Somewhere else. I'm somewhere else.
—
Trevor stands in the doorway of the living room. Nineteen, maybe twenty, already six-three and built like he could put his fist through a wall if he wanted. Which he has. Once. That patched drywall in the hall is his work, not mine.
His face goes carefully blank. I watch it happen — the expression draining out, settling into something neutral and far away, like he's watching this on a screen instead ofsix feet from it. His eyes catch mine for half a second. Then they slide off, fix on a point past my shoulder, and he doesn't move. Doesn't step in. Doesn't say a word.
He just stands there. Watching. Doing nothing.
Not because he didn't see. He saw. His eyes met mine. He saw all of it — the split lip from yesterday still healing, the way I'm holding myself up against the wall like it's the only thing keeping me standing, the whole geography of fear I've stopped bothering to hide.
He saw it. He just never moved.
—
I spent years trying to work out why. Turned it over every night for months after he left, lying in the bed we used to share, picking at the question like a scab. The answer I kept landing on — the one that hurt worst, the one that fit the evidence — was that Trevor hadn't cared enough to risk it.
Standing up to Wade would have cost him something. Not much. A shouting match, maybe a shoving contest Wade would have lost. But something. And whatever that something was, it was worth more to him than I was.
Simple as that. Clean as a knife.
—
My knuckles press into the workbench. I bear down until the grain bites and the blood drains out of them, bone-white and trembling. The pain is good. Specific. It pulls me back — the flickering light, the smell of motor oil, the card under my hand that says HANNAH BROOKS in my own cramped writing.
I don't let myself stay in it long. Never do. The trick is to feel the full weight for exactly as long as it takes toremember why you built the wall, and then step back. Let it go.
I flip to a blank page. Cream paper, faint blue lines, waiting for something worth writing.
I write nothing.
The pen sits by my hand. I don't pick it up. Some pages are better left empty.
The investigation runs on two things: June's ears and Mick's patience. Everything else is noise.
I hit the diner every few days, same corner booth, same order — coffee, black, which I nurse until it goes cold because I'm not there for the caffeine. I'm there for the fifteen feet between my booth and the counter, where June works with the unhurried efficiency of a woman who's been on her feet since before sunrise every day of her adult life. Dark hair streaked with silver, pinned back for work. Hands that look like they could fix anything you set in front of them, given time and the right tools.
The diner smells the way it always has: old grease, burnt coffee, the damp of a building that's been breathing the same air for fifty years. Vinyl booths cracked at the seams. The neon outside buzzing even in daylight.
June and I have a shorthand. She slides a refill across without being asked and says something low and offhand, pitched to reach my booth and no further.
"Voss was in Tuesday. Sat with a man I didn't know. Bald, late forties, drove a county truck."
Or: "Brenda Coyle came in last week. Sat alone an hour staring at her eggs. Didn't touch them."
Or, once, just a name. "Hannah." Nothing after it, because nothing else was needed. The name hung between us like a lit match, and we both knew what it meant.
June doesn't editorialize. Doesn't tell me what to do with it or how to feel. She hands me the raw material — names, dates, table numbers, the way the room goes quiet when certain people walk in — and lets me work. Her eyes cut to the door every time the bell rings. Not obviously; she's too practiced for that. But I've watched her long enough to catch it: right hand on the pot, left adjusting her apron, gaze flicking to the door just long enough to clock whoever's coming, then back to the work like nothing happened.
The vigilance of a woman who's heard everything twice and knows the cost of hearing it a third time.
I leave cash on the table. Always more than the coffee's worth. She never comments.
—
Mick's Auto and Body sits on the east side, a corner lot scattered with cars in every state of repair. I work three days a week, four if Eileen's having a good spell and doesn't need me home. But I also show up when I need to think out loud, which is a different thing.
Mick's always under a car or at the parts counter when I come in. Silver-haired, lean and wiry, strong the way men get from turning wrenches for decades. He moves with an economy that makes the younger guys look like they're wasting motion on purpose.
