Cross (Alex Cross 12)

Her voice trailed off. I smoothed her hair and put the back of my hand against her cheek. I’ve seen how fragile life can be, but it’s not something you ever get used to, and it’s different when it’s somebody you care for, when it sticks this close to home.

“Will you stay with me, Alex? Until I fall asleep? Don’t go.”

It was her young girl’s voice again. Kayla had never seemed as vulnerable to me as she did right then, in that fleeting moment in the recovery room. My heart broke for her and what had happened when she was trying to do some good out there.

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

Chapter 77

“I’VE BEEN DEPRESSED FOR A WHILE, as you know. You of all people know this.”

“More than ten years. That’s a while, I guess, Alex.”

I sat across from my favorite doctor, my personal shrink, Adele Finaly. Adele is also my mentor from time to time. She’s the one who encouraged me to start up my practice again, and she even got me a couple of patients. “Guinea pigs,” she likes to call them.

“I need to tell you a few things that are bothering me a lot, Adele. This may require several hours.”

“No problem.” She shrugged. Adele has light-brown hair and is in her early forties, but she doesn’t seem to have aged since we met. She isn’t married right now, and every so often I think about the two of us together, but then I push it out of my mind. Way too dumb, too crazy.

“As long as you can fit several hours

of your bullshit into fifty minutes,” she continued, ever the wise girl, which is exactly the right tone to take with me.

“I can do that.”

She nodded. “Better get going, then. I have the clock on you. It’s ticking.”

I started by telling her what had happened to Kayla and how I felt about it, including the fact that she had gone to her parents’ home in North Carolina to recuperate. “I don’t think it’s my fault. So I’m not feeling guilty about the attack on Kayla . . . not directly anyway.”

Adele couldn’t help it, good as she is—her eyebrows rose and betrayed her inner thoughts. “And indirectly?”

My head moved up and down. “I do feel this generalized guilt—like I could have done something to stop the attack from happening.”

“For instance?”

I smiled. Then so did Adele.

“Just to use one example, eliminating all of the crime in the DC area,” I said.

“You’re hiding behind your sense of humor again.”

“Sure I am, and here’s the really bad part. Rational as I make myself out to be, I am feeling some guilt over the fact that I could have protected Kayla somehow. And yes, I know how ridiculous that is, Adele. To think. And to say it out loud. But there it is anyway.”

“Tell me more about this ‘protection’ you could have afforded to Kayla Coles somehow. I need to hear this, Alex.”

“Don’t rub it in. And I don’t think I used the word protection.”

“Actually, you did. Anyway, talk it out for me, please. You said you wanted to tell me everything. This is probably more important than you think.”

“I couldn’t have done a damn thing to help Kayla. Happy now?”

“I’m getting there,” Adele said—then she waited for more from me.

“It all goes back to that night with Maria, of course. I was there. I watched her die in my arms. I couldn’t do anything to save the woman I loved. I didn’t do anything. I never even caught the son of a bitch who killed her.”

Adele still said nothing.

“You know the worst thing? I’ll always wonder if that bullet was meant for me. Maria turned into my arms . . . then she was hit.”