Chapter Text
Ten months later.
Max’s mobile rings.
Jeanne wakes before him, reaches over him to grab the phone while he’s still blundering to wakefulness, feeling for his glasses. She swears under her breath in French, drops the phone on his chest and slumps back onto the pillow.
JEANNE - It’s your other girlfriend.
He rolls over to her as he lifts the phone to his face, squints at the screen. Carrie. He switches it off. She can wait. He throws the phone across the room and leans over to kiss Jeanne.
---
Several hours later.
Jeanne, dressing, picks his phone up from the floor.
JEANNE - You should probably call her back.
She throws the phone to him. He switches it on. Seven missed calls. Jesus. Dials.
MAX - Carrie. What is it?
CARRIE - Max, can you come over?
MAX - What is it? Can’t you just tell me?
CARRIE - I need you to look at something. I need you to tell me if I’m going mad or not. I wouldn’t ask unless I really needed you.
He sighs.
---
MAX - I’m sorry. She sounds like she’s manic. If she needs hospitalising again... At least she asked me – she knows the wheels are coming off. That’s progress, I guess.
JEANNE - It’s OK. You don’t have to apologise. She’s your friend. I have stuff to do. Call me when you’re done.
MAX - Are you mad?
JEANNE - No. It’s nice that you care for your friends.
She kisses him. They separate, and he grabs his coat.
---
He rings the doorbell.
She’s there almost instantly, has been pacing the hall, flings the door open.
CARRIE - Where have you been?
MAX - Carrie, have you taken your meds?
CARRIE - YES. I have. It’s not that.
MAX - Because you called me SEVEN times this morning. You know that’s what you do when you’re manic, right?
CARRIE - It’s not that. I need you to look at something.
She marches into the kitchen, leans over the kitchen table, flips open her laptop. Her hands are shaking, jaw trembling. Max is already thinking through the best strategies for getting her to a doctor. She clicks quickly through a couple of screens. The computer freezes for a moment and she pounds her fist into the table.
GODDAMIT.
Clicks.
Look.
She jabs her finger at the screen.
It’s a news website. A report on the New Year’s Day Mummers Parade in Philadelphia. Photograph of one of the huge bands - technicolour costumes, banners and streamers - obviously chosen by the picture desk for the spectacle. Behind, there’s a huge crowd, a wall of people. Carrie’s finger, just to the right of center, is pointing at one small face among them. Not quite in focus, but nonetheless unmistakeable to them both. It’s Quinn.
It’s him. Isn’t it?
She looks up at Max. He’s a split-second too slow to hide his true reaction, which is “Oh, fuck”, but nonetheless erases it from his face and brazens it out, shakes his head.
MAX - Carrie. It’s not. You know it can’t be. He’s dead. I know you want to believe otherwise, but he’s gone.
I can see what you mean. It looks a bit like him.
CARRIE - Max…
MAX - But he’s dead. He died. People see faces in the crowd all the time when they’re missing someone. It’s a thing. Wanting it to be him doesn’t make it him.
But Carrie caught that split second.
CARRIE - Max, it’s him. I know it is. You know it is. What do you know? Tell me.
MAX - Carrie, you need to get your meds reviewed. I’m sorry. I know it’s not the answer you wanted, but you asked me here to give you my honest opinion. And my opinion is that you’re manic. And grieving. That’s it. This total stranger happens to look a bit like Quinn. It hurts. But he’s still dead. Just like he was yesterday, and the day before, and will be tomorrow, and the day after.
She purses her lips. So angry Max is holding out on her, but the anger is chased by a euphoria trickling into the back of her mind.
---
She pulls in every favor she’s ever been owed. Milks them dry. But every time she gets the same answer back: Peter Quinn is dead. She contacts the picture desk of the news website, orders and pays for high-res copies of every single image their photographers took of the parade, which turns out to be hundreds of them, takes a whole evening to download to the external hard drive she bought specially for the purpose. She finds a photo of Quinn online – his CIA file headshot, the one that was in all the papers, and runs the parade photos through facial recognition software. No results. The original photo, the one she’s convinced is Quinn, is too blurred, the software can’t analyse it. She enlarges the picture to a life-size face, pins it to the wall in her tiny room at the top of the stairs. It’s no clearer for being bigger – just an enlarged blur. Pins Quinn’s CIA photo next to it. Stares at them for hours. Weeks go by and still she stares.