His arm tightens around me. "She found them. Census records, immigration documents, the archives of a Chinese benevolent association in Denver. She spent years tracking down what she could."
"And the families?"
"Some. Not all. The records from that era are incomplete, especially for Chinese immigrants. But she found enough to know they were real people with real lives, and that matters. It mattered to her more than anything."
The words settle into the room like sediment. My mother spent decades sitting on this knowledge. The Aldriches spent over a century burying it, and buying the land around it, and maintaining the sealed entrance, and making sure nobody looked too closely at the founding myth of Wicked Falls: thatElias Aldrich built this town with hard work and silver and the kind of pioneer spirit that Americans love to celebrate.
He built it on a mass grave. He built it on stolen labor and stolen silver and men whose families never learned what happened to them.
"Your uncle's team," I say. "When they come. Once the remains are gone, there's no proof. The mine is just a mine. The land is just land."
"And the Aldrich legacy is preserved." His voice is flat, exhausted, emptied. "That's the plan. Remove the remains, seal the mine permanently, and make the whole thing unprovable."
"And you've been helping him plan this."
"Yes."
The honesty of it is brutal and clarifying. He's not pretending he's innocent. He's not performing remorse.
He's lying on my sofa with his body still warm against mine, telling me exactly what he is and what he's done, and the absence of any attempt to soften it is, paradoxically, the thing that makes me believe him.
"What did my mother want me to do?" I ask.
His arm tightens around my waist, possession, pure and simple. The grip of a man who has chosen a side and is holding onto the reason he chose it. "She wanted you to stop them," he says. "She wanted you to stop us."
"How do you know that?"
"She told me. The last time I saw her, a few weeks before she died. She was specific about it." He pauses. "She was specific about a lot of things in that last conversation. Like she was getting her affairs in order."
The words settle into me slowly. "She knew she was dying."
"I think so. She never said it outright, but the way she talked that day was different. She wasn't planning for the future anymore. She was handing things off." His thumb traces a slowline along my hip. "She said you'd come back. I asked her how she could be so sure, and she said,'Because I'm the only thing keeping her away. Once I'm gone, the house will bring her home.'"
The knot in my throat is back. My mother knew. She knew she was dying, and she spent her last weeks making sure the trail was laid, the journals were in order, the sheets were ironed, the Cather novel was on the nightstand. She didn't call me. She didn't ask me to come. She arranged the pieces and trusted that her death would do what her life couldn't: make me listen.
The rain eases. The house creaks. The grandfather clock stands in the hall at 3:47, marking the moment an Aldrich stood on this property and looked at a mine full of murdered men and decided the family name was worth more than the truth.
Callum's breathing has slowed beside me, steady and deep, and his arm is still locked around my waist, and the warmth of his body against mine is complicated in ways I'm not ready to sort through.
He told me everything tonight. He broke open the thing his family spent generations sealing shut, and then he broke open me, and now we're lying in the wreckage together, and I have no idea if the man holding me is my ally or the most dangerous mistake I've ever made.
Both, probably.
My mother's journals are on the shelf across the room. Her handwriting is in them, her evidence, her decades of patient, furious record-keeping. Tomorrow I start reading again, and this time I know what I'm looking for.
Outside, the storm has passed, and the silence it leaves behind is enormous, the whole mountain holding its breath, waiting to see what happens next.
7
CALLUM
Ileave before dawn.
The rain has stopped, and the world outside the Holden house is washed and silent, the air so clean it feels medicinal. Greer is asleep on the sofa, curled under a blanket I pulled from the back of one of June's armchairs, her hair dark against the faded upholstery, one arm trailing toward the floor. The dress is on the rug where I peeled it off her. My belt is somewhere near the bookshelf. The room smells like her skin and old wood and the sharp, clean aftermath of something that can't be taken back.
I stand over her for longer than I should. The slope of her shoulder where the blanket has slipped, the shadow along her collarbone, the way her hair falls across the cushion in a dark spill. The faint mark on her neck where my teeth were, dark against pale skin, and the sight of it does something territorial to the base of my skull.
Mine. The word arrives uninvited, absolute, and I don't bother correcting it.
