The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 14: Whatever Is Left

I said it again, start to finish, and it was easier the second time. That scared me a little.

The older agent’s name was Hollis. He had a gray crew cut and the patient face of a man who’d spent thirty years listening to people explain themselves. He didn’t interrupt. When I got to the part about the three states, he slid a legal pad across the table, and I wrote out the names of the banks from memory, because Victor’s memory was a ledger and he’d never once forgotten a number.

“Mr. Lang,” Marsh said, from the end of the table. His voice had lost its warmth. “I’m advising you, as your counsel, to stop talking.”

“You’re the company’s counsel,” I said. “Not mine.”

“Victor.”

“I waive it, Dennis.”

Hollis glanced at the other agent and back at me. “That’s a lot of money in accounts we didn’t know about.”

“Twenty-two million of it hasn’t been touched.” I pushed the pad toward him. “I couldn’t make myself spend it. I don’t know what that says about me.”

“It says,” Hollis said slowly, “that you may have just made my week.”

I felt the pen go still in my hand. Twenty-two million. Twenty-two out of forty-one, sitting in accounts waiting for somebody honest to open them. It wasn’t everything. But it was a retiree’s grocery money for a long time, and I’d gotten it that far because a man in a gray room had never been able to bring himself to spend it.

Priya hadn’t moved. She was staring at the table like she was reading something in the grain of the wood.

Hollis stood and said they’d need me to come with them. I nodded. When I stood too, the room swung slightly to the left, and I put my hand on the back of the chair.

“I’d like a minute,” I said. “With her.”

Hollis gave us the corridor. He and the other man stood fifteen feet away with their backs politely turned, and Marsh went past us without a word, looking like a man who’d just remembered he had somewhere else to be. The marble lobby stretched out behind Priya. She stood with her arms crossed so tight it looked like she was holding herself together.

“Six weeks,” she said.

“I know.”

“I asked you. In the hallway on the fourth floor. I said Mr. Lang, my name’s on all of these, I think something’s wrong. And you put your hand on my shoulder and said it would sort itself out.” Her voice shook, but it didn’t break. “I believed you. I went home and I told my mother not to worry. I did that. I let her not worry.”

“Priya—”

“I didn’t sleep. I’d lie there at three in the morning thinking, maybe I did it. Maybe I clicked the wrong thing. Maybe I’m so stupid I stole forty million dollars and didn’t notice.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, hard, like she was angry at the tears. “That’s what you did to me.”

I didn’t say I’m sorry. It would have sounded like a man buying his way out of the room. I said what was actually true.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

She looked at me for a long moment. I took it. It wasn’t mine to hold up. Victor’s face was a shield he’d built for thirty years, and I let it fall.

“I don’t forgive you,” she said.

“I wouldn’t, either.”

“I’m still going to say thank you, and I hate that.” Her mouth twisted. “I hate that you didn’t do it six weeks ago.”

“So do I.”

She nodded. Then something changed in her face. Her gaze dropped to my hand, and I realized it had come up to my chest and was pressed flat against the lapel, the fingers curled in.

“Mr. Lang,” she said. “You’re gray.”

I opened my mouth to say it was nothing.

The fist came down on me all at once.

It wasn’t like the elevator. In the elevator it had been pressure, a tightness. This was a hand reaching through my ribs and closing around the whole organ. The corridor lost its edges. White marble tilted toward me, and my left arm went numb and heavy and strange, and I heard a thin, high sound that I understood, from a long way off, was me.

I was on the floor. I didn’t remember going down. The marble was cold against my cheek.

Priya’s face swam into focus above me, enormous and terrified. She was saying something, over and over, and then she was yelling over her shoulder, a sound with no words in it, and feet came pounding across the lobby.

“Nitro,” I got out. “Pocket. Left.”

Her hands were shaking so badly she dropped the bottle twice. When she got it open she shook a tablet into her palm and held it out, and I took it under my tongue, and the room went white at the edges and stayed there.

“Stay with me,” she was saying. “Stay with me, stay with me, they’re coming, they’re coming.”

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not. Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare do this to me, you don’t get to just...”

She was crying again, and she was furious about it, and her hand had come down to grip mine, hard, as if she were holding a rope.

I understood something then that I hadn’t, up on the roof. She was twenty-six. She’d spent six weeks believing she’d destroyed her own life, and the one person who could clear her was dying in front of her before he finished. I could hear it in the way she said dare.

“Phone,” I said. “Leanne. Please.”

She pulled Victor’s phone from my pocket and thumbed the screen, and I watched her read the thread, six weeks of one-sided messages stacked up like unopened mail. Please just call me. Vic, I’m worried. I don’t know what’s happening. I love you. Just tell me what’s wrong.

Priya’s face went soft. Not forgiving. Something older than that.

She pressed the call button and held it to my ear.

It rang twice. Then a click, and a breath, and a voice thick with sleep and sudden fear, a woman’s voice, with a Midwestern edge:

“Vic?”

The marble was very cold. The white was closing in. Far off, an ambulance siren had started up, the way a wind comes before a storm, and I knew, in the part of me that was still keeping count, that this was the last real conversation Victor Lang was ever going to have.

“Lee,” I said. “I need to tell you something.”