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“Hey, it’s her or you, man. Your call.”
Jo’s trigger finger was locked in place. Her whole arm froze. As aware as she was of Henry coming up behind her, already cradling one injury, all she could see was Mr. Bentley’s body lying in the hallway of the Frenchman’s antique shop.
She blinked it away. Ryan Morris had a gun to her. The forest was dead quiet but for their heavy breaths. Henry glanced over at her.
He wasn’t actually going to answer, was he?
“Me.” Henry stepped forward brazenly. “Choose me.”
Jo’s heart seized. “Henry, stop!”
Morris swiveled his aim. This was her opening. She had the aim. Shoot now. Shoot him before he-
The bass pop of a gunshot. Henry crumpled to the ground.
Morris lowered his weapon slightly, his eyes wild. He took a rapid stock of Jo, then turned and fled into the forest.
She could hardly breathe. How could she... how could she have...
What had she done?
Haggard breathing drew her attention. She holstered the gun and knelt down by Henry’s side; he was on his back, looking up at her, his suit stained with red. He was shot in the chest. She took out her phone.
“It’s okay,” she heard herself saying. “You’ll be okay, Henry.”
“Put down the phone.” It was a weak sound, but he raised one hand and pushed her phone away from her ear. “Hang up, Jo. Please.”
“You need an ambulance, Henry.”
“Won’t make it that long. Listen to me.”
He was struggling to speak, his face was going white, but his eyes were intense and lucid. He gripped her wrist and focused his whole will into her.
Jo leaned forward.
“For your own sake.” He was trembling. “For your own sake, don’t tell anyone... what you see. Let it go.”
It sounded like a dying wish. “You’re not going to die, Henry. I won’t let you.”
His fingers dislodged her phone from her hand, and with a grunt, he pushed something against her palm to replace it. He coughed at the effort, a splash of blood on the front of Jo’s shirt, and grasped her hand with both of his. He pulled forward, looking deeply, urgently into her eyes.
“Let it go,” he choked out. “Tell... no one... what you see. For your own sake. Please.”
She reached under his head to support him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do it. This is my fault.”
To her surprise, he smiled, a trail of blood running down his cheek. “You’ll be fine,” he said, with as much conviction as before. “Thank you... for everything.”
Then his eyes unfocused, and his hands lost their grip on hers. The sight of him went blurry with her tears.
This was her fault. If she’d taken the shot, this wouldn’t have happened. Why had he stepped forward like that, goading a panicked, armed suspect? Why had she gotten into the habit of taking an untrained civilian along with her to these dangerous-
-Henry was gone.
She froze, shocked awake. The forest floor was dusty and covered with a scattering of leaves; no blood anywhere. Not on her hand, not on the front of her shirt. The brisk breeze cooled the tears on her face.
Had she... No, she hadn’t imagined it. Had she frozen up, maybe, long enough for his body to have been taken away? No, she would have been moved if that had happened. There was no one here. Nothing. The only object marring the leaf-strewn floor was her own cell phone.
She blinked at it, then opened the hand Henry had been holding.
It was his pocket watch. He’d knocked the phone aside and pressed this into her hand. He had really been here. He’d been here just a second ago. He’d been dying, he’d been saying...
Tell no one what you see. For your own sake.
Henry had known that was going to happen. Whatever it was. He knew that was going to happen when he...
Henry was dead.
Jo picked up her phone and came numbly to her feet, looked around. She was completely alone in the forest; Henry had... and Morris had run off. She needed to put out a BOLO on him. She needed to...
Henry was dead.
What... what happened to him?
Let it go. That’s what he’d said. This was what he’d been talking about. But how could she? He’d... he’d died, and then vanished, and somehow he’d known it was going to happen, and she was supposed to let it go?
Henry was dead, and it was her fault.
She staggered back for a bigger view of the scene, but there was nothing. No blood, no drag marks, no Morris. If she’d pulled the trigger, none of this would have happened. Henry would still be alive. He’d still be... here. But she was completely alone.
Put a BOLO out on Morris. Right. She fumbled with her phone; it was hard to operate with the pocket watch still occupying most of her palm.
She called it in, stuttering her words, operating on autopilot.
“Alright, putting it out now,” said the dispatcher. “Are you okay, Detective?”
Must have been something in her voice.
Jo stared at the place where Henry had died; it looked the same as any other patch of ground. She needed to report this, report him dead...
For your own sake, tell no one.
Damn it. He’d known how it would look. He’d known he was going to vanish like fog under the sun, and in his last moments, all he could think about was how people would react to Jo telling them that. She had been trying to save his life, and he’d turned that down in favor of saving her career.
“Detective?”
“I... can’t find Dr. Morgan,” she said distantly. “He... he disappeared while I was chasing down Morris.”
“Do you need backup?”
Backup. Yeah, she needed backup.
“No, I’ll call Hanson myself. Thank you.”
Jo hung up before anything else could be asked, and looked down at her phone, scrolling through the contacts. The screen was shaking.
Henry had died. Should she tell Abe? Tell no one, right, but Abe was the closest thing Henry had to family. It would be cruel to let him spend the rest of his life thinking of Henry as a missing person, to deprive him of that closure.
Henry was dead. She’d never see him again, never see that sideways smile he’d always seemed to have ready for her, never hear the way his voice would pick up speed while lecturing about something important.
She lingered on Mike’s contact information. She could still put the phone away, drive off, as though nothing had happened. Tell no one, doctor’s orders. She couldn’t think. Everything had gone hollow.
This couldn’t have happened to her twice. She worked for the NYPD; she’d prepared herself for Reece’s death, for Mike’s, even for her own. But that sort of risk wasn’t supposed to spread out from her; it wasn’t supposed to touch people like Henry. People like Sean. They were supposed to sit safely in the sidelines, unaffected by the death that surrounded her position.
She was the one who was supposed to take the shot.
Jo hit dial before she could rethink it, but she hadn’t come up with anything to say by the time Mike answered.
“Hey, you and Henry on your way back? How’d it go with Morris?”
“Morris... got... away,” she said, watching the perfectly empty clearing. A clean and empty crime scene, wiped free of clues and DNA, like by someone who knew what they were doing.
“Shit. You put a BOLO out?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, Jo. You alright?”
Must have been something in her voice.
“Henry...” She tried to stop herself, and somehow failed.
“Yeah?” She could hear his alarm. “What happened?”
“Henry’s... gone.”
“Jo, what do you mean? Tell me what happened.”
“Henry’s gone,” she repeated, numbly. It was the only true thing to come to mind that she could say, so it had locked onto her tongue, along with the desperate hope that those two words could make clear everything she was feeling.
“You’re at Morris’s shop, right? Do you need a bus out there?”
“No. He’s... he’s gone.”
“Jo, stay put, alright? Stay right there, I’m on my way.”
Good. Backup. She needed backup.
#
She’d made it as far as her car by the time Mike arrived. The whole place was silent; Morris had been the only attendant at the shop, so the only sounds came from the calm chittering and rustling from the forest. It was rare that she found herself in a place so quiet. Like the world itself were mourning the loss of Henry Morgan.
She hadn’t made it into the car. She’d reached the driver door and hadn’t gotten up the courage to go any farther. It felt on some level like if she left this place, she’d be leaving Henry behind forever.
But she needed to wake up. She knew she did. She’d been through this before; nothing got done during this part.
What if nothing could get done? What if Henry had vanished forever, leaving behind nothing but an ephemeral memory? What if Sean had died of a heart attack, no more, no less? What if their stories were already over, and there was nothing Jo could do about it?
“Jo,” Mike said as he leapt out of his car. “Jo, what happened?”
He reached her side where she stood leaning against her car, arms crossed and hands tucked-in.
“Henry’s gone,” she said quietly.
“I need you to tell me what happened,” Mike said, calmly. “Start from the beginning, alright?”
But what was the story she was supposed to tell? How far did tell no one extend?
Well, no, that was obvious. All Henry had meant by it was not to tell anyone that he’d vanished after he’d died, like a dash of sugar into boiling water. Building a sensical story around that omission would be her own responsibility.
He’d also said let it go. That one was going to be harder.
“Jo?” Mike touched her gently on the arm. “Jo, look at me.”
She met his eyes. When his gaze softened, she realized she’d been crying.
“Tell me what happened.”
Her frazzled brain tried to piece together a story that would result reliably in both Henry and Morris disappearing. Morris as just a runaway, someone who could be found; Henry as something more permanent.
Morris kidnapped him, maybe, and greivously injured him--or killed him, but in a way that would leave no blood or traces--and stole his body for... some reason.
Trying to imagine the various ways Morris could have killed Henry was making her sick.
“Jo, talk to me. I’m right here.”
It was going to have to be enough.
She said, “When Morris realized we were onto him, he ran. Henry... chased him.”
Henry’s arm injury. Would there be blood in the shop? Or had all of it vanished with him?
“Yeah?” Mike prompted quietly.
“When I found them, Morris had his arm around Henry’s neck. Choking him. I couldn’t get a... shot. He killed Henry, kept his gun on me. They disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“When I followed, I couldn’t find them anywhere. I saw Henry die.”
Jo had been hovering somewhere above herself while the lies spun out of her, but she came crashing down on that last sentence. A sudden, shining truth: she saw Henry die. Whatever the hell had happened after that, that had been real.
"Where is he?" Mike asked, his hand firming on Jo's arm. "Which direction did he take Henry?"
This was all wrong. This wasn't the direction she was supposed to have sent him, was it? But there was no right direction. There was no truth anymore; only tell no one , and Henry's blood on her hands.
She needed to get away from here. Take a long, quiet drive by herself... No. Morris was still out there.
"Jo, where did he go?"
"It was too long ago, Mike. There's a BOLO out on him, we'll find him somewhere."
"But we need to find..." he trailed off. Must have seen something in her eyes. "Alright," he said instead. "Let's go back to the station. I'll send someone to get your car, alright? Let me drive."
She hadn't known Henry for very long, compared to some. But there had been something... different about her connection to him. About the way they got along. It wasn't romance--maybe not yet--but it was something else. A partnership that she'd never quite felt with Mike.
Now that was gone.
"Yeah," she said, finally, and let Mike pull her off toward his car. Maybe once she got a decent distance away from tell no one, then she'd be able to start on the long path of let it go.
#
That night, she forced herself to call Abe. He deserved to know. Maybe he couldn't know everything about it, but he deserved to know part of it. That Henry wasn't just missing; he was gone.
But he didn’t pick up.
She tried once more, then gave up. Maybe Abe was asleep by now. It could be late enough. She'd try again tomorrow.
Jo was exhausted. She'd spent all day repeating her imperfect story: Henry was choked to death and dragged away, and had dropped his pocket watch in the scuffle. She'd given no indication of intending to relinquish the watch, and no one had asked it of her. She made certain to say that she'd seen him die; she couldn't bear the pain of an ongoing missing person's case, Mike's constant and well-meaning words of hope that they'd find him somewhere out there. They wouldn't.
Henry was dead.
After all of that--after Lieutenant Reece asking her politely to take at least a few days off--she couldn't sleep. She stared up at the ceiling like it might have answers written on it.
Why had that happened to his body? How had he known it was going to happen? How could he ever have expected her to be able to let it go?
For her own sake, she'd told no one. That's two out of three for Henry's dying wishes. But the third one was the hardest.
#
Jo was halfway out the door the next morning before she remembered she'd been told to take the day off. She stood there, staring at the steps down to the street, breathing the cool, crisp air of a world that didn't seem to mind that Henry had died, that he'd vanished like a puff of smoke in a strong wind. Staying inside would mean doing nothing but dwelling on what had happened; Reece had to know that, didn't she? Sure, Jo had a pile of to-read books as tall as she was, but she couldn't sit and stare at the inside of a mystery novel. She couldn't sit and stare at anything; her mind would wander, would land on Henry...
For your own sake, let it go.
She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. The NYPD would turn her away, but someone else needed her right now. Someone who might not know yet that his own son--not exactly, but someone who might as well be his son--had died.
#
Jo walked slowly up to the 'closed' sign on the front door of Abe's Antiques. It was well into midmorning; the only reason Abe would have closed the store would be if he'd found out. They must have called him already. She wanted to tell him the truth, wanted more than anything to let him know that Henry had died saving her life.
She should have saved him, but she hadn't. She couldn't.
Maybe she should see the counselor Reece had suggested.
Jo pushed those thoughts away and raised her hand to knock. Three sharp raps, and down again. This was the only place she could be today. It was the only place she could see herself being.
After a little while, she realized she was still waiting. She tried again, three sharp knocks, a little louder.
What if Abe was asleep? What if he was up in the apartment, sitting in Henry's room, beside himself?
No answer.
She peered into the shop windows, but saw nothing amiss. No overturned tables, no sign of a struggle. She shouldn't have expected one; Abe was fine. He was allowed to mourn his own way, wasn't he?
Selfishly, she knocked one more time. As loud as she could without pounding on the door.
Who else could she see? Where else could she go? She couldn't be allowed to sit at home alone, remembering the fierceness of Henry's dying gaze, the way Bentley's body had twisted to the ground with four quick shots to the chest, the look in Morris's eyes when he'd realized that she was powerless and he had the opportunity to run.
She couldn't be allowed to sit at home with nothing to haunt her but Sean and Henry.
Abe wasn't coming to the door.
There was nowhere else she could run. The precinct would turn her away, the morgue would be too painful. Abe didn't want to see anyone in his hour of grief, and she couldn't see a counselor, not if she wanted to tell the truth.
She could go to the library and do some research on disappearing dead bodies. It must have happened before. It must have happened at least once before, if Henry had known it was going to happen. But that was hardly in the spirit of let it go, was it?
Why would Henry have asked that of her? Could he really have thought she'd be capable of letting something like that go?
Maybe he hadn't thought that far ahead. He'd been dying, after all.
Feeling numb, Jo backed away from the silent shop door and retreated to her car. She settled into the driver's seat, shut and locked the door behind her, and sat staring out at the narrow New York street that stretched on ahead.
Where to? Home, and a pale, empty book? Or out to the library, to figure out how to even start looking into this?
She cast one more lingering gaze to the silent antiques store, then started the car.
#
Jo took a long sip from her coffee.
She'd stopped at home long enough to grab her laptop and run out again, as though the suffocating silence of the place might crash down around her. She went out to her favorite coffeeshop, a comforting cloud of coffee-scented air and the distant notes of reheated pastries, and she decided to start with a Google search. That would at least tell her where to start looking.
Several long hours passed. Jo slowly drained her coffee and, after a while, a second that’d been served with a donut. Most of her time she spent weeding out the fictional stories from the conspiracy theories, and those from reputable sources, but the start and end of it so far was that reputable people didn't believe that what had happened to Henry was possible. She didn't participate in any of the sites or forums she found; she only searched through them, reading about the experiences of others.
No one explained exactly the thing she was looking for. She found disappearances, ghosts, aliens, and people teleporting in from other universes; she believed none of it, and none of it reflected what she'd seen: a man dying and then disappearing. No trace left.
If Henry had left any blood behind in Morris's shop, then no one had told her about it. Then again, they might not tell her if they did. She wasn't even sure if they'd searched it.
Let it go. She could nearly hear his voice, the intensity he'd forced into the words, the way he'd struggled to keep her gaze. It was as close to a dying wish as she'd ever heard.
Damn it.
She closed her laptop and leaned back in her seat, looking at the empty cup of coffee, the crumbs of donut on the small plate they'd served her. This was new, whatever it was, or so incredibly rare that even the flat-earthers and moon-landing-deniers hadn't heard of it. But Henry had known it was coming; someone must have told him. He must have already known there was something different about him, that he would just vanish on contact with death.
The bitter irony hit Jo for the first time: that Henry, a man so deeply familiar with dead bodies, wouldn't become one himself.
Had she imagined it?
No. No, she would not let herself fall down that path. She'd never hallucinated before and there was no reason to think she'd have started with this. The memory was so viscerally real to her that it couldn't have been some dream. She hadn't been able to sleep last night, anyway; no time to have created any false memories.
Henry had known ahead of time that his body was going to disappear. That meant someone had told him. She hadn't been able to find any sort of community online, so... what if it was a family thing? Genetic?
If it was, Abe might know. But he didn't want to see anyone, and she couldn't honestly blame him. Henry might not have been Abe's son but that didn't mean Abe hadn't planned on dying first.
She would back off for a while. A few days. Two, maybe. At least one day. Long enough for Abe to grieve by himself, in his own way, to give him the space he needed. Then she'd check in on him again.
#
That night, Jo read a random Derrick Storm book cover-to-cover and absorbed none of it. She got Chinese rather than spend a moment's thought on dinner, sat on the floor in front of the couch, and when she wasn’t staring absently at the pages of the book, she couldn't take her eyes off of Sean's chair.
She'd never felt like a failure before.
Her life was full of mistakes, as anyone's was. Missed homework assignments, regrettable insults, even things like focusing on the wrong piece of evidence or letting a suspect get away; they were all just part of being human. No matter how badly she messed up, it had never really been that hard for her to get up again and dust herself off. It didn’t tend to get to her, the way she'd seen that sort of thing get to other people, because making mistakes and learning from them was a routine thing that happened to everyone.
When Sean had died, her life had fallen apart. But even then she'd never managed to blame herself for it. She blamed herself for that terrible argument they'd had before he left, a bitter note at the end of a beautiful relationship, but she'd never talked herself into taking the blame for his heart attack.
Henry's death was her fault.
She'd had the shot. If she'd taken it, Henry would be alive. None of this would have happened; she would have told him off for putting his life in danger , again, and the incident would have been filed away alongside all the other stupid things he’d done. In a month or two she'd scarcely have been able to pick it out of the heap, just another example of his misplaced bravado. But she hadn't taken the shot. She'd frozen up, and he'd paid the price.
The deep, cold darkness in her chest, however, didn't specifically come from the fact that she'd frozen up. That wasn't her failure point; she'd wanted to pull the trigger, but hadn't been able to. Where she'd failed had come in before then: when she'd turned down the Lieutenant's suggestion that she talk to a counselor.
Henry had died because Jo had been too proud to talk to someone about Bentley.
She sat there, on the floor, in the silence, surrounded by stone-cold containers of lo mein and fried rice, feeling nothing but the gaping hole in her heart that was the absolute knowledge of her failure. Henry was dead because she'd thought herself above mental illness. How could she have been so conceited?
She would set that up tomorrow. Chances were high that Reece would require it, anyway, between her killing of Bentley and Morris's killing of Henry, both in the span of a mere few weeks. If something like this had happened to Mike, Jo would support a decision like that.
The dust cover of the book she'd tossed onto the coffee table. Its outline against the white takeout containers, theirs against Sean's chair in the background.
If she sat here long enough, maybe she'd pass out from exhaustion, and wouldn't have to worry about dreaming.
#
The next day, Jo felt a little more alive. She wasn't better, not by a long shot. But at least she felt a little more like a person. She went out to her bakery and sat for a while, nothing but her coffee, a notepad, and a pen.
Her notes didn't make any sense, but they didn't have to. It was a combination of her rambling thoughts, the pain of what she'd done, and back-and-forth hypothesizing about what had happened to Henry. She bled out onto the little lined notebook, there in the quiet morning, sipping her coffee as though she were merely arranging her to-do list for the day.
It felt... pretty good. It was almost the opposite of what she'd done the day before, although it was a similar silence and the same deep pain. She made hardly any new decisions as she scribbled out the words that had been whirling tunelessly in her head all night, but still she felt like she'd reclaimed some part of herself.
When her hand was sore and her coffee empty, she ripped out the pages and crumpled them up.
#
Jo knocked on the glass front door of Abe's Antiques.
The store itself looked the same as it always had, as though nothing had changed at all. But Henry was dead, and the sole remaining occupant of the place was desolate with grief; she could nearly feel it, the raucous silence echoing through the empty front room.
No answer. She knocked again.
Abe deserved some time; she knew she was still likely to be too early. She should--if she wanted to be as kind to him as possible--wait at least another day, maybe as long as a week. And she wanted to be kind to him. She dithered outside the shop, waiting and hoping that he came down to answer, that he would want to speak with someone.
Mightn't he want to talk to someone, anyway? Jo might have been the only person aside from Abe who knew Henry as well as she did.
What if she didn't know him well at all? He’d ignored her calls that morning. All of them. She shouldn’t have come.
One more try. Three sharp knocks, louder than before.
Damn it. She shouldn't be bothering him. Henry had died. In her arms, while pressing his pocket watch into her hand. She took it out of her pocket and inspected it, turning it over in her fingers. She felt she should give it back to Abe. Would he at least let her in for that?
She felt like a lost dog pawing at some stranger's front door.
Would Abe really want to be alone right now? What if something had happened to him? She hadn't heard from him at all since it had happened. Sure, they weren't exactly in constant contact, but this... would he have called her, once the police had called him? Why hadn’t he answered his phone? She just wanted to make sure he was alright.
Jo glanced around the street, then kicked the door open.
"Abe?" she called into the shop. "Sorry about your door, I just wanted to make sure you were alright. I haven't been able to reach you." She closed the door behind her, although she'd broken the jamb so it leaned open again.
No response.
She went through to the back of the store, up the stairs to the apartment, still calling his name. The longer he kept silent, the more worried she grew. Had something actually happened to him? When, and how?
"Abe?"
She found the bedrooms and bathrooms, inoccupied. Maybe Abe had gone out. She relaxed at the thought. He'd gone out to get some space. Probably the shop was too full of memories; there was a time after Sean died that Jo had done her best to spend as little time at home as possible, going as far as taking naps at her desk at work and showers at the gym.
But... no, there was something missing.
Jo went back into Abe's bedroom, scanning the shelves. Something was off . What was it?
She found a dust outline, an empty space on a bookshelf like he'd removed two or three books. Beside that, the outline of a narrow rectangle, like a picture frame. The sight of it gave her a sinking feeling.
On a hunch, she opened Abe's dresser to see that it was half empty. His closet, too; sparse, incomplete, like he'd lost half his clothes somewhere.
He'd... left?
It was the only thing that made any sense. Abe had packed up to leave. Henry's death must have hit him hard. But where did he go? Why hadn't he told her?
Feeling a bit numb, Jo wandered around the apartment. She'd been to the shop a few times, but had only been invited up to the apartment once. It had been a lovely dinner, Abe and Henry laughing over their stories, sharing delicious food under the open sky.
She found herself in the shop again, and sank into a seat beside the chess table. Henry had died while insisting that she let it go. Abe had left rather than face what had happened.
She needed to talk to a counselor. That was the only thing left that was abundantly clear. She could get the information from Reece with little to no prodding; might even be able to see someone as soon as today. She owed that much to Henry.
But where--and why--had Abe gone?
#
One week later, Jo watched the boxes coming out of Abe's Antiques.
He wasn't coming back.
She hadn't told anyone; she let Henry's disappearance die with him. 'For her own sake'. Despite that, her sessions with the counselor had so far been carrying on well enough; they'd moved on from daily to weekly sessions quickly enough, and she was already relieved at the feeling of talking to someone. She never thought she would be, but it was like her scribbling at the notepad--except that this notepad responded with calm understanding.
Unfortunately, feeling better about seeing a counselor made her feel worse. The counselor had tried to talk her through it, but this was something she couldn't shake, at least not so quickly: if she'd just bitten the bullet and done this in the first place, she would both have benefited from it and not killed Henry.
Too late now. The only thing left to do was to let it go. She ran one thumb over the face of the pocket watch.
She started her car and left Abe’s Antiques behind.