"Well?" He pulls back just far enough to look at me. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
I study his face in the lamp's amber wash. The sweat at his temples. The vein in his neck still pounding. The loosenessaround his mouth that only shows when every barricade has come down at once. Without the composure holding his features in place, he looks older. Tired. The skin under his eyes is bruised with it, and for a second he's just a man standing in a kitchen with his trousers around his ankles and no idea who tried to kill the woman he's inside of.
A Callum without an answer is a thing I've never seen before. If whatever put that look on his face is bigger than the man standing in front of me, then the thing hunting me is bigger than I thought.
"Not yet," I say. "Come upstairs."
We pull on enough to make the stairs. His coffee sits on the countertop, the spill from where he set it down too hard already drying at the edges. The house creaks through its sequence as we climb, and my mother's bedroom door is closed at the end of the hall. I steer us to my room without acknowledging it.
The bed is made with June's ironed sheets. The Cather novel is still on the nightstand. The window faces east, toward mountains I can't see in the dark. I pull him down onto the bed, and his weight settles into the sheets my mother ironed for a room I abandoned. The collision of those two facts, Callum Aldrich in June Holden's careful, hopeful laundering, is something I'm not equipped to hold right now. I let it go.
His body curls behind mine, his arm across my waist, his breath evening out against the back of my neck. The house settles around us with small sounds and deep silences.
This is the moment. His defenses are stripped, his composure scattered somewhere on the kitchen floor with our clothes. If there is a lie in him I will see it now, before the walls go back up.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand. The screen lights the room in a blue-white rectangle, and I open the photograph and hold it where he can see it.
"Do you recognize her?"
His body goes still against mine. Not tense. Not guarded. Still in the way a man goes still when the face in front of him connects to nothing he holds, when the blankness isn't a wall but an open room with nobody in it.
"No." He takes the phone from me, studies the image with the same focused attention he brings to documents and clauses and the fine print of other people's mistakes. "Where did you get this?"
"The woman on the plains. The one my mother sent me to."
His jaw works once. "The address in the book. She gave you this photograph."
"The woman took one look at me and said I have my father's eyes. So does the girl in the photograph."
He looks at the screen again. I watch the side of his face in the blue light. The way his brow draws together. The way his mouth opens and closes without forming a word. His thumb hovers over the girl's face the way a man touches a document he's trying to place in a file that doesn't exist. The blankness is genuine. The confusion of a man who keeps meticulous records and has just been shown a page that belongs to no file he maintains.
"She does," he says. "Have your father's eyes."
"I know."
He hands the phone back. "She looks familiar, Greer. But I can’t place her."
I believe him. Or I believe the body that just came apart against mine, which may not be the same thing. I know that, and the knowing doesn't change the weight of the instinct.
The blankness on his face when he looked at that photograph is the same blankness I've seen on two kinds of people: the ones who genuinely don't know, and the ones who are so good at performing ignorance that the performance and the truth become the same thing.
My gut says he's the first kind. My gut has been wrong before. But Callum Aldrich isn't a man whose body lies well after his own composure has cracked on a kitchen counter, and that's the closest thing to certainty I'm going to get tonight.
That's the first fracture. Not in the case, but in my conviction that the man lying in my childhood bed is the man who tried to put me in the reservoir this morning.
If he didn't do it, then someone else did. If someone else did, the list of people who knew where I'd be and when I'd be there is longer than I thought. The machine that runs this valley has channels I haven't mapped and hands I haven't seen.
I set the phone on the nightstand, face down. The room goes dark again. I can feel the mountain pressing against the windows the way it has pressed against this house for over a hundred years, patient and heavy and full of things it isn't ready to give back.
"The woman who took the photograph," I say into the dark. "She's Chinese. Or part. And the girl in the picture has my father's eyes."
He's quiet for a long time. His arm tightens across my waist, and I can feel him working through it, assembling the pieces the way he assembles clauses, testing each one for where it fits.
"Your father had another daughter," he says. Not a question. The conclusion arrived at cleanly, the way his mind works, stated without decoration.
"That's where it points."
"And your mother knew."
