Page 12 of The Company We Keep

"What happened to Wayles?" she asked. He could hear her moving. Good. She'd be headed over without protest, then.

"He's going to need to be sedated," Carrow said. "He's not going to take it well."

"I'd imagine none of you are," McBride pointed out. He hadn't thought that far ahead.

"No," he said. "I'd imagine not."

A week later, the penthouse still felt like a tomb.

Leta did her best with Wayles. They all did. McBride had left them with several stashes of sedatives, fearing that Wayles would probably flush the bottle she'd given directly to him.

She'd been right. He started out hysterical, then furious. All of that manic energy that normally made him buoyant was channeled into raging at the rest of them — at Vashvi for losing sight of Nick, at Herron for not getting there faster, and at Leta for having the audacity to try and tell him that he'd get over this someday.

But most of his anger was saved for Carrow.

Carrow, who had put them on the stupid heist. Carrow, who had ordered Coffee to take him to the house instead of the scene of the blast. Carrow, who had paid McBride to sedate him against his will.

"You didn't let me say goodbye," he insisted when he came to, and again and again in the days that followed. "He was my brother and you didn't let me say goodbye."

Nick Short was not Wayles' blood brother. Their families weren't even from the same country. But what they'd shared was more than blood brothers did. Family by choice — an alliance that went to Wayles' core. And wouldn't that be worse, Carrow thought, than losing someone who was just a happenstance of biology?

No, he hadn't let Wayles say goodbye. McBride had sedated him before he was allowed to see Nick. Their demolitions expert died in the back of Carrow's black sedan on the way to the safehouse, but none of them would tell Wayles that. It wasn't a good death — sputtering and bleeding out on expensive leather seats while your boss kept his eyes on the road.

Together they crafted a better death for him — not for Nick's sake but for his brother's. Nick died in the safehouse and it was peaceful, Nick told them to take care of Russell Wayles, who he loved.

Leta, Vashvi, Herron, the doctor — they were all complicit in this lie. They wove their own versions of the narrative together. Vashvi remembered the last joke he told her. Leta recalled how peaceful he looked in the moments before he went. Herron talked about Nick's very last shiteating grin.

But he'd just been a corpse by the time they made it to the safehouse, to McBride. Their doctor became a coroner, and Nick's friends became co-conspirators and storytellers. McBride did her best to clean him up while Wayles sucked deep, unconscious breaths in the adjoining room with Coffee standing guard at the door. None of them cried just yet because they needed to get their stories straight before Wayles came to.

In a hasty meeting held in the kitchen at the dingy safehouse, Carrow told The Company that Nick was in too rough of shape to let Wayles even see his body, even after McBride had stitched him up and washed all of the blood off of him. He was too mangled — his body puffed strangely and the wrong hues all over.

Leta and Herron had agreed but Vashvi had let her tears flow then, calling them cruel, calling Carrow a "paternalistic bullshitter" and striding from the room, angry and embarrassed with herself for crying.

"I'll talk to her," Herron said gently before following her out.

Leta, Carrow, and McBride were left, all staring at fixed points so that they would not have to look at one another. Vashvi and Wayles hadn't lost a friend like this — not before Nick. The rest of them had.

Carrow had lost entire crews.

He knew that there was a perverse mercy in not letting Wayles say goodbye to his brother. It was better not to see the people you lost at all. He knew from rotten experience, from nightmares that still seized him, that the image of a corpse was like a solar eclipse. It blocked and burned all of your good memories of a person until all that there was in the weeks after they died was that wrecked corpse that, you eventually realized, had nothing to do with the person you had loved.

How would Herron be able to explain that to sweet Vashvi? How would Wayles believe that this was a mercy when he'd never had to live through anything like it before?

He steeled himself against it. It couldn't be his concern.

So in the week after they lost Nick, Carrow allowed himself to grow weary of Wayles' railing against him. He snapped at the kid as he tried to read Carrow the riot act. He met anger with anger. The alternative was too devastating: go soft with Wayles and he would go soft with all of them and the years of hardness would catch up to him all at once.

He made himself scarce, and on the night when Leta found him alone on the roof during the following week, he listened to her unburden herself. He listened to her recount how Wayles had nightmares, how he had to be coaxed and bargained with before he would take his sedatives, and how Leta worried that something essential was broken in him now.

How they may have to replace their security and tech specialist along with their ballistics man.

"No," Carrow said. Leta gave him a shocked look, as if he had slapped her. He never said no to her. "That's too much to lose. Wayles is our family."

She seemed to process this. Had she really interpreted his coldness as anything but necessary? Had she really thoughtthat he would be open to letting someone from The Companygo?

The Company was not a thing you quit. You went the way Nick went — or you didn’t go at all.

Finally, she nodded. She worked it out. She agreed.

---