The accusation hangs there. Accurate. Unanswerable. I am up to something, and he knows it, and that he knows it and I can't tell him why is its own kind of torture. The muscle in my cheek jumps. What wants out right now isn't the investigation or the note or the address burning in my pocket.
It's simpler than that, and more complicated, and I've spent too many years walling it off to let it through now — in a kitchen this small, a house this full of history, a moment this loaded with everything we don't say.
I don't answer. Can't. The words sit behind my teeth, lodged between confession and surrender, and if I open my mouth they'll come, and if they come, everything changes,and I'm not ready for everything to change. Not here. Not now. Not with Eileen's machine going down the hall and ten years of silence pressing on us both.
So I walk. Down the hall, past the fan turning its lazy circle, past Eileen's closed door, to the garage door at the end. I push through it and let it click shut behind me — almost worse than a slam, because a slam would mean anger, and anger is simple, and there's nothing simple in the way that door settles into its frame like it's carrying every unsaid thing in this house.
I stand in the dark with my hand still around the note. The concrete is cool under my boots. The workbench waits where I left it, notebooks stacked in order, maps folded along creases I've memorized. Everything in its place.
Everything but me.
In the kitchen, a closed door away, Trevor stays where I left him. I can picture it without looking: one hand flat on the counter, fingers splayed, staring at the space where I stood like it holds an answer he can use.
I take the note out again. Unfold it. 447 LAKEVIEW DR. Sunday. When they're all in church.
I fold it. Put it back. Stand in the dark with the weight of it against my chest and the ghost of his shoulder against mine, lingering on my skin like a brand I didn't ask for.
Some silences get heavier the longer they go unbroken.
I hit the switch. The garage fills with sick yellow light, and I get to work.
Chapter Six
Cole
The heat in the cab is a solid thing. It sits on my skin like a damp blanket, pressing through my shirt and into the vinyl seat that's been baking in the July dark for two hours and counting. My back is slick where it meets the seat. My neck is worse — a slow drip working down between my shoulder blades no matter how I shift, and I'm trying not to shift, because the springs complain every time and sound carries at night.
Voss's house sits across the street like someone planted it there without caring how it looked. A ranch box, beige siding, a porch that sags at the left corner. One dim bulb burning by the front door, yellow light falling on crabgrass and cracked concrete. The blinds in the front window are drawn but backlit, a thin strip of yellow where the fabric doesn't quite meet the frame. The Silverado's in the drive, nose-in, bumper kissing the edge of the overgrown lawn. The AC unit on the side of the house drones, the one steady sound since I parked.
I lift the binoculars. Driveway first. Empty. Side door — closed, dark, no motion. The gap in the blinds. Yellow. Still. I lower the binos and jot the time on the spiral notebook on my thigh: 12:47 a.m. Nothing.
The street is the kind of quiet that belongs to the east side after midnight — no traffic, no porch lights, just a breeze moving through the maples along the curb. A cat crosses the road thirty yards down, unhurried, like it owns the night. I track it through the binos out of habit, then feel stupid and put them down.
My neck cramps. I roll my shoulders, feel the joints pop, reach for the water bottle on the passenger seat. Warm. Everything in this cab is warm. The water tastes like plastic and regret. Two swallows, then back.
Headlights at the far end of the street. I slide lower — not hiding, just smaller, the way you make yourself when you're parked on a block where the cars know each other and yours doesn't belong. The car comes slow. A sedan, dark, county plates. I jot the plate and time: 12:53. It rolls past Voss's place without slowing and turns at the next intersection. Nothing.
Driveway. Empty.
Side door. Closed.
Blinds. Yellow.
12:59.
A light goes off in the back of the house — a window on the east side, the glow cutting out like someone flipped a switch. Three minutes later another comes on, what might be a bathroom, a harsh white gleam that lasts maybe twenty seconds before it dies. After that, nothing. No shadows behind the blinds. No doors. No Voss steppingout for a smoke or the mail or any of the things a man does when he can't sleep. Just the house holding its secrets behind beige siding, the AC droning into the dark.
My jaw tightens, the muscle ticking in my cheek — the tension of wanting something to happen and watching nothing happen instead. I lower the binos and stare at the house like it's personally responsible for my wasted evening, which it is, which doesn't make the staring any more useful.
The notebook's open on my thigh. I flip back to the Voss section, entries in my cramped, right-leaning hand.Silverado, HS lot, 6/14, 10:17 PM. Lot empty except custodial.Below it:K. Ramirez mentioned a ride from Coach V. 5/22. "He's nice. Always asks how things are at home."And under that, eating half the margin in block letters pressed hard enough to dent the page: HANNAH BROOKS????
The question marks are big. Aggressive. They take up the same room in my head, lodged behind my eyes every time I close them. Hannah got into Voss's car three weeks ago. I watched it from across the lot — watched her shoulders hunch and her head dip, watched her make herself small as she slid into that Silverado like she was stepping into a room she'd been in before and didn't want to enter again.
I stare at the page. The words don't change. Three weeks of the same words, riding under my passenger seat, waiting for me to turn the question marks into something with teeth. Something that would make Calloway sit up in his chair instead of looking at me with those dishwater eyes and that flat, practiced voice —let it go, son, some girlsjust run.
The page doesn't owe me anything. I stare at it anyway, like the answer might surface between the lines if I look hard enough, and when it doesn't — when it never does — the conviction settles deeper. A stone, cold and smooth and immovable. The kind of certainty that comes not from evidence but from the absence of it, from the way a town arranges its silences around the things it won't have known.
I close the notebook. One more pass through the binos.
