Through the kitchen window, their father had gone still.
For a second, Danny held his gaze.
Something passed between them—tight, uneasy, impossible to name.
Then his father turned away first.
David followed Danny’s glance toward the house. Their parents were still standing at the window, watching Davie in the yard.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Then his attention drifted past his brother to the pool. The water lay flat and turquoise in the late light, but he barely seemed to see it. Instead, his focus caught on the far corner of the flagstone patio, lingering there a beat too long before he finally looked away.
Something shifted in his expression—gone so fast Danny almost thought he imagined it.
Not guilt.
Just something shuttered, tired, and impossible to read.
Danny tossed the baseball toward Davie.
“See you later, champ.”
Davie waved.
Danny climbed back into the cruiser and sat there for a moment before starting the engine.
Davie’s laughter drifted across the yard.
Then Danny backed down the drive and pulled away.
To anyone passing on the road, it looked like another Mercer evening—a father and son in the yard, grandparents at the window, the house glowing gold in the late sun.
The kind of picture people liked to believe meant nothing bad could happen here.
35
Eleanor’s House — Evening
By the time Reid Calloway turned off Main and started up the hill, the route to her place was embarrassingly familiar.
Left at the old oak, follow the curve as the street climbed, houses getting bigger, lots getting deeper as the road wound toward the ridge.
Snob Hill.
He’d heard it called that since law school—the pocket where Sylva’s who’s who tucked themselves a couple streets off downtown. Doctors. Bankers. Old families with old money.
Made a certain kind of sense that Eleanor Harper was tucked up here, too.
He spotted her house as he rounded the last bend: white brick, black shutters, porch gaslights already lit against the deepening blue of evening.
Those gaslights had stuck with him from the first time he’d dropped off paperwork here. A little too Charleston for a mountain town, a little too dramatic for a brick ranch, and somehow exactly—inevitably—Eleanor.
He parked at the curb, grabbed the bottle of wine from the passenger seat, and climbed the brick steps. Jazz seeped under the door—piano and trumpet, smooth and low—twined with the scent of garlic and butter.
He rang the bell.
Footsteps. The muffled clink of something in the kitchen. The deadbolt slid back.
