25. Emily

Rachel's funeral is on a Wednesday. Birds sing high in the oak trees overlooking the shady burial plot as her parents stand near the casket, her mother sobbing into her stoic father's shoulder. I didn't know she had so many friends—there must be fifty or a hundred people crowded around the cemetery. Danny's wearing a good suit, his head bowed, his eyes red-rimmed. A part of me is angry that he's here, that asshole was never good to Rachel when she was alive, but I don't get to monopolize loss. He's going to grieve too. He's got his own demons and his own questions to answer.

I feel like I'm moving in fits and starts. Time slows to a syrupy crawl then jolts forward. One moment, I'm listening to the priest, the next Rachel's casket is in the ground, then I'm standing stiffly as Simon puts his arm around my shoulders. Then we're in the back of his car and I'm staring out the window trying to remember how I got here, and wondering where Rachel is, because for a second, I'd forgotten what happened, but of course she's in the ground now. They buried her casket a half hour ago. I watched it sink down beneath the dirt, and my face is wet with tears that I don't recall crying, and then we're in the oasis again.

None of this makes sense. I don't know how Rachel's gone. She'd been so alive, so loud and excited, with a thousand different dreams. One day she came in talking about going back to nursing school. The next she wanted to become a paralegal. There was the bartending phase, the beauty school, the traveling salesman, teaching English overseas. She wanted to marry Danny and pump out his babies. She wanted to give them alliterative names: John, Jane, Jackson, Jessica. I'll never sit outside with her and drink a Diet Coke while she smokes a cigarette and gossips about the other servers ever again. I'll never laugh until I cry over some absurd story, some impossible situation she got herself in over the weekend, like the time she stole a traffic cone and tried to bring it home on the subway only for a cop to yell at her and make her take it all the way back to the worksite. She had a million stories, and they died with her.

Simon leads me into the house, sits me down on the couch, and brings me a glass of wine. I take long sips and stare at the far wall, trying to come to grips with my friend's death and finding it impossible. She was too young. She was too alive.

"You know what I keep thinking about?" I don't look at my husband as I speak. I should hate him for what happened, but I don't. There's just a cold numbness where my rage used to be. "If I hadn't married you, I would've been there that night. We always closed together."

He sits next to me, his knee touching mine. "You can't think that way."

"But it's true. If we hadn't gotten married, I would've been there, and maybe it would've been me instead of her."

He takes my hand and squeezes it. I look at him, wondering how a creature like my husband could possibly care how a tiny, insignificant little speck of dust like me feels. And yet his face is etched in pain. It's a livid mural of agony.

"Don't you dare start saying you blame yourself for what happened." His voice is hard, almost husky. It's dripping with emotion.

"I could've helped. If I'd been there?—"

"None of this is your fault." He looks angry, and I don't understand why. I try to pull my hand away, but he doesn't release me. "This happened because of me."

"I know that," I say, speaking softly, because it's true. On some level, I know this happened because of him. But from what I heard, he tried to save her, he did everything he possibly could to keep her alive, and it still wasn't enough.

"No, baby," he whispers, jaw flexing as he says it. "I went after one of Santoro's scam call centers. I killed one of his managers. The attack on Cucina was a direct response to my provocation. It was my fault. I made that happen."

I feel like my feet are dunked in Arctic waters. I'm frozen, numb, unable to move. I try to map out what he just told me, try to make the connections between words and phrases, but my brain isn't working.

"Santoro has scam call centers?" I manage to ask. I barely recognize my own voice. I'm drifting on an ocean, blowing away on a kite string.

"He's been at it for years. It's one of his main income streams. When you told me about what happened to your dad, it pissed me off so fucking much, because there are dozens of people like him every day getting ripped off and ruined, and I just snapped. I put together a team and we raided one of his offices, and I pulled the trigger on that manager. I'm the one that made the choice. If I hadn't, I don't think Santoro would've attacked Cucina."

It washes over me in a wave. Simon struck first. But he only went out there because of the story I told him. It's so easy for me to find a way to blame myself, to bend the world straight back to me. I can drown myself in responsibility.

Simon did that for me.

I try to pull away. This time, I wrench my hand free and stand, pacing away. "Then it's still my fault," I say, finding all the cracks and flaws in his story and digging my nails into them. If I could rip my own skin off my body, I would. I'd flay myself to the muscle, just to bleed some of this guilt away. "I made you go. It was me from the start."

"No, baby, you're wrong." He sounds like I'm breaking his heart. "This fight with Santoro was going to happen no matter what. It was ramping up long before you came into my life. I'm trying to make you understand that if it wasn't the call center, it would've been something else, and it always would've been my fault. What happened to Rachel is on me. I couldn't protect her."

I put my face in my hands and take deep breaths. "It's like you want me to hate you. Do you want me to hate you?"

"Not even a little bit." He gets up and comes toward me. I back away. "But I want to make sure you don't hate yourself, either. If that means redirecting all your anger toward me, then fine. I can suffer through it. But you've done so much for the people around you already, and I don't want you to take what happened to Rachel onto yourself. You did nothing wrong."

"Then you're right. I should hate you instead." I rub my eyes and try to summon the energy to feel anything but this bottomless pit of grieving, except there's nothing left in me. I don't hate him, even if I should. I know he would've given anything to keep Rachel alive. I know he never imagined Santoro would attack Cucina. I still can't stop myself from wondering if I could've done something more to save her.

"Go ahead, baby," he says, advancing on me. "Put your blame on me. Don't suffer for what I did. Hate me. I can handle it."

"Simon," I whisper, backing away from him, staring as he keeps coming, big and sleek, prowling like a beast, like a hungry panther in his expensive suit. He's a monster, a well-groomed animal.

"Just don't blame yourself. That's all I'm asking. Rachel didn't deserve what happened to her, and I'm so fucking sorry that it happened. I swear to you, I'm going to hunt down every single Santoro bastard?—"

I shake my head as I bump up against the wall. He's there, his right palm on the side of my face, and my hands push into his chest to hold him back from crushing me.

"I don't want that," I whisper, trying not to cry again. "Please don't escalate because of me."

"I'm going to escalate because he killed an innocent civilian. I took out one of his managers, but that guy was in Santoro's organization. He retaliated by murdering a fucking waitress. It went too far."

I pull in a breath through my nose. "That's all that ever matters, isn't it? You two are going to burn down this city because of your pride? You hit, he hits back, on and on forever because nobody can step back from the brink."

He looks almost sad as his hand slips across my face and back into my hair. I tilt my chin up, trying to summon defiance, and all I feel is tired.

I can already see how this war is going to go. Simon won't ever stop. He'll kill and kill until either Santoro is finished or he's dead too. The only way to escape this terminal plummet is to hit the ground in a fiery, cataclysmic explosion. But I want to save him, and I want to save everyone, but I don't see how that can possibly happen.

There will be more Rachels. There will be a dozen, two dozen, a thousand dead innocents because Simon doesn't know anything but violence.

And I'm just some girl. I couldn't help him, even if I tried.

"I'm going to kill because that's how I'll keep everyone else safe," he whispers, and damn if I almost believe him. "You don't have to approve of what I'm going to do. I know you never will. But I'm doing what's best for my family."

"I'm your family," I say, my lips parting. "I'm your wife. What if I begged you to let it go? What if I asked you not to fight?"

His expression twists and he shakes his head. "Sorry, baby. That's one thing I can't ever give you." He leans forward and his lips brush my chin. I shiver, and a spark of a new emotion kindles. The feeling of his mouth on my skin is divine, and so what if I'm a mess right now? So what if my friend is dead and Simon thinks he's to blame? I want to forget. I want to feel something more than this steady, thumping emptiness in my chest.

I get up on my toes and kiss him. Softly, on the corner of his mouth. He seems surprised and goes very still.

"I'm your wife," I say again, and this time it means something very different. It's a promise and an invitation to make a huge mistake with me.

"You're my wife," he says. I kiss his lips and stare at him. We're inches apart and his eyes look so damn hungry. "You should hate me."

He's probably right. I should hate him for what happened.

"I don't." I kiss him a third time. I don't know what I'll do if this doesn't work, and I'm starting to wonder if he's about to reject me. "You're my husband."

"I'm your husband," he agrees and there's a low, almost pained groan in his throat as he pulls me against him, one hand on my lower back, the other in my hair. "Tell me you want this."

"I've wanted you since the day you found me under that desk." I've also been afraid of him, and I've hated him, and I've wanted to get close to him a thousand times over. "Don't overthink this."

His lips part. "We shouldn't."

"I want to."

"Yeah, baby," he says with a strangled sigh. "I do too."

Then he kisses me, and his time his mouth opens and mine opens too, and his tongue brushes past my teeth, and I'm completely lost to him.