, Maribel, you wouldn't have understood the answer if I’d given it to you between bites of roast chicken.”
The front door chimed.
It wasn't a tactical comms link this time, and it wasn't a man in a navy-blue windbreaker. It was the front doorbell—the cheerful, three-tone chime that Maribel had installed twenty years ago to announce the arrival of high-society guests and wedding caterers.
Aurelia’s voice drifted in from the foyer, bright and slightly breathless.
“Mom? Are you in there? Julian’s father wants to know if we can move the rehearsal dinner to the country club because the garden club is having their annual meeting on the lawn—!”
The footsteps clicked across the hardwood floor of the hallway, light and expensive, stopping dead at the entrance to the kitchen as Aurelia saw the scene: Maribel sitting at the table with spilled coffee on her lap, Stellan standing by the counter with a black eye-ring of fatigue around his gaze, and Rowan sitting quietly by the kitchen doors with her crossword puzzle half-completed in her lap.
“What’s... what’s going on?” Aurelia asked, her hand dropping from the pearls at her throat. “Why does it smell like... like an electrical fire in here?”
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Rowan picked up her pencil. She didn't look up from the squares.
“Nothing, Aurelia,” she said, her voice smooth and even as she filled in a seven-letter word across the grid. “Just an old message coming through from the other side of the world. Go tell Julian his father’s garden club can wait.”
