“You didn’t need to be in it. You wanted to be in it. And I knew that on the phone, at zero-three-hundred, and I said fine.”

“Why?”

Mercer took a while.

“Because you were the best officer I had,” he said. “Because your husband had left you bleeding on a highway to drink champagne with a woman he’d given a fake title to.

Because you had two children in incubators and a magnesium drip in your arm and you asked me for one thing.

“And I was not going to be the man who told you no that week. That’s the whole reason. It’s not a good one. It’s the true one.”