awake.”
Allie twisted her sheet in her right hand and looked down. “Did I talk about Dad?”
“You did.”
Allie looked up at Mom’s face. The care lines were back, deeper than ever. She looked exhausted. “What did I say?” “You said a lot of things.” She pressed her lips into a thin, pale line for a moment.
“You said that he made you lie. You said you… you said something about his death.”
“That it was my fault?” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Yes.”
Allie gulped her coffee, as if the hot liquid would make it easier to speak. It merely scalded her mouth and throat.
She coughed and took a deep breath. “It was my fault. I was driving.”
There. It was out there. It was finally, finally out there. After all these years, the truth sat out in the open like a boulder that she had finally dropped from her shoulders. But would that boulder forever block the path that connected her and Mom?
Mom stared at Allie for several seconds, her mild eyes filled with pain. She pinched them shut. “Oh, Allie. You’ve carried that all these years.”
Mom bowed her head, and Allie could see tears falling into her lap.
Allie felt her own eyes fill and her throat swell. “Dad made me promise not to tell you. He said you wouldn’t understand. He wanted me to blame him, so I did and… and…” Her words dissolved into sobs.
“He was trying to protect you.”
She nodded and buried her face in her sheets. Waves of agony swept over her. This was like having surgery done on her soul with no anesthetic.
“Allie, who is Jason Tompkins?”
She looked up and saw the reproach and fear in her mother’s face. “I talked about him too?”
Mom nodded.
Allie took another sip of her coffee to calm herself. “Mom, there are some other things you should know. Actually, there are a lot of things.”
For the next hour, Allie talked and her mother listened. Mom stopped crying but didn’t otherwise react. She just sat there and absorbed what her daughter was saying with a blank look.
Allie filled in all the secret gaps in her life: Erik’s meth use, Jason Tompkins’s death, Blue Sea’s blackmail, her fraud at Deep Seven, why she ran away, why she came back. Everything.
Then she reached the end and fell silent. It had been surprisingly easy. Once the first big confession was out, it was as if the cork was out of the bottle. She could pour it all out, and she had. Now she felt empty.
The two women sat quietly. The monitor beside the bed beeped softly and a bird sang outside the window.
Allie drained the cold dregs of her coffee. Awful stuff, even for a hospital. “I suppose you hate me now. It’s okay—pretty much everyone I know hates me. I even hate me. I deserve it.”
Mom reached over and took her hand where it lay on the damp sheet. “Oh, Allie. I don’t hate you. I love you, sweetheart. I just… it’s as if you’ve been a complete stranger and I just found out about it. I, I don’t quite know what to think. But I don’t hate you.” She smiled and patted Allie’s hand. “And I don’t think that Mr. Norman hates you either. He’s been in here every day for at least an hour.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. We had some good conversations about you.”
“What did—”
A sharp knock at the door interrupted her. Nurse Perky was back, and she had brought an equally chipper doctor with her. “Well, I understand you’re feeling better, Allison.”
She thought for a moment. “You know, I think I am.”
68
KIM TAE-WOO, KNOWN TO MOST PEOPLE IN THE WEST AS CHO DAE- jung or David Cho, lay in his hospital bed, watching the ceiling. During the battle on the dock, he had suffered a superficial bullet wound, smoke inhalation, and some cuts and bruises. The smoke inhalation left him short of breath and prone to coughing fits, but he was getting better. He suspected that he could be released soon—if the Americans had any intention of releasing him.
He doubted they would. Two heavily armed guards stood inside the door, and whenever it opened he could see more men outside. As soon as he was well, he expected to be moved to a high-security prison somewhere. Perhaps Guantanamo or wherever the Americans kept terrorists these days.
That was all right. He had been prepared for much worse fates when he took this mission: torture, death, life in prisons much worse than Guantanamo. The Americans probably wouldn’t even