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Hailey lay on the ground staring up at the sky. In her peripherals, she could see the flashing blue lights from the police vehicles arriving on scene.
She’d gotten herself out though.
And she got herself through the rest of the night. Checked out of the hospital. Been sent home finally by Voight. Sat on the couch until the sun rose up above the buildings on the horizon.
She let the hours tick past until it had been twelve.
Jay would be back at his base camp, cell phone waiting with messages she knew Torres had left.
It had hit her when an ax was about to come down on her hand that she was going to die and Jay wouldn’t even know until the next day.
Which meant she had to survive.
If she didn’t, it meant she wouldn’t get to tell him she needed him and he wasn’t there. That she had to fight tooth and nail because no one else was going to fight for her.
She looked at her silent phone, then her ring.
She took it off.
Sat it on the table.
Walked away.
It was still cold in Chicago, but she got dressed and left the apartment. She walked past the coffee shop that she and Jay stopped at every morning. She hadn’t been there since October. The pastry shop, the diner with the good eggs, and the park with the bench with a good view…all passed by because she couldn’t bear the memories.
She got to the train station and took the train to Greektown. Walked up the street and then down. Glared at the sign for Halsted where it intersected Adams, then turned to glare at the sign on the diner on the corner.
In some ways, it had all started there. The moment Officer Trudy Platt stepped through the broken out door of Nico’s Diner and told Hailey it was all going to be okay.
She was a cop because of that moment. She’d met Jay because of that moment. Without it, she wondered who she would be.
Probably still behind that counter or maybe in some law firm a thousand miles from here with no clue who Jay Halstead was and not a care in the world that he was in Bolivia within reach of a phone and not calling her.
She left Greektown behind and eventually ended up at her desk. No one was looking at her when she was looking at them, but she could feel them staring all the same.
“Go home, Hailey,” Torres told her, pressing her coat into her hands and giving her the saddest eyes of any of them in the room. She knew he knew. She caught him looking at her hand when she took her coat from him. “Please?”
She nodded and gathered her things, patting her pocket for her keys and realizing she hadn’t driven there.
“I got you,” Torres said, his voice soft and calm, like he thought she might try to bolt.
She let him usher her to his car.
“You hear from Jay?” He asked, the only thing he said on the ride to her apartment.
She shook her head. She couldn’t say it out loud.
Torres frowned and she wondered what he thought of all this. He saw everything, probably more than everything. He could catch on to those microscopic details they usually had to send things to a lab for. He had to know more than she had told him.
“I’m sorry,” he told her earnestly. “We should have found you sooner.”
She stood outside the passenger door looking in at him. Shaking her head, she said, “You weren’t the one who was supposed to come.”
That earned her an even sadder look than the one he already wore and she waved before climbing the stairs to her apartment even though all the muscles in her back and in her right hip screamed that she had just been in a car wreck and a fight for her life the day before and that earned her a ride in the elevator. She pushed on.
She knew something was off when she shoved her key into the lock and the knob turned in her hand in a way that it shouldn’t.
But, had she locked the door?
She could only remember leaving.
With stiff, rope-burned fingers, she drew her gun from the holster she still wore at her hip.
She opened the door and the smell of sandalwood and leather hit her.
A man was standing in her living room.
No, not just a man.
Jay was standing in their living room.
Head bowed, hand held palm up in front of him. Her ring sat in his palm, a dark circle against pale, calloused skin.
She lowered her gun and he looked up.
“Hailey,” he breathed, her name leaving his lips like it had been pulled from some hollow place in his chest cavity that was bloody and full of thorns.
She was stunned.
Wake up tied to a bathroom counter and she didn’t blink. See a CI with his hand in a bathtub and the stump bleeding out and she could spur herself into action. Watch a man dying from a gunshot wound to the chest and she would still try to staunch the flow of blood on instinct.
But there, with her husband standing twelve feet away in their own living room, she couldn’t move. Not an inch, not a twitch, not a breath.
“Hailey,” he said again and this time it was a sob. His hand closed around her ring, engulfing it.
She thought she would feel a lot of things. Anger. Frustration. Sadness.
She felt numb. She felt like a stranger was standing in front of her with tears in his eyes and face she should know as well as her own.
He might as well have still been in Bolivia for how wide the distance felt between them.
“I-“ he started, shook his head, closed his mouth.
Closing the door, she hung up her coat and walked to the kitchen. There was beer in the fridge and whiskey on the counter. She would drink them if she thought it would help, but she’d tried that and it never really did.
Instead she poured a glass of water, paused a moment, then poured a second. She pushed it across the counter to him without looking at him. He didn’t take it.
“Torres called,” he finally said.
She nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out.
Apologies felt hollow. Excuses felt contrived. She just wanted to know what was happening.
“Are you going to talk to me?” She asked him.
He pursed his lips and anguish filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks with his tears.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
Anger stabbed through her heart. “I don’t need apologies.”
“I don’t know what to say,” he whispered, his voice strained and weak.
Frustration swarmed through her chest. “Just tell me what is going on. Tell me anything.”
“I can’t.” His voice broke.
Sadness washed over her, dampening the ache in her heart and the sting in her chest.
“Why?” She pleaded with him.
There had been times she had been there herself. Times when she looked at the man she trusted more than anything and couldn’t verbalize her pain because fear had stitched the words to her tongue.
Fear that he would leave if he saw all of her laid bare for him to see.
But he had already left.
She didn’t fear driving him away anymore.
He could leave and she would survive.
She already had.
He crossed his arms over his chest, hand still fisted with her ring nestled inside. He looked away from her.
“You-you aren’t my keeper,” he mumbled, sounding more like he was repeating a threadbare mantra than explaining himself.
“No,” she agreed. “I’m your wife.”
His entire body heaved like it had taken a punch, caving in at the chest and shoving the breath from his lungs.
“I wanted to be fine on my own,” he told her. “I wasn’t supposed to-to burden you. Not like this.”
She had blood on her hands. Lee was dead at her feet. If she wanted to survive, she had to leave him behind. Facing her captors, she turned to stone. She was going to save herself because no one was coming for her.
It had been a moment that broke something loose in her. Standing there with zip ties around her wrists and a gun in the hands of one captor and an ax in the hands of the other, she was the strongest person in the room. She had to be.
She still was.
“I don’t know how not to lean on you,” he said, voice wretched. “Not without shutting myself off from you and I thought-“
He swallowed hard and shook his head. She remained quiet and waited for him. She’d been waiting for months. She was well practiced at it by this point.
“I thought-“ he stumbled over the words. “I thought-“
Now she could see the anger he struggled against within himself play across his face. The frustration in the ticking muscle of his jaw as the words refused to come. The sadness at the end that was inevitable.
“Jay,” she said and waited for him to look her in the eye. “Where you go, I go.”
The muscles at the corner of his mouth spasmed and he turned his face away. In profile, she could see the way his bottom lip quivered.
Her own lip throbbed, a reminder of the day before when she still thought she could save both herself and Lee. When she still thought she could beg Jay enough that he might finally try to let her help him. She’d gotten nothing but silence from both of them.
“Is that fair to you?” He asked, barely audible. “That you would have to hold me up when I don’t even know who I am anymore? I’ve lost myself, Hailey. I tried to do it on my own. I tried to- and what I became- It wasn’t me.”
Her fingers itched to reach for him, but he was still so far away.
He opened his palm and looked at the ring there. “I thought I wouldn’t be able to find myself again here, around Voight, the unit, Chicago-“
“Me?” She added.
He nodded, head hung, and closed his hand around the ring again.
She wondered how he saw it. Did he think she led him down this path that was littered with blackmail and lies when she knew he would follow her? Did he blame himself for following?
Was this her fault?
“Hailey, I don’t regret anything I had to do to protect you,” he told her, quiet voice vehement. “I don’t blame you.”
“Then why?” She asked.
“I felt like I was falling and I didn’t want to pull you down with me. Not if I couldn’t pull myself back out of it,” he said, voice becoming steadier than it had since she walked in. “I already saw it happen once.”
She remembered the night spent working instead of waking him up and spilling all her secrets in the dark of the night. She remembered the way it shredded her until it rose to the surface, welling up with her blood in open wounds.
“I left because if I stayed,” he paused, gathering him. “If I stayed, I was afraid I would pull you back down. We had finally gotten back to solid ground, I thought. We’d gotten past the stuff with North and we were happy. Then Anna and-“
He stopped again and Hailey felt things fall into place.
“Then I shot Anna,” she concluded. “Like I shot Roy.”
He shook his head. “Then Voight got Anna killed and I should have stopped it. I was supposed to-after Roy-I was supposed to stop it from happening again.”
Confusion fogged her thoughts. He had never told her any of this.
“What do you mean?” She asked, seeking clarity.
“I told him we would work together. No more lies. Keep everything clean. And she still died. I couldn’t stop any of it,” he said, words wavering along their syllables. “I tried to take it on instead and I thought I could handle it. I couldn’t.”
Guilt was something Hailey understood well. She had more than enough of it. More than anyone should.
“What if I pulled you down with me? What if I was like him ?”
She knew he meant Voight. They both had their relationship with him. Good. Bad. And so, so, ugly.
She realized finally whose feet he really laid the blame at for Roy, for Anna, for who he became.
“I wanted to be. I wanted to not feel like this at the end of a case. I wanted to be fine, but I’m not. I’m still not.” He crumpled them, falling until his head was tucked between his knees and he was curled in on himself. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She walked around the counter, kneeled in front of him, pulled his head to her chest. This is where they should have been in October.
“I didn’t want to make you hide things for me, not like he did to you,” he pushed the words out and they sounded painful. “I couldn’t let you do it. I didn’t trust myself with you anymore.”
His back heaved and shuddered as she pressed her hand along her shoulders, weaving her other hand through his short hair, holding him closer.
“I was trying to protect you,” he said with a sob. “I thought I was protecting you.”
“Jay,” she said, scratching her nails at the nape of his neck. “I can handle myself. And so can you.”
She knew she could pull herself through if she had to. And so could he. How many times had they proven that now?
He nodded into her neck, cool tears on his cheeks raising goosebumps in their wake.
“We were supposed to do it together,” she told him. “You didn’t let me.”
He pulled back, wiped his eyes on his arm. He held up the ring, the little black ring that she had taken off because she realized she needed to protect herself if he wasn’t going to.
They had miscommunicated somewhere along the line. He had. She wouldn’t let him slip away from that.
But if he was there…maybe she didn’t have to make a clean break.
Maybe they could come back.
“Am I too late?” He asked, eyes searching hers, open in a way he hadn’t been in a long, long time.
She studied him. The freckles on his face. The pale green of his eyes. The way he held in to her so tight.
She shook her head. “No.”
But it had been close.