Don't Let Go

by Harlan Coben

It costs me nothing to be careful.

“You want to have an ear fight with me?” I ask him. “A what?” “Your brah”—I gesture with my head toward Cop Two—“leaves. We lock the door. We put down our weapons. One of us walks out of this room with the other’s ear in his mouth. What do you say?” I lean closer and make a biting motion. “You’re fucking nuts,” Cop One says. “You got no idea.”

“Cops would be better at their jobs if God gave them bigger dicks.” “You’re a cop,” I remind her. “Me especially. Come on. I need to show you something.”

There was a song Dad loved by Alejandro Escovedo called “Castanets.” Do you remember it, Leo? Of course you do. There’s that line where he sings about this impossibly sexy woman: “I like her better when she walks away.” I never concurred—I preferred when Maura walked right toward me, shoulders back, eyes boring into me—but boy, did I get it.

Good news was never yet good news until I shared it with you.

I can hear only the sound of my own breathing. The past does not simply die away. Whatever happened here still haunts these grounds. You can feel that sometimes—when you visit ancient ruins or old estates or when you are alone in the woods like this. The echoes quiet, fade away, but they never go completely silent.

My great-grandfather, Dad often told us, saved his best wines for special occasions. He was killed when the Nazis invaded Paris. The Nazis ended up drinking his wine. Lesson: You never wait.

“Thanks.” She moves toward me. “You done charming me with small talk?” “How did I do?” “So charming that if I wasn’t already pregnant, I would be now.

“But do you know what I don’t like most?” I look at her. “Online shaming. It’s the worst sort of vigilante justice.

I would lecture Suzanne Hanson on her lack of empathy, but what’s the point? I remember once when we were maybe ten, driving through a rough neighborhood in Newark. Parents always tell their kids to look out the windows and be grateful for what they’ve got. But our dad handled it differently. He just said one line that has always stuck with me: “Every person has hopes and dreams.”

If you are ten years old, a year is ten percent. If you are fifty years old, a year is two percent. But she had read a theory that spurned that explanation. The theory states that time passes faster when we are in a set routine, when we aren’t learning anything new, when we stay stuck in a life pattern. The key to making time slow down is to have new experiences.

This is like nothing I have ever experienced before. It is a hunger, a tearing, a ripping, a healing. It is rough and loving. It is gentle, it is harsh. It is a dance, it is an attack. It is ravenous and intense and ferocious and almost unbearably tender. When it’s over, we collapse on the bed, staggered, shattered, like we’ll never be exactly the same, and maybe we won’t. Eventually she moves so as to lay her head on my chest, her hand on my stomach. We don’t speak. We stare at the ceiling until our eyes close. My last thought before I pass out is a primitive one: Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me ever again.