Someone's been through this.
The knowledge sits in my throat and won't go down. I stand still in the middle of the garage, under the buzz, and let it settle into my bones. The notebooks. The maps. The satellite image, facedown where I left it but dog-eared now, a crease that wasn't there. Hannah's card out on the bench instead of tucked inside the blue notebook. The red pen uncapped, on its side near the edge, the point gone dry.
Someone stood where I'm standing. Lifted these pages. Read the names in my hand, the dates, the routes in red, the question marks beside Hannah Brooks and Denny Voss and Dwight Calloway — and that they did it here, in my garage, on my bench, while I sat four hours on the east side watching an empty drive, brings the anger up so fast and clean I can't see past it.
I turn. Move to the interior door, the one between the garage and the kitchen. Push it open.
The kitchen light is bright after the garage. The linoleum gleams under the overhead, the same brown-and-cream worn smooth at the stove where generations of Hollanders and Mareks stood making meals they didn't want in a house they didn't want to live in. The refrigerator hums. The fan turns its circle over the table.
Trevor is sitting at the table.
Gray t-shirt and sweatpants, forearms on the wood, hands loose around a mug of something that's probably coffee and probably cold. His dark hair is pushed back the way it gets when he's been dragging his hands through it. His jaw is set. His eyes find mine the second I clear the door, and they don't move.
We look at each other across the kitchen. The space between us might as well be nothing, might as well be everything, and in the quiet — the hush that belongs to four a.m. in a house where two men have ten years of unsaid things hanging in the air — I can hear the concentrator down the hall and the refrigerator cycling and the old pipes ticking in the walls, and under all of it, louder than any of it, the sound of something breaking that's needed breaking a long time.
His mug sits between his hands, a thin curl of steam dying off it. His fingers are loose around the ceramic, easy in a way that tells me he's been here a while. Waiting. And that he was waiting — that he knew I'd come through that door and set himself here to meet me — lands alongside the anger and the violation and the cold certainty that whatever happens next has been building since the day he walked back in and decided the walls were too thin for both of us.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't need to. The question is all over his face — in the set of his jaw, the stillness of his hands, the way he holds my eyes without blinking — and it's simple and impossible and exactly what I've dreaded since I saw the kitchen light from the drive.
What are you doing, Cole?
And behind me, on the bench, bathed in that sick yellow, the answer waits in notebooks and maps and a coffee can an inch out of place — and the distance between his question and my answer is just the distance between this table and that door, and neither of us has moved to close it.
Chapter Seven
Trevor
The crunch of tires wakes me. Not the sharp crack of someone hitting the drive at speed — the slow, deliberate crunch of someone trying not to make noise. Gravel shifting under weight, the engine just above an idle, the sound of a vehicle creeping onto a property in the middle of the night like it knows it doesn't belong.
I lie there. The ceiling stain hasn't changed its borders. My t-shirt is damp where my back meets the mattress. The sheet is tangled around my legs. July in Pennsylvania, and the heat doesn't break after dark — it settles, becomes something you breathe instead of something that happens to you.
Cole's Toyota. I know the sound of it. I've been tracking it for nights without meaning to, lying awake and listening to the sequence: gravel, engine off, door open, door close, footsteps across the backyard, the scrape of the side door. Tonight the sequence breaks. The crunch comes, then nothing. No engine cut. No footsteps. The truck idles at the end of thedrive ten seconds, maybe fifteen, then the crunch comes again, moving away, and I'm left with the fan turning and the heat pressing down and restlessness beyond imagination.
I sit up. The mattress groans. My shoulder throbs, a dull ache that lives deep in the muscle and surfaces when I'm tired or stressed or both, which is most of the time now. I swing my feet to the floor. The wood is cool under my soles, or maybe it's just that my skin is hot. Hard to tell the difference at this hour.
Downstairs in the dark. I move by memory — hand on the banister, three fingers trailing the top rail the way I did coming down these stairs for the last time at twenty-two, except now I'm coming down them for what feels like the hundredth time in ten days and the house shrinks a little with each trip. The kitchen linoleum is cool and sticky under my bare feet. I flick the light on. Harsh yellow floods the space, makes the brown-and-cream pattern look feverish.
I pull a water bottle from the fridge. Cold against my palm. I don't open it. Just hold it, feeling the chill work into my skin, and that's when I see the door.
The garage door off the kitchen is ajar. Not wide — an inch, a thin vertical line of dark between door and jamb. Cole left in a hurry. Didn't latch it. I can picture it: him shoving through the side door, moving fast, still angry from the kitchen, his hand hitting the latch but not seating it. The mistake you make when your mind is somewhere else.
I stand there with the bottle in my hand and the yellow light beating down and Eileen's concentrator a faint breath from down the hall, and the line of darkness from thegarage seems to widen without changing size, like it's breathing.
I nudge the door open with my foot.
The fluorescent tube is already on. Cole left it burning — which is its own kind of clue, because the man who counts every pill and squares every mug to the millimeter doesn't leave lights on by accident. The garage smells the way it always does: motor oil and metal and concrete that never dries all the way. The workbench runs the length of the far wall, a slab of scarred pine Wade built twenty years ago and never maintained. Above it, a hand-drawn map of Roan and its outskirts is tacked to the wall with pushpins. Not printed — drawn, on graph paper, the streets rendered with a shaky precision that says someone who knows the roads by heart but can't quite hold the scale. Pushpins in red and blue. Routes inked in, circuitous, dodging the main roads.
On the bench: three composition notebooks splayed open, pages covered in Cole's cramped, slanting hand. A coffee can of pens at the far end, the red Folgers logo faded to pink. Color-coded tabs bristle from the notebook edges — blue, red, green, a system I can't read but that Cole clearly lives inside. The notebooks aren't hidden. They just sit there, exposed, like the contents are too urgent to conceal or too dangerous to risk moving.
I set the bottle down. Pick up the first notebook.
The pages fall open to a blue tab. Annette Coyle. Four years ago. Block letters, underlined twice. Below it, in Cole's tight script:Left for Seattle 4/17. Never called home. Sister (Brenda) filed missing persons 4/22. Report #7743.Signed Calloway. No follow-up. No door-to-door. Closed 4/29.And under that, one word: DEAD.
I turn the page. Judy Marsh. Three years back. Same pattern in the same hand:Pulled out of school. Stopped answering texts. Cover story about a sick aunt. Report filed, case number, Calloway's signature. Closed inside a week.DEAD.
My throat goes dry. I flip faster. Voss's name on nearly every page, circled in red, sometimes dated, sometimes joined by arrows to other names. Calloway. Always Calloway. The sheriff's name written hard enough to emboss the back of the page. In one margin:Lakehouse???, three question marks eating half the line.
My hands feel wrong. Sweat on the spine, my fingers leaving damp prints on the paper. I keep turning. The entries get denser, the writing more compressed, like Cole was running out of room or patience or both. Dates. Times. License plates. Witness statements that trail off mid-sentence, followed by(refused to continue)or(door shut in face)or just a line drawn through the whole paragraph like he couldn't stand to look at it.
