Chapter 61: The Princess's Letter to the Knight
The stairwell door swung open and Bolton came through it at a run, Susan right behind him — gym bag still over her shoulder, the specific expression of someone who had been following a thread and arrived at the end of it.
Robert's attention split for a fraction of a second.
That was enough.
Andrew covered the distance before the decision fully formed. His hand found Robert's wrist and redirected it upward — the gun discharged into the ceiling, plaster dust, the sound enormous in the small room — and then Andrew's other hand was already moving.
[Boxing (Proficient): 94/100]
No gloves. No controlled sparring. Every technical correction Bolton had made over three months arriving simultaneously as the thing they'd been building toward.
Robert was not a fighter. He was a man who'd always operated through leverage and distance and the specific power that came from having resources and patience and the willingness to go further than other people expected. In a room, at close range, with those advantages stripped, he had nothing.
It was over quickly. Andrew made sure of that.
He was aware of Jade making a sound — not a scream, something lower, a sound that came from pain rather than fear — and he turned.
She was on the floor where she'd been, trying to push herself upright, and there was blood on her coat. The first shot, the one he hadn't redirected in time, had found her.
"Hey." He was beside her immediately, hands on her face first so she could focus on him. "Hey, I'm here. Look at me."
Her eyes found his. Frightened. Present.
"I'm here," he said again.
Bolton was already on the phone — 911, the address, gunshot wound, she's conscious — his voice the flat efficient register of someone who'd done first aid training and was using it. Susan Berman had gotten her hands free somehow and was pressing her scarf against Jade's side with the controlled urgency of someone overriding their own shock.
Andrew stayed in front of Jade's face so she wouldn't look at the room.
"Keep your eyes on me," he said.
"Okay," she said. Her voice was thin but steady.
"You're okay."
"You don't know that."
"You're okay," he said again, because it needed to be true.
[Observation (Proficient): 63/100]
The panel moved and he barely registered it.
The police arrived in four minutes. The paramedics were thirty seconds behind. Andrew answered questions in the hallway while the EMTs worked, giving the officer the factual sequence — the stairwell, the open door, the gun — and leaving out the parts that would require explanation he didn't have. Bolton corroborated. Susan Berman sat in a chair someone had brought out of one of the apartments and gave her own statement with the careful precision of a woman who wrote crime novels and understood exactly what she was and wasn't saying.
They took Jade out on a stretcher. She was conscious. She turned her head when they moved her through the door and found Andrew in the hallway and held his eyes for a moment.
He watched the elevator doors close.
The police station was fluorescent and smelled like burned coffee. Andrew sat in a chair and answered the same questions in slightly different order and gave the same answers. At some point a detective sat across from him with a yellow legal pad and worked through the Robert Durst history — the name, the known cases, the surveillance Andrew had observed — and Andrew gave him everything that was documentable.
The detective was a careful man. He wrote things down without editorializing.
At some point, through the precinct's front door, Mr. Corleone came in.
He spoke to the desk sergeant briefly and then came to where Andrew was sitting. He looked older than he had at his door — or maybe just more tired, the specific fatigue of someone who had tried to manage a situation and found the situation had moved faster than management.
He sat down across from Andrew.
"I'm sorry," he said. Not the social form of it. The real version, the kind that acknowledged specific failure. "I told him to leave. I believed that was sufficient. I was wrong."
Andrew said nothing.
"The Durst family will be handled," Corleone said. "Whatever Robert's brother Douglas needs from us to expedite the legal process — it will be there. He'll cooperate. He's wanted Robert properly dealt with for years." He paused. "Susan Berman is under our protection for now. When this is resolved she'll be relocated. She'll be safe."
Andrew looked at the floor.
"Mr. Sanchez." Corleone's voice was careful. "Jade will recover. The bullet didn't reach anything critical."
"The detective told me."
"Then—"
"She got shot," Andrew said. "In the hallway of her own building on Christmas Eve because I wasn't fast enough." He kept his voice level. It took effort. "That's what happened."
Corleone was quiet for a moment. Then he placed a plain business card on the table between them — white, one phone number, no name. "If you need anything. Any time."
Andrew picked it up. Put it in his coat pocket.
He was released at two in the morning with instructions not to leave Manhattan until the case was formally closed. He took a cab home.
Christie was awake.
She was on the couch when he came in, textbook open on her lap but not being read. She looked up and took in the dried blood on his cuffs, the bandages the precinct's first aid kit had provided for his hands, his face.
She said nothing.
He went to his room and closed the door and lay on top of the covers in the dark and did not sleep for a long time.
When he came out, it was the afternoon of the twenty-seventh.
Christie pointed at a pile of gifts by the door — Monica's handwriting on one tag, Joey's on another, a small package from Phoebe wrapped in paper covered in hand-drawn stars. Several voicemail messages on the machine, the light blinking steadily.
"Your friends came by Christmas Day," Christie said. She'd said it carefully, the tone of someone who'd worked out that information was what was needed rather than questions. "I told them you were dealing with something."
"Good."
He went to the kitchen and made eggs, the simple kind, and ate standing at the counter.
[Cooking (Proficient): 85/100]
He noted it without feeling anything about it.
He showered, changed, put on his coat.
"Hospital?" Christie asked.
"Hospital," he said.
The nurse at the desk gave him the room number without difficulty. He rode the elevator up and stood in the hallway outside the door for a moment, working out what he was going to say.
The door opened before he decided.
The woman who came out was a few years older than Jade, the same cheekbones, hair cut shorter and worn practically. She stopped when she saw him.
"Andrew?" She said it the way you said a name you'd heard in context and were now applying to a face.
"Yeah."
"Vicky." She looked at him with the specific assessment of an older sibling, the evaluation that ran under every other exchange. "Jade's sister."
He'd known about her. Jade talked about her the way you talked about someone who was load-bearing — the person who'd held things together when their mother was working double shifts, the one who'd driven her to dance class and picked her up from parties and been the first person she called when anything went wrong.
"She's in there?" he asked.
Vicky didn't answer immediately. She picked up the bag she'd set down when she opened the door — canvas, practical, the overnight kind — and held it with both hands.
"She went home this morning," Vicky said. "Early flight. She asked me to wait for you."
Andrew was quiet.
"She wanted to leave before you came," Vicky said. She wasn't saying it to be cruel. She was saying it because it was true and Andrew deserved the true version. "She said if she saw you she wouldn't be able to go."
He looked at the closed door that had no one in it.
Vicky held the bag out. "She left this."
He took it.
"I have one younger sister," Vicky said. She stopped. Started again differently. "Whatever you decide to do — take your time deciding. She means it, what she wrote. She'll wait." She paused. "I think. I've never seen her do anything like this before, so I'm working from limited data."
She zipped her jacket and walked to the elevator.
Andrew stood in the hallway and didn't move for a while.
He sat in the stairwell at the end of the hall — concrete and fluorescent, ugly and private — and opened the bag.
A sweater. Hand-knitted, dark green, the kind of project that took weeks. She'd been working on it, he realized, since October at least. She'd hidden it from him, which meant she'd been planning to give it to him, which meant she'd been thinking about Christmas with him since October.
And a letter. Envelope unsealed, his name on the front in her handwriting.
He opened it.
Andrew—
By the time you read this I'll be back in Austin. I'm sorry I didn't wait. I know that's the coward's way out and I'm taking it anyway.
I've been trying to figure out how to say this for a while. Here's what I know:
You're the most capable person I've ever met. You think about everything three steps ahead and you're almost always right and it should be exhausting but somehow it isn't. Being around you made me feel like the world was something that could be navigated instead of just survived.
But Andrew, I'm a person who needs quiet. I grew up in a loud, complicated house and I spent my whole adult life building something small and manageable and mine. New York was supposed to be an adventure and it was, and you were the best part of it.
The thing that happened last night — I know it wasn't your fault. I'm not leaving because of that. I'm leaving because last night made me finally be honest with myself about the fact that your life has a different center of gravity than mine. Things happen around you. I don't think you cause them exactly. I think you just move toward the hard things instead of away from them, because that's who you are.
I love that about you. I do.
I also know that I am not built to live in that direction.
You always decided everything. What we watched, where we went, what we ate — and I let you because it was easy and I liked your choices and I told myself that was fine. But I think part of me was already practicing for this. Already getting ready to let you choose this too.
So let me choose it instead.
Don't come after me. I mean it. If you come after me I will fold, and I'll come back, and eventually I'll become someone who's afraid all the time, and I don't want you to watch that happen.
If you get to a place where quiet sounds like enough — where you want what I want — then find me. I'll be in Austin. I'm not going anywhere.
I was going to make this harder to say, but here it is: I love you. I should have said it out loud. I'm saying it now.
— Princess
Andrew sat in the stairwell for a long time.
The sweater was in his lap, heavy and carefully made.
He thought about the window wave. Every night, the window opening, the hand. The ritual they'd built without naming it. He thought about the breakfast tray on the nightstand. The yawn on the couch, her voice going soft, can we just keep doing this.
He'd known what she wanted. He'd known for months.
[Observation (Proficient): 64/100]
The panel moved, and this time he felt it. Not the number. The thing underneath it — the specific ache of having seen something clearly and not acted on it in time.
He put the letter back in the envelope. Folded the sweater carefully. Put them both in the bag.
He stood up, and walked out of the hospital into the cold, and started thinking about what came next.
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