Caroline looked at her watch.
“It’s late,” she said. “We should get some sleep. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”
“Can I stay in here with Mo tonight?” Sophie asked. Marguerite had a double bed.
“I can’t think of a good reason why not,” Caroline said.
Marguerite gave Caroline a hug. “Can you stay in here too?”
Caroline kissed her forehead. “How about we all stay in the master bedroom tonight? It might be a little tight, but it would mean a lot to Jack. Let me go change. I think he wants to talk to you anyway before we go to sleep. Are you okay with that?”
The firm hugs her daughters gave her were all the response she needed. Her beautiful, wonderful angels. She had no idea how she was going to get through the next day.
“I’ll go tell him,” Caroline whispered.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Fed
What did those awful men do in the wee hours of the morning when they were monitoring that camera? That goddamn fucking piece of shit, that evil eye blinking at her erratically even when the lights were off. The guards loved that part of their job, no doubt. They were probably placing bets on what she’d scream out in her sleep.
There had to be even odds that night on the names Marguerite and Sophie. Back in the day, when she’d been far more self-deprecating, she would have joined in on such an activity. But that was when she played with house money. Now she was in the red. Deep in the red, her idealism now permanently and painstakingly crushed by the unyielding fist of authority.
She tried not to think about it. About them. But each attempt to push them from her mind led to thoughts of greater tragedy, greater agony…greater grief. She flashed back to that day in January so many years ago, when she arrived at her office to find Ellen, Christine, Jen, and Kathleen waiting for her. She walked in after a subcommittee meeting and her receptionist couldn’t even look at her. Caroline was in the process of leaving yet another voicemail for Nicky, begging him to call her back. Her heart thudded into her stomach when she entered her private office.
Two Maryland State Police troopers were standing next to her desk. It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots. She figured it out right away. Why Nicky hadn’t called from Baltimore, why he hadn’t responded to her texts, why her calls had gone straight to voicemail. She almost keeled over at the sight of them.
Jen or Kathleen must have called Ellen and Christine, to soften the blow. They all pulled her over to the couch as the troopers tried to explain what happened. At some point the men might have offered their condolences, but the words slipped into the ether, the roaring rush through her head too powerful to let them in. The four women had her wrapped up in a cocoon of sympathy, Ellen and Christine on either side of her on the couch, Jen and Kathleen kneeling on the floor with their arms around her. The voices in the room started to run together. Caroline started making some horrible guttural cry that didn’t even sound human, and wasn’t sure if the troopers stopped talking or were still trying to explain things through the sound of her agony. She’d never felt that kind of grief before, not even when her parents died almost two years apart.
Ellen drove her car home, with Kathleen in the front passenger seat. Christine and Jen sat with their arms around her in the back seat. No one spoke the entire time. It was eerie. Christine somehow convinced Caroline’s doctor to prescribe her a sedative to calm her down, but by the time they arrived in Rockville she was too numb to take it. She sure as hell took one before the girls got home, though.
She sat them down in the room she and Nicky shared, told them what had happened, and could actually see their hearts ripping apart. They were both so young, particularly Sophie, but they knew what death meant. As the days passed, Caroline felt herself changing. There were moments when time stood still, when the world appeared to stop turning on its axis and reality ceased to exist. She had hoped never to experience those moments again. She’d dealt with enough, or so she thought. But it had been foolish to think she could cheat life’s most harrowing experiences.
Now she had no one left. Her children were