The number was unfamiliar, Montana area code, but that didn’t mean much. I thumbed it open.
Three words and a county name:She’s coming herself. Madison County.
I read it, then read it again, waiting for the words to rearrange or elaborate or do anything but sit there like a dare.
The screen faded, leaving a negative afterimage burned into my eyes. I set the phone face down and sat very still, counting the seconds as if there would be a countdown, a warning, some preamble to whatever came next.
There wasn’t.
I stood, the chair scraping the floor, and walked to the living room. I didn’t turn on the light. Just listened for movement, for the return of boots or voices or any of the other sounds that meant safety by mass.
The hallway was empty. The baby monitor was lit green, steady. The house was asleep except for me.
I went to find Hooper.
If the story was going to start over, I wanted to be the one to write the first line.
Chapter Fifteen
~ Hooper ~
It’s the same six degrees as yesterday, the cold notched just past bearable, enough that the skin on the back of my hands feels like it could split with one good knock. The floor of the equipment barn did its best to telegraph the temperature straight through my jacket and up into the hinges of my jaw.
I lay flat under the old flatbed, diagnostic reader plugged into a port that should have been replaced in the Bush administration and squinted up at the tangle of wires with the kind of optimism reserved for those who’ve never had to wire a secondary relay with their ass on a slab of rebar-reinforced concrete.
The trouble light swung from the bumper, a little disco of shadows flicking across the undercarriage every time the wind tried the gaps in the siding. I’d lost a washer somewhere between my chest and the differential, and the odds of finding it in the next twelve hours were worse than even, but I kept the rhythm going—loosen, pull, replace, test—because there was comfort in knowing that even the most temperamental machinery could be bullied into working with enough patience and torque.
Liam’s footsteps didn’t match any of the other regulars; he walked light, but not from habit. From calculation. Each step on the old barn’s wood was a decision—make a sound, don’t make a sound, test if the world will let you get away with it today. I counted his approach: six boards, then the hitch as he ducked under the low lintel.
Even with the trouble light overhead, it took a second for my eyes to adjust to the silhouette. He stood in the open, not hiding, not advancing, holding out a prepaid phone with two fingers, the way you hold evidence at the scene of a minor crime.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to. He held out the phone like he’d already tried every other possible move and this was the last one left in the deck.
I finished the rotation on the ratchet, set it down on the creeper by my hip, and shimmied out until the cold air hit the skin above my waistband like a cattle prod. I sat up, propped on one elbow, and reached for the phone. He handed it off without ceremony.
The screen was unlocked, the message front and center:She’s coming herself. Madison County.
Nothing else. No number, no preamble, no signature.
It didn’t have to say more.
I scrolled up, just to check. The prior message was three days ago—an area code ping, likely a burner phone used only for this purpose. Whoever sent the last one sent this one too, and they’d waited until now, until the night before a forecasted freeze, to let us know.
I handed the phone back. “How old is the message?”
He checked. “Forty minutes.” His voice was thin, dry. Like it hurt to make it travel across the barn.
I wiped my hands on the inside of my jacket—already stained from axle grease and the kind of mud that never fully leaves you, not even after three wash cycles—and tried to think of the next step.
It was rare for Liam to come to me with a problem. Rarer still for him to do it without a joke, or at least a crack about the barn smelling like boiled dog food.
That’s how I knew he was scared.
I reached for the shop rag, rolled it between my hands while I let the plan build itself. “You need to get Emilio and head to the east house,” I said. “The Decker-Jasper place, not here. Not anywhere with a front window visible from the road.”
He blinked. Not pushback—just surprise at the speed of the instruction. “Now?”
“Now,” I said. “Don’t use the main trail. Take the horseshoe path by the old silo, then cut south once you’re past the marsh. Stick to the fence line.”
