the pieces seemed to fit together. Possibly.
I felt a strange twinge of worry. Not that DeStasio deserved it.
“It just hit me, right now, that DeStasio might be addicted to painkillers,” I said then, out loud.
My mom looked over. “Why?”
I walked her through my thinking.
“That’s a pretty good list,” she said.
“Maybe I should go check on him this afternoon,” I said.
“You want to go check on the guy who stalked you, lied about you, and ended your career?” she said.
“I’d been planning to go over there anyway,” I said, nodding at the turn of events. “But the plan was to yell at him.”
“Maybe you could bring him some soup instead.”
Safe to say, I had a lot of mixed emotions toward DeStasio at that moment. But I knew him too well to just decide he was evil and leave it at that. It was unequivocally not okay that he was taking it all out on me, but I could know that and also know that he was in pain. Both could be true at the same time.
I wasn’t sure if he deserved my compassion, but I did know I wanted to be the kind of person who would offer it. It’s not the easy moments that define who we are. It’s the hard ones.
DeStasio was clearly at the end of his rope. The addiction, the losses. There was nothing left of his life but smoldering rubble. I tried to imagine being him—being in that situation—and then having somebody like me show up at the department to break apart the last bricks in the foundation.
In his shoes, I might have made some bad choices, too.
Though probably not that bad.
“I think,” I said carefully, “that I’ve got a workable plan. First I’ll go over and punch him in the jaw. Then I’ll force him to stand face-to-face with his cruel, stupid behavior and hold him accountable. Then I’ll give him some homemade soup. Just to cover all the bases.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Diana said.
I glanced over and shook my head.
“What are you going to do after you yell at him—before you give him the soup?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think you do know,” Diana said, setting her little bird on the dashboard. Then she reached over, put a hand on mine, and said, “You’re going to forgive him.”
I shook my head. “I’m still bad at forgiveness,” I said.
“Well, then,” she said. “This is a great chance to practice.”
Twenty-eight
DESTASIO DID NOT answer his door.
I stood on his porch with a massive thermos of beef-and-vegetable soup on my hip, and I knocked and knocked.
Something didn’t feel right. His sedan was parked carefully in the driveway.
I set the soup down on the steps and went to the window to peer in.
The inside was dark. The place was a mess—papers everywhere, trash, several meals’ worth of old plates of food on the dining table. Suspicions about DeStasio’s quality of life confirmed: He was not doing well.
That’s when I spotted him at the far end of the living room, laying back in a recliner.
He wasn’t just ignoring me. He was unconscious. The skin around his lips was blue.
When you’ve seen it enough times, you just know.
He’d OD’d.
I ran to grab the trauma kit in my car, and then, before I broke out the window, I went ahead and tried the front door. It was unlocked. Something a firefighter would do—make it easy for the medics when they discovered the body.
I got to him in seconds, and he was bluer up close than he had seemed from the window. There was a note on the table next to him with two words on it: I’m sorry.
I started an IV push of Narcan, which is an antidote to opiates. It’s amazing stuff, really. Seconds after you give it, the patient wakes up—a little groggy, but completely fine. If you give it in time.
That’s what happened with DeStasio.
He opened his eyes. Blinked a second. Took a few deep breaths.
It was that easy.
Then he looked at me. “What are you doing here?”
“Saving your life,” I said. “Apparently.”
I picked up his note and showed it to him. If I’d had my mother’s origami skills, I might have made it into a bird.
“That’s private,” DeStasio said.
Underneath the note was a sealed envelope addressed to Captain Jerry Murphy. I stared at it for a second as I took note of his handwriting: The T in “Captain” looked like an X.
It was one thing to have guessed it, but quite another to know for sure. I felt a