I stand on the sidewalk with my grocery bag and my mother's years-old complaints finally answered by a woman in hiking boots with a messenger bag. I don't know yet whether Naomi is an ally or a parallel investigation that runs beside mine without ever touching it. Her interest is the claims, the filings, the paper. Mine is a girl in a photograph and a family that buries everything.
The afternoon goes to the journals. The Aldrich references are growing denser in the later years, more specific, and the margins are filling with notes in a tighter, more urgent hand than the body text. My mother was building toward something. I can feel its shape without seeing its edges.
My phone buzzes. Callum.
Dinner. Tonight. I have something you need to hear.
He didn't ask. He didn't request. The sentence structure of a man who assumes compliance and calls it communication. I stare at the message, and my body answers before my brain does, a low pull behind my navel that has nothing to do with dinner and everything to do with the weight of him the last time, his hands on the kitchen counter, the way his composure dissolved under mine.
The man who let Ward's call ring unanswered in my bed now needs me to hear something. After his family performed grief like a company presentation, and the back of my neck prickles.
The want and the suspicion occupy the same space. They always have with him. I don't know how to separate them, and I'm not sure he does either.
Can't tonight. Early morning.
The dots appear and disappear twice. I can see him on the other end of this silence, jaw tight, recalculating. A man who hearsnoso rarely that it takes him a beat to process the shape of it.
Tomorrow night, then. This doesn't keep well.
Then stop being cryptic and tell me now.
Not over text. In person. I need to see your face when you hear it.
The possessiveness of that, wanting to watch my reaction as though my face is something he has a right to read, sends heat down my spine and irritation up the back of my neck in equal measure. This is who he is. The man who controls what he can and seduces what he can't, and the distance between those two verbs is narrower than he'd admit.
Last time you watched my face that closely, you lost your composure. Sure you want to risk it?
The dots appear and stay for a long time. I've just put the kitchen counter on the screen between us, and the man who runs every conversation like a deposition is rewriting his response.
Yes.
One word. No calculation in it, no hedge, no clause. Just the bare admission from a man who builds escape routes into everything that this time he's walking in with his hands open.
Tomorrow. Feed me and talk fast.
Be careful, Greer.
My name in his text, when he's been careful to keep his messages impersonal until now. The two words carry more weight with my name attached, as though the warning is a thing he's putting his hands on rather than just sending into the air.
I pocket the phone and go back to the journals.
After dark, Naomi texts.
Wanted to go over the access route for tomorrow morning. I'm in the hotel bar if you have time.
I close the journal I'm reading, pull on a jacket, and drive to the Aldrich Hotel. Part of me wants to see how the hotel machine responds to an investigator sleeping under its roof.
The parking lot is half-full, the hotel's stone facade lit warm against the dark ridge behind it. I push through the front door and the lobby swallows me the way it swallowed me at the memorial: leather, dark wood, brass fixtures that catch the lamplight and throw it back softened.
The front desk greets me with the neutral courtesy of staff trained to welcome without warmth. I ask for Naomi's room andam told she's in the bar. The woman behind the counter delivers this with a smile held in place by professional habit rather than feeling, and as I turn toward the hallway I catch her reaching for the phone. A quick motion, almost reflexive. The kind of call a person makes when they've been told to make it.
The hotel bar is quieter than the last time I was here, the long walnut counter mostly empty, the low lighting doing its job of making expensive drinks feel like secrets. Keaton is behind the bar. A single stool at the near end has a clean napkin placed in front of it, the kind of standing reservation that doesn't need a name. Callum's seat. Even when he's not here, the space waits for him.
Naomi is at the far end, seated on the last stool with her messenger bag on the bar beside her and her tablet propped against a water glass. A drink sits in front of her, amber, neat, and the glass is full, which tells me it arrived recently.
I take the stool beside her. "You ordered fast."
She glances at the glass. "I didn't order at all. It was here when I sat down."
