I cut my lights and sit in the silence of the cooling engine, and the full weight of the day finds me all at once. My shoulder aches where the seatbelt sawed my collarbone on the pass. My hands are stiff from hours on the wheel, the knuckles pale and locked, and when I flex my fingers the tendons protest like old rope.
The photograph is still on my phone where I left it, snapped off the keeper's wall before the woman could decide whether she wanted me to have it. The girl mid-laugh with her eyes catching the light, the eyes I've spent my whole life finding in the mirror and calling my father's. Three faces across two generations, and the one in the middle belongs to someone I've never heard of, in a frame on the wall of a house my mother sent me to without telling me why.
I close the phone, pocket it, and get out.
The October air has teeth now that the sun is gone. The mountains are a black absence against the sky, the cloud covertoo thick for stars, and the house sits in the middle of it all like a held breath. Lavender still comes off the garden beds in faint waves.
The porch step groans under my boot, and the front door of his car opens. Callum unfolds himself from the driver's seat the way he does everything, with economy and a deliberate patience that makes every step feel like assessment. He crosses the gravel without hurrying. His coat is the same charcoal he wore the morning he sat in my dining room, laid out documents like cards in a game only he knew the rules to, and offered me the money and the most carefully constructed lie I'd ever been told to my face.
The collar is turned up against the wind, and the sight of him in the dark at my mother's house pulls something low and complicated through the center of my body.
"How long have you been sitting out here?" I ask.
"Long enough." He stops at the bottom of the porch steps and looks up at me, the sharp lines of his jaw, the flat set of his mouth. His hands are in his pockets.
"I didn't invite you."
"Your porch light is on." He's already coming up the steps, his hand reaching past me for the door, and the presumption of it is so perfectly Callum that my irritation and my relief arrive in the same breath.
"My porch light has been on a timer since my mother set it. That's not an invitation. That's a dead woman's habit."
The corner of his mouth moves. "Then consider me uninvited."
"Why are you here?"
"Because somebody tried to put you in the reservoir this morning. You've been gone all day, and I have no idea what you found out there." He sets his jaw. "I need to see your face while you decide how much of that you're going to share with me."
I've spent all day in a car with a photograph and a question, and the question won't resolve at a distance. Up close is where I need him.
I step back from the doorway. "Wipe your feet."
The house takes us in with the dark wood and the stillness it's carried since June stopped filling it. The grandfather clock in the hall reads 3:47, the way it has read 3:47 for as long as I can remember.
I leave the overheads off and turn on the lamp by the sofa. The light pools in a warm circle that makes the rest of the room fall back into shadow. His coat goes on the back of the chair where June used to hang her apron.
"Coffee?" I ask, because I need the distance. A counter, the width of the kitchen, and the time it takes to brew a pot between me and the man standing too close in my mother's house.
"You're stalling."
"I'm being polite. Take the coffee, Callum."
He takes the coffee, black, no sugar, in the plain white mug. I take the blue one. He leans against the counter and I stay by the stove, the width of the kitchen between us.
"You followed the address," he says.
"Of course I followed the address. My mother hid it inside a dead woman's novel and someone tried to kill me for it. What did you think I'd do, Callum, stay home and iron sheets?"
His jaw tightens. "You drove through the pass, alone, after someone tried to put you in the reservoir. You found something out there. And now you're standing in this kitchen deciding whether I'm safe enough to tell."
He sets the mug down too hard. Coffee sloshes over the rim onto the old granite, and he doesn't wipe it up.
"I am not the enemy in the room, Greer."
"Then who is?"
Somewhere in the walls, a pipe knocks once, the old plumbing shifting with the cold the way it has shifted every October I can remember. The house filling the silence the way it fills every silence, with its own small commentary.
"I don't know yet," he says. The words cost him. I can see it in the tension along his forearms, the tendons standing out where his sleeves are pushed to the elbow. He runs his hand across his jaw, a quick, frustrated gesture that belongs to a man who hates the taste of those words.
