Page 79 of Solanum

"Tolerable. I was going to check on her…"

"Sali still gone?"

She nodded, both of us falling into an uncomfortable quiet for a few seconds.

"Nora's asleep right now."

"Harper said she's not eating much…"

"She's not. Or talking."

"How are you with all of this?" she asked, her brow wrinkling with concern.

"Trying not to think too far back or ahead," I admitted, shrugging with it. "She let's me hold her while she cries. She does the same with Anita, somewhat."

Miller's lips pressed to thin lines in a way I'd witnessed the first time we met to discuss her reopening of the Four Point case a few years back. Anger, fiery anger, burned beneath the surface of her deadly expression. There was something militant about it, about her, in the way she stood there with her frozen, expression.

"A long time ago, when I first met Sali, she told me that she didn't coin Clark the Four Point Killer because of the positions of the bodies like everyone assumes," she began, her gaze flickering to mine. I listened to her while the tingles of emotions fired out across my nerve endings. "She said because he killed them. Her team. All four of them in different ways. Stevens' suicide, Ben's marked losses and alcoholism, Gonzalez's career, and Sali's entire existence. All four of them died in a way that ended who they were."

"Yeah…" I tucked my hands into the pockets of jeans. "They did."

"I was so determined to not have that happen again. To finally close this case, once and for all without anymore casualties." Her hands balled to fists briefly.

"You did end that case," I said, glancing to the door beside me. "This is a new one."

"And it's killing us just as badly." Miller's eyes welled up for the briefest moment. "Nora. And Sali and Ben again. Now you."

"We can't think like that, Miller. We can't go back and change things. We have what we have in the moment that we have it. Nora is suffering right now, we all are. But it's up to us how we handle it." I motioned to the door again. "Nora's in a bad place, and I might be, too, but I'm not about to let this situation win. I can't. And I won't."

She nodded, drawing in a slow breath after. "Trying."

"Come in and sit with us," I said, opening the door for her. "Right now, that's what we can do."

She sniffled, taking a swipe at her nose. "How are you so rational right now?"

I smirked at the comment. "Nora always says that to me."

"Not surprised."

"I've got nothing else left sometimes save for rationality." I turned and led her back into the room.

In the days that passed, more chaos ensued when Perkins' obsession with James and her survivorship made itself known. His traitorous team up with Scott Alexander Clark made headline news, particularly when he escaped during extradition from Canada briefly. James took him down, bare-handed after he shot her sister. Bloodshed touched all of us in waves of torment that none of us could even begin to process.

I felt like an observer to it all, an outsider to so much pain. Except this time, I didn't have the rally of thousands behind me to do something about it. With Perkins' death, and our worlds simultaneously turned upside down, none of us knew where to go.

Nora refused to leave Sali's house, downright rejected any suggestion of returning to her condo, and holed up in the guestroom for days on end.

With Miller and Harper on the mend, Harper and Sali back to their twin shenanigans, and people filling up the James residence day in and day out, I found myself growing more comfortable with the presence of the people who helped Nora and extinguished the greatest threat to her wellbeing. Nora hardly spoke to me most days, but she didn't seem to mind my presence in the room.

I stood in James' kitchen one morning alone, a cup of tea in my hand thrust there by Harper, staring at my boots against her pristine floors. Stomping feet ascended from the basement, and a sweaty Sali emerged. With a form so slight, my memories flickered to the scene of her final takedown of Perkins. Screaming over her injured sister, blood pooling around them, and a dead madman with a twisted neck, his face frozen against the shattered mirror. The horror of it all never quite settled in me until I finally saw at her that morning. Unexpectedly powerful wasn't the appropriate description of her because it wasn't about power at all. Sali's sheer force of her own will and her determination carrier her through everything.

"What's got your boxers in a bind there, Donovan?"

"Little bit of everything." My gaze flickered over her well-muscled form glistening with sweat. "You're looking particularly badass."

"I am particularly badass." She shrugged and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. "You look constipated."

"Emotionally."

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