Chapter 10 - The Cost
It took seven hours.
The warrant was signed at 1:14 am. By the time Erin, Avery, and Ozawa walked through the doors of Chesapeake Rehabilitation Partners, Inc., it was 2:32 am, and the building was quiet and cold and smelled like bleach.
They found Michael in a room on the second floor, alone, sitting in a chair by a window with a blanket over his lap and a plastic cup of water on the tray beside him.
He looked up when the door opened.
He looked at Erin.
"Told you not to come," he said.
Then he started to cry.
She crossed the room and knelt in front of him and put her arms around him and held him the way she had held him when he was eight years old and had fallen out of a tree. He was shaking. She was shaking. Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Avery stepped back into the hall with the Marshal and closed the door.
When Erin finally pulled back, she looked at her brother's face. It was scarred. There was a line along his jaw that hadn't been there before. His eyes were the same.
"What did they do to you?" she asked.
"I'll tell you everything," he said. "But first I need to tell you something else."
"What?"
"The people who did this aren't done." He met her eyes. "There's a general. His name is on the paperwork. He's still active. And he has my daughter."
Erin went very still.
"Your what?"
"My daughter. Sophie." He swallowed. "Kessler's daughter. She's not his. She's mine. And she is the reason I reported what I saw. Because if I hadn't reported it, I would have been complicit, and if I had been complicit, I would have been the kind of man who couldn't look his own child in the face."
Erin's world rearranged itself.
"Sophie Kessler is your daughter?"
"She was born when I was twenty-four. Her mother was a woman I loved who married someone else. She raised Sophie with Nathan Kessler and told him the truth on her deathbed, four years ago. He did not take it well. He also did not tell Sophie." Michael's voice was barely above a whisper. "He is her father in every way that matters and I am the man who gave her a wish trip. And now he is the man who threw my flag in a trash can, and he is doing it because he is trying to protect her, and the general is using her as a hostage to keep him in line."
"The general."
"General David Riordan. He's on the joint staff. He is the man who ordered the execution in Syria. He is the man who ordered me into a hole." Michael looked at her. "And he is the man who has been paying to keep Sophie's mother's medical bills quiet because he is her biological grandfather."
Erin stood up.
May you like
She was going to have to be careful. She was going to have to be an officer again.
"Tell me everything," she said. "And then we're going to make a phone call."
