on three different occasions while they’d been in Cambridge: His cousin Gunter’s wedding when he’d drunk too much and not eaten. Then when he’d tried to run that 5k. And finally after he’d taken a big dose of insulin in preparation for a Friendsgiving dinner and they’d gotten a flat tire on Storrow Drive.
If she hadn’t stood there in front of the goddamn Indian food in the kitchen and been angry at him, could she have saved him? There was a glucagon kit right there in the top drawer by the sink.
If she had gone right upstairs for her shower, could she have used it in time and then called 911?
The questions haunted her because her answer was always yes. Yes, she could have turned the insulin crash around. Yes, he’d still be alive. Yes, she was responsible for his death because she had been condemning him for loving his work and finding purpose in saving people’s lives.
Reopening her eyes, she looked over at the counter. She could remember, after the body was removed and the police and medics had left and the phone call to Germany made, she had told herself to eat something and shuffled toward the kitchen. The silence in the house had been so resonant that the screaming in her head felt like the kind of thing the neighbors could hear.
Entering the kitchen. Stopping dead. Seeing the two paper bags full of now utterly cold and congealed food.
Her first thought had been how foolish to worry about putting them briefly in the snow to unlock the door. They had been destined to lose their warmth.
Just like Gerry’s once vital body.
Weeping again. Shaking. Jelly legs going out from under her. She had hit the floor and cried until the doorbell had rung.
BioMed security. Two of them. Coming for the computers.
Returning to the present, Sarah shifted around and looked through the archway, past the living room, to her front door.
She had been honest with Agent Manfred. She had told him the whole story—well, minus the emotional bits like the stuff about calling Gerry’s parents and her Cold Indian Takeout Food Breakdown.
Also the part about her feeling responsible for the death—and that was not just because she didn’t want to share the intimate details of the loss with a stranger. Bottom line, it didn’t feel smart to even hint to a federal agent that she believed she might have played a role, however unintentionally, in the very thing Manfred had come to talk to her about.
Other than those two omissions, both of which were non-factual, she’d hid nothing about the natural death that had tragically occurred to a Type 1 diabetic after he had no doubt kept on his insulin schedule but forgotten to eat all day long.
Utterly heartbreaking, but a totally common, garden variety way for someone with Gerry’s condition to die.
Frowning, she thought about her statements to Manfred. Relating the this-then-that-after-which-this-other-thing-happened to the agent had been the first time she had relived Gerry’s death from start to finish. In the intervening two years, she’d had plenty of flashbacks, but they had been out of sequence, an unending supply of discordant, invasive snapshots unleashed by all manner of foreseeable and unforeseeable triggers.
But tonight had been her first full replay of the horror movie.
And that was why she now wondered, even though she had spent too many hours to count ruminating on the natural death of her fiancé …
… how it was that BioMed had known to come pick up those computers before she had told anyone at the company that Gerry was dead.
The Black Dagger Brotherhood Mansion
Caldwell, New York
Born in a bus station. Left for dead. Rescued from the human world by a stroke of luck.
If John Matthew’s life had been required to carry ID, some kind of laminated card detailing its vitals, those would be his birth date, height, and eye color.
Listed also would be mute and mated. The former didn’t really matter to him as he had never known speech. The latter was everything to him.
Without Xhex, even the war wouldn’t matter.
As he entered the King’s study—that pale blue French sanctuary which suited Wrath and the Black Dagger Brotherhood about as well as a ball gown on an alligator—he found the four walls and the silk furniture crowded with big bodies. They were all there waiting for the King, these prime males of the species, these teachers and smart-asses, these fighters and lovers.
This was his family on such a deep level that he felt like he