​Chapter 21. You Are Alone, and It’s Fair

Two shots — and the world collapsed in on her, flooding her senses with the metallic stench of the tracks and the cold taste of rain on her lips.

Dan dropped onto the wet pavement, clutching his stomach, his face drained of all color. The second shot missed. Frankie bolted, his figure flickering like a dark stain in the gray curtain of rain.

“Ten-thirteen, officer down, 300 Pleasant Street, requesting backup and EMS,” Liza said, her voice trembling. “Pursuing suspect, heading north.”

She tore after him. Dan’s groans stayed behind — a dead weight she couldn’t help now. Her boots slapped through puddles, her lungs burned with icy air. She was faster, angrier, younger. She couldn’t let that bastard get away.

Frankie dove into a dark, echoing underpass beneath the railroad bridge. Liza rushed in after him, and reality shrank for an instant to that concrete corridor. Her pounding footsteps ricocheted off the walls. Above, a train roared past, the vibration rolling through her bones, blending with the hammering of her own heart.

She swung onto Florence Street, gulping at the air. On both sides, the road narrowed between blank walls of four- and five-story office buildings of dark, rain-soaked brick. Frankie was ahead of her, pulling away, already a good hundred yards out. For some reason, the signs burned into her memory: “Great Expectations,” and behind it “Right at Home.”

Great expectations right at home, she thought bitterly. What a piece of shit.

The street climbed upward, curving right, pulling away from the office blocks into a residential area. Rows of standard two-story houses, neat lawns, cars parked along the curb. She couldn’t let him slip deeper into the neighborhood. She pushed harder.

Frankie spun around and fired again, but Liza didn’t even flinch. That was his mistake — she had already closed the distance twice over. Now she knew she would hit him. Her focus narrowed to the figure ahead; she saw nothing else.

“Drop the weapon!” she screamed, her voice tearing from running and rage.

But he kept bolting toward the intersection, hoping to cut right and weave through the houses. Liza skidded to a stop next to an old Boston Globe newspaper box — paint peeling, a cloudy plastic front, a yellowed issue visible inside.

She raised her gun. Inhale—exhale—pause, just like they’d taught her — and she opened fire to kill. Dull pops. The echo slammed into the brick walls, merging with the roar of the passing train overhead. She didn’t count the shots, just squeezed the trigger again and again. Frankie dropped as if someone had switched him off and lay still on the wet lawn.

She rushed toward him, keeping him in her sights. It was over. She kicked his gun into a puddle — and then she saw her.

A few meters from Frankie’s body, on grass soaked through with blood, lay a girl about seven years old. Pale blond braids fanned out around her. Her dress was drenched, clinging to her tiny frame.

A sharp ringing flooded Liza’s ears, cutting off every sound. The pistol slipped from her hands, disappearing soundlessly into the grass. How? Where had the girl come from? Liza hadn’t seen her — no shadow, no cry. The bullet had been meant for Frankie. A ricochet?

She lunged toward the child and fell to her knees in the puddle. Ice-cold water burned through her uniform, but she barely felt it. She rolled the girl over — a crimson stain, a neat little hole right over her heart. No breath. Eyes blank as glass.

Her hands moved on their own: palms on the sternum, compressions — one, two, three. Beneath her fingers, the ribs felt like brittle rods. “Breathe,” she repeated, starting another cycle, harder, faster, the proper rhythm already meaningless. The only answer was the squelch of water beneath her knees and the distant rumble of the train. Her thoughts shattered into a thousand red shards — the braids, blood, grass — and somewhere deep inside, a whisper rose: You killed her. Ricochet or poor aim — it didn’t matter.

She kept pressing until her arms went numb, until the rain washed the blood away, erasing evidence — and she knew it was too late.

Chaos filled her head. You killed her, the cold voice repeated, as cold as the puddle around her. She’d been aiming at Frankie — but she hit the girl. Accident or not, it didn’t matter anymore.

Protocol. She had to follow protocol, cling to something simple and solid. Raise the weapon, holster it, report. But her hands wouldn’t obey.

“Dispatcher, unit eighteen. Suspect neutralized. EMT needed. Civilian down at 25 Florence Street. Need backup, urgent,” she rasped into the radio.

The wail of sirens grew closer. Quiet at first, it rose fast and turned into a piercing, accusing scream that sliced straight through the day.

Patrol cars arrived, then paramedics. Someone gently took her by the shoulder and guided her toward a cruiser. She didn’t resist.

Then everything dissolved into one monotonous, half-delirious haze.

The events of those days never formed a coherent picture; they remained in her mind as a series of painful, disconnected fragments.

The precinct. The same smell of spilled coffee, wet wool from rain-soaked coats, and something sour that had seeped into the old walls. They made her sit for hours on a hard plastic chair in the hallway, while behind closed doors her life was being turned into paperwork. Other cops walked past and looked away. No one wanted to meet her eyes. No longer a colleague — just a problem.

They called her into the captain’s office. He sat behind his desk buried in paperwork, his face gray with exhaustion. Beside him were two men from Internal Affairs — same cheap suits, same blank expressions. They asked her the same questions again and again.

“Why did you open fire to kill?”

“Did you see a civilian in the line of fire?”

“Why didn’t you wait for backup?”

She answered monotonously, without emotion, repeating memorized lines from the manual. But in her head there were no questions — only the face of the little girl with braids lying on the grass.

One day, as she sat there waiting to be called in to see the investigator, the door of the next office opened. A woman came out — her face swollen from crying.

She noticed Liza, and for a moment confusion flickered in her eyes. Then her pupils widened, and all her grief and pain fused into a single point.

“You!” she screamed, and the shout was so fierce the glass partition trembled. “Murderer! Damn you! I curse you! May you burn in hell!”

She lunged at Liza, but two officers grabbed her instantly, holding her back. The woman writhed in their grip, her face twisted with sobs, and she never once looked away from Liza with those eyes full of pure hatred. Liza sat frozen, unable to move, taking in this torrent of searing pain she herself had caused.

Finally, they announced the decision. Dry and temporary. Suspension from duty until the end of the investigation. Surrender your badge and service weapon. Mandatory therapy sessions.

Her hand didn’t tremble as she held the pen; she simply signed the report in silence.

She walked down the echoing corridor, and it felt as if this path would never end. Conversations died the moment she passed. She felt the looks — curiosity, judgment, quiet gloating. With every step, she understood more clearly: she was no longer a cop but a killer on leave.

The heavy front door slammed shut behind her, cutting her off from the life she knew. With that slam, something inside her stayed on the other side.

One day, in the middle of this endless hell, Liza returned to her apartment on the edge of South Boston and found that Ethan was gone. The silence of the place crashed down on her, louder than any scream. He’d packed his things — a couple of bags of clothes, his guitar, and a stack of blues vinyl. No note, no message on the old Nokia. Just the echo of footsteps in the hallway and an empty closet where his shirts used to hang. She stood in the center of the room, feeling the air coil in her lungs like the smoke of a cigarette she hadn’t yet lit.

Their relationship had cracked long ago, and now that crack had simply vanished from her life. Work had already been poisoning them, and after the incident everything only got worse. Obsession, guilt eating her from the inside — venom she brought home every night. Ethan tried to hold on. “You’re here, with me, Liz. Forget everything,” he’d whisper as they lay in bed. And she would stare at the ceiling, silent, watching the cracks spread like translucent veins on a child’s hand.

Now he was gone, and she wasn’t angry. Just empty. No tears, no scream. And the whisper in her mind:

You’re alone. And it’s fair.

Time folded into a loop, and every new day was a repeat of the one before. The internal investigation dragged on like a chronic illness. The commission dug through details: weather, house number, the exact time of day.

Life froze: morning — coffee alone, day — calls with her lawyer, evening — an empty apartment. She barely ate, barely slept. She sat by the window, watching the rain wash the lights of the business district across the canal. “You deserve this,” whispered the voice in her head. Quiet, like the rustle of a newspaper with the headline “Cop Kills Child.”

By day, the apartment walls seemed to close in on her, pushing her outside, and she wandered to the abandoned park near the Fort Point bridge — cracked benches, trash in the bushes, black canal water smelling of rust. She sat on a damp bench, wrapped in her old coat, staring at the water for hours. The rain drummed on her hood, the drops sliding down her cheeks, blending with something warm. Across the canal — blurred lights of downtown Boston, skyscrapers glowing like lies. Here, in solitude, the image of the girl came back sharper.

Sirens again, shouting, the flash of a shot. Blood pooling. The braids.

“Accident,” she repeated. But guilt grew like mold creeping across the apartment walls. She sat until her legs went numb, until the voice inside her grew louder: “You’re a killer. You deserved this.” The cold dug into her, reached her bones, but she didn’t want to leave — here by the water she felt closer to that girl. To her shadow.

By evening, dusk thickened, the voices in her head turned to a low hum, and she dragged herself back toward South Boston. Her refuge became Lucky’s Lounge — a basement on Congress Street with no sign outside and red neon glowing in the windows. Dim light, the smell of old wood and damp. Someone always played blues on the tiny stage — a jagged saxophone line or a guitar. The music seeped into the wound — “Stormy Weather” or “The Thrill is Gone” — a shiver of loss.

Liza would sit at the bar, nod at the bartender — an old Irishman who never asked questions. “Scotch. Double.” And the glass appeared. Slowly, methodically, sip by sip. The burn in her throat spread warmth through her veins, but not oblivion. She wasn’t trying to forget — only to dull the guilt. That whisper from the park: “You’re alone because you deserve it.” The blues amplified it, yet soothed it — like an old friend who reminds you of the pain but won’t let you drown in it.

Around her — the silhouettes of regulars: dockworkers, off-duty cops, loners like her. No one approached, and that was a blessing. Her depression deepened: days in the park, thinking; nights in the bar, drinking. The investigation dragged on, Ethan didn’t call, and the girl’s voice echoed with every sip. She was alone — and this was only the beginning.

The whiskey no longer burned. The third glass slipped down easily, like water, leaving behind a dull warmth in her chest. Her head was filling with lead, her thoughts barely moved, yet they remained clear. A clarity worse than any hangover.

The musician on the tiny stage kept playing, stubborn and relentless, repeating the same pain in different variations. Liza listened — and in front of her she saw the bridge. Cold iron railings, black water below her feet, the cold weight of a gun. How many times had she fired it in her dreams? How many times had she watched herself fall?

The dreams blended into one endless nightmare, and she stopped counting them.

Liza ran a hand over her face, trying to wipe the images away, but they had seeped into her like the smell of cheap tobacco.

“One more,” she muttered to the bartender.

And that was when she noticed someone sitting beside her.

A blonde. Hair pulled back into a perfectly neat bun. She smiled — and two small dimples appeared on her cheeks. The smile looked too alive for this basement, too real.

“End of the world or something?” she asked, teasing but without malice.

Liza didn’t answer. She took another sip and stared into her glass again.

“What happened to you?” the blonde asked. “What did you lose?”

Liza wanted to tell her to screw off, but instead a bitter, drunken truth slipped out:

“Everything. Meaning. Life. Myself,” she mumbled, tongue thick and clumsy. “I’m empty.”

The blonde tilted her head slightly. There was no pity in her eyes — only interest. Sharp, calculating.

“And if someone offered you a new meaning, a real one? You’d have to give up everything else, but you don’t care anymore, do you?”

Liza tapped her glass against the counter.

“Give up what, exactly — ‘everything else’?”

“Everything you have. People, your past, your pain. Yourself,” the blonde said, her smile unchanged — only the dimples deepening slightly.

Liza suddenly realized: nothing was holding her anymore. Not the job. Not the apartment. Not Ethan, who had left without a word. Only the guilt, burning through every day she lived.

And she made her choice.

“Yes,” she said.

The blonde nodded, and that was the end of the conversation. Liza took a sip, staring into the cloudy bottom of her glass. The music stretched into a long note, like the hum of rain outside the door.

When she lifted her head again, the stool beside her was empty. The blonde was gone.

Liza stepped out of the bar, and the door shut behind her with a dull thud. The music stayed inside, locked in the basement. Outside, rain poured down. Heavy drops stung her face and soaked through her coat at once. The air smelled of wet asphalt and the sea buried somewhere past the docks.

The street was empty. A few scattered streetlights cast pale circles on the facades of warehouses and the glass walls of new buildings, leaving blurred halos in the fog. Everything else was swallowed by darkness.

She walked without watching where she was going and soon realized she had turned onto Seaport Boulevard. A long, straight stretch of asphalt disappearing into the night. No cars. No people. The city had gone silent, leaving her alone with the rain and the void.

The weight of the gun at her belt pulled at her hip. Recently bought — not regulation, not by the book. She wasn’t even sure why she’d done it. Wanted the familiar feel of metal? Wanted to prove to herself she could still hold a weapon? Or had she been preparing an exit for the moment the girl’s voice in her head became too loud?

She walked along the boulevard, each step echoing through her body — hollow, needless.

Ahead — the bridge. A faint vibration came through the roadway, and the sensation deepened the emptiness inside her, as if the city itself had exhaled and fallen silent.

Liza stepped out onto the middle of the bridge. The lamps hummed overhead, their light mirrored in the dark puddled asphalt. No movement — just her, the rain-slick pavement, and her own breathing pulsing in her chest.

Below her, the canal churned with black water — thick as crude oil. It smelled of rusted iron and sea salt. The water didn’t reflect the light; it devoured it — like an abyss one longs to fall into and disappear without a trace. To find peace.

Ahead, the outlines of the financial district barely showed through the haze. The skyscrapers rose into the sky, but their tops vanished into the milky fog. Lights blurred, smeared, and faded. The city hid itself, unwilling to look at her.

Liza stopped, grabbed the railing, and climbed onto the parapet. The concrete beneath her boots was slick, the wind cutting through her soaked coat.

She stood above the black water, her chest pounding, but there was no fear.

Liza drew her gun. The smooth, light metal settled into her hand with a familiar ease. She raised it and pressed the barrel to her right temple.

Rain lashed the bridge. Somewhere far away a siren moaned — muffled, distant, as if from another world. The streetlights behind her flickered, turning her shadow on the rails into a trembling silhouette about to dissolve into the air.

Then everything went silent. Abruptly, as if a needle had lifted off a record.

The rain froze in midair, droplets hanging in motionless strands, like beads strung on an invisible thread. The city’s hum vanished, the lamps stopped humming. Even her breath felt foreign.

Liza slowly lowered the gun.

Perfect stillness — the world itself had ceased to exist.

Fog pressed in from all sides. Dense, milky, almost tangible, it engulfed the bridge. The skyscrapers ahead dissolved into it completely. Everything was gone.

Something warm on her temple. She touched it — sticky, wet. Blood. She must have cut herself with the gun, pressing it too hard against her skin. A red droplet slid down her cheek, merging with the frozen rain.

And then she saw her.

The girl.

Pale braids stuck to her shoulders, the dress soaked and heavy, its hem dragging across the asphalt. She stood just a few steps away, right on the bridge. Her face was pale, her eyes empty — doll-like, hollow.

The girl turned — and ran.

Her feet barely touched the ground, yet the sound of her steps shattered the silence, sharp as an echo in an empty corridor.

“Stop!” The word tore itself from Liza’s throat. Her voice trembled and sounded muffled, swallowed by the fog.

And she sprinted after her.

The bridge was dissolving. The streetlights vanished one by one, swallowed by the white void, until all that remained was the run itself: the slick concrete beneath her feet, the flicker of a white dress ahead, and the sticky blood on her temple, sliding down faster with every breath.