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We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.
— Richard Siken, “Crush”
Time is a funny thing.
Paige’s days have been slowed to an agonizing snail’s pace for weeks now—maybe that’s her brain projecting, her way of trying to absorb every bit of the horror in front of her. Maybe she’s had to slow down to capture the details of the case, to catch the men responsible for Lina’s victimization. Whatever the reason, Paige has aged years in the past two months, no matter what the mirror says.
The speed comes back when she’s kneeling on a concrete floor, rain water dripping from her hair and trailing down the curve of her spine. The sensation makes her shiver, but the motion is incomparable to the shudders that wrack Mike’s frame. She knows that she should get him on his feet, because they’re running out of time, but the way he’d jerked away from her earlier stays her hands.
He’s afraid of her. In light of his innocence, Paige can understand why. But she can fix this, or at least, she thinks she can. She can get Mike on his feet, and then she can get him to a hospital, and then she can clear his name, and then she can make things right.
And then.
And then Mike is talking—it’s better if they believe—and Paige doesn’t want to believe it, has never wanted to believe it, but the familiar ache in her chest is returning and the words keep coming—that she’s happy. That she’s in a better place. It’s better for them.
And then it’s like Paige isn’t there at all.
She’s next to Mike and then she’s in her car, back in Los Angeles, driving past the exit that would take her to FBI headquarters. She’s walking into the police precinct before she can process anything over the image of Mike throwing Lina away like garbage, like she was little more than an inconvenient piece of evidence to be tampered with and tossed aside, like she was nothing, nothing, and—
Mike Warren is hospitalized under the name Mike Richards.
She doesn’t want justice. Not the kind that the FBI doles out. She doesn’t want Mike under house arrest at Graceland while their superiors whittle his sentence down to nothing. She doesn’t want to see him walk back through the doors of Graceland with a slap on the wrist, doesn’t want to see him rot in a cell for mass murder without Lina’s name ever being uttered in court.
She wants him to burn.
Mike Richards.
Paige has always loved the view from Graceland’s living room. It had stopped her in her tracks the first time she’d walked into the house, and she’s seen it happen over and over with each new recruit. There’s something about the mixture of bright, white sand and crashing waves in the sunlight that’s relaxing, uplifting.
It’s still raining when she gets home from the precinct and is roped into one of Paul’s team meetings. No one’s talking—no one’s been talking for a while—and no one stops Paige when she goes to sit on the bench in the foyer, away from them all.
It’s raining, but when Paige looks through the blinds, she sees sunshine. She sees herself playing football with Mike and Johnny, smiling in a way that even her muscle memory has forgotten. She sees Mike, bright-eyed and laughing as he tackles her into the sand, leaving them a giggling heap on the ground. She can hear the delighted whoop he’d let out the first time he managed to catch a wave. She can see them sitting in the sand, Paige trying to convince him to open up to her, to trust her.
She doesn’t know if that man disappeared, or if he’d never existed to begin with. She can’t imagine that anyone with the capacity to burn the body of an innocent teenaged girl was ever innocent to begin with. But still, she sees the memories playing out on the beach like they’ve been projected for her viewing pleasure.
Briggs is talking, and talking, and talking, and no one seems to be buying it any more than Paige is. Alone we come untethered. No shit. They’ve all been untethered from the moment Mike walked back into Graceland. This case—they could have saved Lina. It’s Mike’s decisions, his ambition, his need to have everything instead of something—it’s that that’s torn them apart, unhooked them from each other and left them incapable of saving just one innocent girl—
We don’t guard Graceland. Graceland doesn’t guard us. We guard each other.
It’s too much. It’s bullshit—bullshit—because they are the guardians. That’s why Paige had signed up for the DEA in the first place—to protect people. To be the guardian angel that the disadvantage need, to protect innocents and innocence. They have failed. There’s no point in protecting each other, not when the kind of protection that Briggs is going on about is helping to cover up murder. They aren’t guardians anymore; they’re monsters with badges, no better than the people they catch, and it’s too much, too much, and she leaves the room, throwing a furious glare at Briggs as she does.
Briggs follows her, because of course he does, and Paige is ranting at him when it all seems to catch up to her—the failure, the grief, and the aching, cavernous guilt that seem to rise up in her throat and cut off her voice.
Lina is dead. She is dead, and the same hands that had touched Paige so gently had been used to dispose of her body. And no one cares. No one cares that Paige has been alone since she took on this case. She can see the familiar annoyance and disbelief in Paul’s face that she’s seen over and over with Johnny and Jakes. They’ve been tired of hearing about Paige’s convictions since the first time she brought it up, but she’s been right, and Mike’s confessed now. She closes her eyes and collects herself as much as she can, but the words are still broken when they hit the air.
He did it. He did it, Paul. He burned her.
She doesn’t expect sympathy, or even understanding, because she hasn’t been afforded that much in a long, long time. But Briggs raises his voice, and gets in her face, and Paige sees then what she expected the least from him: Fear. What did you do?
She’d burned him.
Briggs runs out of the house, and Paige knows exactly why. It’s been forty-five minutes since she gave Sid the name. The hospital is two hours away. It’s too late for Paul to get there before him, but maybe not too late for him to get to Mike first, if Mike isn’t out of surgery yet. If Mike had even gotten up off of the floor.
Mike is going to die, if he hasn’t already.
This is not new information, but—but she processes it, now. Mike, who took away Lina’s dignity, who gaslighted and lied to Paige, who made her feel like she was going insane, who let Lina die—he is going to die. But so is the smiling, innocent Mike who makes breakfast to apologize, who goes for runs at six in the morning and sings off-key in the shower when he gets back, who kisses her like she’s all that’s holding him in place—
He’s going to die.
And Paige is the one who will have killed him.
And just like that, the air is sucked from the room. She is both in and out of her own body, watching herself stumble back and slide down the wall, but still feeling the sharp, stabbing pain in the center of her chest as her lungs scream for air that she can’t seem to breath in. Her legs and the tips of her fingers are numb, like they don’t belong to her, and like maybe they never will again. She curls inward, forcing her head between her knees, and fights the internal mantra of he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead with breathe breathe breathe.
She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting there with her chest caving in on itself when Jakes sits down beside her and breaks the news.