You Cannot Safety-Proof the World

Something tickled the edges of Katherine’s senses.

           Katherine turned over in her sleep, her hand brushing against her husband’s body. Her sheets twisted slightly with her as she did so, wrapping her right foot in a bit of a knot, which her subconscious got annoyed at and she shifted her foot so she was free to move. She started breathing faster as her heart sped up and her face twitched as something continued to bother her. Her psyche dissipated her dreams into oblivion before muted blackness took its place. And gradually Katherine awoke, keeping her eyes closed as she felt out her surroundings.

           And as Katherine’s psychic abilities picked up on something, there was an uncontrollable hitch in her breath and her eyes flashed open. She slid her hand over to David, putting it over his mouth and shaking him. He startled awake, eyes instantly wide and questioning. “I want you to count to thirty and then go to Alex’s room, lock the door and call 911,” she whispered to him, removing her hand. “Tell them there’s someone in the house.”

           David’s eyes narrowed worriedly but he nodded once. Katherine got out of bed, forgoing the knife under her pillow for the switchblade in her bedside table drawer, opening it, and with a silence and grace that never failed to stun and slightly scare her husband, she crept out into the hallway. She slipped past the bathroom and waited with her back against the wall, shifting the knife in her grip to a comfortable waist-height hold, until the intruder turned the corner. And she shoved it into his stomach, propelling him back around the corner and into the wall, grabbing the gun from his hand by the barrel and snapping the side of her hand into his wrist so he would release it, tossing it away down the hall.

           The man choked out a shocked cry at the knife in his gut as Katherine let him slide down to the floor, kneeling down and taking him by the throat, pinning him to the wall, prompting him to grab her wrist, putting his ability to breathe on priority. Katherine ripped the ski mask off his head, her eyes burning angrily as she kept her grip on his airway just tight enough to be alarming. She waited until she heard David walk quickly down the hallway and go into Alexandra’s room, closing and locking the door. Then she carefully wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the blade in the man’s stomach and his eyes widened further than they already had.

“I’m not gonna take this out. Not yet. And for now it’s just a three-inch blade that cut through muscle. You get to a hospital within a few hours, you’ll be fine.” The man’s teeth gritted his teeth. “Although I’d love to show you how much it hurts if I twist it.” She paused, letting the moment hang in the air, gathering tension, her face cold as ice. “Yeah, I guess you weren’t expecting this when you came to grab my daughter, huh? Who hired you? I want a name, or I take out the blade and watch you bleed. You won’t loose any credibility if you give them up cause you’ll be in the hospital from a knife wound to the gut. And hey, if you want, I could even give you some more wounds to make it seem more justified.”

           Katherine loosened the pressure on the man’s throat and he carefully took a deep breath, blinking once slowly and swallowing. “Frank Barton,” he said.

           “Why?” she asked quietly.

           “Don’t know the why,” he said. “Just know to get the girl, keep her under wraps somewhere until I get a call with further instructions. Either I’d be keeping her for two weeks before I let her go or I kill her and dump her body somewhere it’ll be found.”

           Katherine’s stomach turned at the thought, but she kept her face firm, carefully removing her hand from the blade. “Thank you. Now we’re gonna sit here nice and quiet until the authorities get here. Sound like a good plan to you?”

           “Sounds awesome,” he muttered.

#

           “Frank Barton,” Katherine told the officer standing in her living room. She glanced over to David, who was standing beside her. Alexandra had gone back to bed, unsure of exactly what had happened, just knowing it had something to do with a guy that had gotten into their house.

           “He just gave the name to you?” Detective Shawn Callahan asked her with a smile.

           “Yup,” Katherine replied. “He said he was supposed to take Alex and hold onto her for two weeks, then let her go. Unless…he got a call.”

           “I’m not sure exactly what this is about, but I have a guess. Frank Barton’s my boss’s boss,” David told the detective, crossing his arms tightly. “The new security protocol that we’ve been working on has a problem. A major one. And I found it. I spoke to him about it today and we had a pretty heated argument about the fact that this grant was riding on it… Two weeks, thirteen days, actually, is when we get the grant money to continue the research and without it the company is cut off at the knees. He would have lost…” David let out a long breath. “The whole company would have collapsed. I told him I wouldn’t stand by and let this security glitch leave millions of servers vulnerable and eventually he gave in, but…I guess he really hadn’t. He just told me to keep it to myself for now and he’d take care of it first thing tomorrow.”

           “And I guess he did,” Katherine noted.

           “Well, there’ll be a cruiser outside for the rest of the night,” Callahan told them, nodding toward the front of the house, “though I doubt you need the backup,” he added, glancing to Katherine knowingly. She smiled just slightly. “And I double-checked; the security guy reset the alarm with all the wires in the right places.”

           “All right. Thanks for coming, by the way, Callahan,” Katherine spoke as he put his clipboard under his arm.

           The detective’s expression softened. “No problem.”

           Callahan left and Katherine shut and locked the door, staring at it for a second before turning back to her husband. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked after a long moment.

           David blinked in surprise. “I didn’t think it was a big deal,” he said. “And you’d just come home from a big case, so-”

           “We used to talk more,” she sighed, running a hand through her hair as she made her way into the kitchen.

           “You stopped him,” David said as he followed her. “That’s what’s important.”

           “I know that, and I doubt you telling me you had a fight with your boss would’ve changed what happened tonight,” Katherine said, taking a beer from the fridge, “but we need to communicate more. I’m the psychic, I know, but I can’t know everything. And information is power. I can’t be powerless, especially at home.”

           “You’re acting like I left out a crucial piece of information that got somebody killed on a case,” David told her.

           “No,” she responded, putting her shirt over the bottle cap and twisting, opening it, “I’m acting like you could do that in the future.”

           “Katherine, I can’t always know what’s going to be valuable and what’s not, and I can’t tell you everything that happens in my life,” he told her as she took a drink of her beer.

           Katherine glared at him. “Don’t patronize me-”

           “I’m not patronizing you-”

           “You don’t know what information can mean,” she snapped at him. “And I need to be able to count on you to give me what I need to keep this family safe.” Katherine suddenly realized her eyes were tearing for some reason she couldn’t understand, and she swallowed hard, falling into one of the kitchen table chairs and putting the beer on the table, letting out a tired sigh. “Son of a bitch.”

           “Kathy,” David murmured, pulling up a seat beside her as she blinked back the tears. “You cannot safety-proof the world-”

           “I am not trying to-”

           “Hey,” he interrupted, putting a hand over hers. “Let me talk.” Katherine pursed her lips but remained silent. “You cannot safety proof the world, although you do a pretty damn good job of trying,” he told her, “and you cannot revolve your world around the possibility of something bad happening.” The words ‘of course I can’ jumped to her lips, but she held them back. “We averted a crisis tonight. But bad things are going to happen and if you try to stop all of them or blame yourself when you can’t, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. Or worse, you’re going to drive me crazy.”

           Katherine took a long drink of her beer before putting it down and dragging her fingers through her hair again. “I hate it when I can’t see an enemy coming, David,” she whispered, sliding her eyes over to him. “It scares me so much. And being reminded that there are some things that I’m just never going to be able to see coming…it’s just the worst feeling in the world.”

           David wordlessly took Katherine into his arms, letting her rest her head on his shoulder. He remained silent for a few moments. “Go hug your daughter,” he finally said.