The Nazi looked up, startled, as the door swung open. And before Matthew even knew what he was doing, before he could so much as think, he had his hand around the man’s throat.
Oh, but it felt good to have his hands there. To squeeze hard. It felt so very satisfying, so very right, to watch Henck’s eyes bulge and his face go red as his pudgy little hands clawed uselessly at Matthew’s own. He was going to kill him, and he was glad. He wanted it to happen; he welcomed it.
“Lawson, don’t kill the bastard!” A hard hand on his shoulder threw Matthew back, and he fell against the doorway of the stall as Henck doubled over, choking and gasping for air. “We want him alive, not dead,” Cardenas reminded him matter-of-factly, seemingly unperturbed by the grim scene that had just played out. “They’re no good to us dead. Not before they’ve all sung like canaries.”
But I wanted him dead, Matthew thought as he stared at Henck’s reddened face, his fingermarks livid on the man’s throat. I needed him dead. I still do. And I want to be the one to kill him, to get revenge.
The former SS Unterscharführer, he saw, had pissed all over the floor.
The next day, he received his Distinguished Service Cross, given by Captain Betts with an understanding smile.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ABBY
Abby watched the fields blur by as Simon drove across Wisconsin under a hazy sky, back towards Ashford. They’d been in the car for several hours already, and neither of them had said much at all. Abby didn’t know what there was to say; her head felt full, her heart empty. It was a strange sensation.
Last night, when Simon had said the words “my daughter”, she’d simply stared. They’d bounced off her brain, not making sense, because he looked so sorrowful, so resigned, and she didn’t understand why, just as she didn’t understand how he could possibly have a daughter he hadn’t told her about.
Except he did, obviously he did, and she realized she shouldn’t feel surprised—never mind betrayed—by it, because surely this was just another reminder that they really didn’t know each other well at all.
“Your daughter,” she’d finally said, testing the words out, feeling their strength, and Simon had nodded, more of a hanging of his head than anything else.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
And so he had, as haltingly as she’d told her own tale of complicated grief, about his divorce, which hadn’t been as simple as he’d made it out to be, because there had been—there still was—a child involved, a little girl.
“Maggie,” Simon
had said, with an ache in his voice.
“How old is she?”
“Twelve.”
“And when you separated…?”
“Five.”
Abby was silent, absorbing these unexpected revelations, unsure what to make of any of it. Somehow it changed things, and yet she couldn’t even articulate why or how. “Why didn’t you mention her before?” she had asked finally.
“Because I felt guilty,” Simon had said. He’d looked wretched, and she had wanted to comfort him, yet somehow she couldn’t, even though he’d comforted her. He’d put his arms around her, he’d held her while she’d cried. And yet somehow she couldn’t do the same; she had leaned back against the headboard, her arms around her knees.
“Guilty?” she’d repeated after a moment. “Of what?”
“Of failing my family.” He’d paused, each word drawn out of him like a poison, with both reluctance and healing. “Of… of being a bad father.”
“Why… why would you feel that way?” Asking the questions felt like edging through the dark, tiptoeing, not sure what she might bump into. “What happened?”
Simon was silent, his gaze moving despondently around the bland room as if looking for answers he knew he wouldn’t find. “Nothing happened,” he’d said at last. “There’s no big moment I can point to and say ‘that’s when I should have done x’ or something like that. I wish there was. If there had been, I hope to God I would have done it.”
“Then…” She had stared at him, confused. “I don’t understand, Simon. I think… I think I feel a bit like you must have, when you knew there was this big thing I hadn’t told you about, and you kept coming up against it like a brick wall I pretended wasn’t there. What happened with your daughter? With… Maggie? Because something did, obviously.”
“Well.” He had shifted on the bed, trying to look composed and practical when Abby suspected he possessed as deep a wound, a grief, as she did, or almost. “Sara had sole custody, for a start. It didn’t feel quite like that at the time—I didn’t just sign away my rights to my child. But I was the one who moved out—Sara asked me to—and it just seemed like the right thing for Maggie to stay in her family home, with the parent who had been at home with her the most. Sara was a stay-at-home mum for four years, while I’d worked. And I told myself I still had summer holidays and the rest of it. We agreed on—well, visitation is the wrong word, because I was more than a visitor. At least at the start. But I’d have Maggie for weekend afternoons—we both agreed she should sleep in her own bed every night—and Sara had her the rest of the time. That’s how it began.”
Which sounded both depressing and ominous. Abby didn’t reply, just waited, as Simon once had for her to organize her thoughts, explain her regret.