Driveway: empty.
Side door: closed.
Blinds: yellow.
2:17 a.m.
Four hours. Four hours of sweat and stiff joints and the AC drone and two cars and one cat and no Denny Voss doing anything worth writing down. My focus is going soft at the edges, the way it does when your body's had enough and your brain's too tired to argue.
The thoughts come in sideways. Cembrook Road. The house with its peeling paint and listing porch and the stillness of a place where too much has happened for the walls to hold it. Eileen's concentrator hissing in the back room. The kitchen with its sticky linoleum and one working burner and the pill organizer in its spot, because God forbid anything in that house sit in the wrong place for more than five minutes.
Trevor.
The name arrives without warning and closes around something vital. Trevor asleep down the hall. Or not — lying awake, probably, the way he has since he got here, watching the stain on the spare-room ceiling and listening to the house breathe. A hallway between us. A lockeddoor. Ten years of silence packed into a distance I could cross in three strides if I wanted to. Which I don't. Which is the problem.
My hand goes still on the notebook. I stare at the dark windshield, at the reflection of nothing — my own face ghosted on the glass, pale and hollow-eyed in the spill from Voss's porch — and for a beat too long I'm not in the truck. I'm in the kitchen doorway, days back, my hand on Trevor's forearm, his pulse against my thumb, two seconds that felt like twenty, both of us frozen like we'd touched something we weren't allowed to.
The memory has weight. I feel it in my shoulder, where his brushed mine, a warmth that has nothing to do with July and everything to do with the fact that Trevor Hollander's body against mine is something my skin remembers even while the rest of me works to forget.
I catch myself. Blink. The windshield is a windshield again. The house is a house. The AC drones. The street's empty.
One last pass through the binos — not because I expect anything to change but because the routine is what I've got when certainty's in short supply. Porch light: on. Silverado: in the drive. Blinds: yellow. Nothing moving. Nothing worth staying for.
Nothing here tonight.
I cap the pen. Tuck the notebook under the driver's seat, spine flush to the rail the way I always set it. The key goes in. The engine turns over louder than it has any right to be in the quiet, and I wince and glance at Voss's house through the passenger window, half expecting him at the door, squinting into the glare with a hand raised against it.
He doesn't come. The house stays dark. The blinds stay drawn. The AC drones.
I pull off the curb with the lights still off, rolling slow until I'm a block down before I flip them on. The street falls away in the rearview — porch light to a pinprick, then nothing, just dark houses and darker trees and the emptiness of a stakeout that gave me exactly what I came for, which is nothing, and the stone in my chest doesn't lighten on the drive home.
The headlights die before my brain catches up to my hand. Muscle memory — I've killed the lights at the end of this drive for years, rolling the last twenty feet dark so I don't wake Eileen, and the habit's so deep I don't register what I'm seeing until the engine cuts and the gravel goes quiet under the tires.
The garage light is on.
A pale rectangle bleeding under the side door, throwing the weeds beside the steps into a sick glow that shouldn't be there. I sit with my hand still on the key, the metal warm from four hours of driving, and the wrongness of it lands cold.
I did not leave that light on.
I know I didn't. I left in a hurry — pushed out of the house after the kitchen, angry and off-balance — but I always kill the garage light. Always. The notebooks are in there. The maps. The satellite image with the routes in red. The whole case lives on that bench under a fluorescent tube I switch off every time I walk out, becausethe one rule in a town where walls have ears is you don't leave it lying in plain sight, even if the plain sight is your own garage.
My eyes cut left. The kitchen window is lit.
Yellow spilling through the glass above the sink, the same as the garage but brighter, and my stomach drops through the floor of the cab. Not a slow sink — a plunge, the ground gone before the body understands it's falling.
I get out without closing the door all the way. The latch catches at the last inch and holds, a soft click that's almost worse than a slam, because a slam would mean I've stopped trying to be quiet, and quiet is the only advantage I've got. My boots hit the gravel and I go still, listening.
The neighborhood is dead — the kind of dead that belongs to four in the morning on a weeknight, when the people who make things happen are asleep or somewhere they don't want witnessed. Crickets in the weeds along the fence. A dog barking two streets over, once, unanswered. No cars on Cembrook. No headlights. No cruiser at the curb with its engine idling and its radio low. Nothing out of place but the lights in my house.
I scan the street left to right, the way Mick taught me to read a perimeter. No strange vehicles. No county plates. No dark sedan with tinted glass parked with the engine off.
The garage side door is unlocked. I push it open and step inside.
The tube buzzes overhead, throwing that sick yellow over everything — my skin, the concrete, the workbench, where the top notebook is sitting at an angle.
Not a big one. Maybe fifteen degrees off true. But I left it flush to the edge, spine parallel to the front rail, theway I always set it, because the system only works if it's consistent. The corner of the blue notebook — Annette's — hangs a quarter inch over the lip, and the sight of it hits like a round from a .22. Small caliber. Precise. Built to do maximum damage with minimum fuss.
My eyes go to the shelf. The coffee can — red Folgers, emptied and repurposed for the loose pages that don't fit the notebooks — sits an inch forward of where it lives. I can see the dust ring it left, a clean circle of pine against the grime, and the can isn't in it. Someone lifted it, looked inside, set it back without lining it up, because they didn't know the ring was there, didn't know the position of a coffee can on a garage shelf is a piece of data, same as a timestamp or a plate, if you're the one who set it.
