Doggett grins at him. “Christ, you really do know how to piss people off, don’t you?” He lifts a hand and again touches Tyler’s arm. “Stay away from the Cartwright lad, eh?”

“I’m suspended,” Tyler says. “I can’t damage the case any further.”

“It’s not the case I’m worried about.”

They’re trying to protect him, Doggett and Jordan both. They don’t want him to end up like Rabbani.

“Just go home and think of this as a few days’ holiday. The DCI will straighten it all out once the super calms down.”

He wants to believe that. He wants to believe they can somehow go back to the way things were before. But he thinks of Rabbani lying in the hospital struggling to breathe on her own, and Jordan still trying to protect him in spite of everything he’s done behind her back. He’s let them both down, just as he lets down everyone sooner or later.

—

Tyler stares at Rabbani through the window. They won’t let him go in to see her because it’s “family” only. Her chest moves up and down too slowly. Now and again the breath catches in her throat and she coughs through the mask. It’s a small sign, but a comforting one. He knows the reason she’s here is his fault. He neglected her, spoke up for her on a whim to prove a point to Jordan and then forgot all about her. Like a pet he begged to have and then gave up feeding. He leaves the flowers he brought with the nurse and heads back to the car.

He doesn’t realize where he’s headed until he’s almost at the gates of the cemetery. He hasn’t been here for years but it looks exactly as he remembers it, the newest graves laid out in neat little white rows, the older ones more haphazard, overgrown and crumbling. Eventually the dead are forgotten.

From the visitors’ parking lot, he follows a network of paths that meander through a rose garden, and then he is searching the pale white headstones for the one he has come to visit. When he finds it, the grave is bare; he should have brought flowers, but from what he remembers his father was never really a flowers sort of person. He certainly can’t remember him ever bringing any home for their mother.