Three weeks later, Richard Cross wakes up.
That's how Chen puts it when she calls at seven in the morning. He woke up. Like he just had a long nap. Like the man didn't spend twenty-one days in a medically induced coma following emergency surgery for a gunshot wound he received while trying to grab his own infant granddaughter.
I'm standing in the kitchen of the house we're renting in a small town forty minutes outside Missoula. It's not the house I described to Damien in the cab. Not yet. That house is a future thing, something we've talked about in the careful way you talk about things you want so badly you're afraid to want them too loudly.
But this house has a yard. And breakfast in the morning. And Hope in a high chair making architectural decisions about her oatmeal while Damien drinks coffee and reads emails and looks, for the first time in the entire time I've known him, like a man who is not bracing for impact.
Or he did. Before the call.
