Then I flip to a page near the back and the air leaves my lungs.
Hannah Brooks. The name spans the top in letters that slant harder than the rest, pressed in hard enough to tear the fibers.17. Track. Spotted her getting into Voss's car outside Roan High, 3 wks ago.Below it:Pulling back from practice. Quiet. Won't say why.
The page is dense. Question marks everywhere, big and aggressive. Underlines. Arrows running Voss to Calloway to dates to places I don't recognize. And at thebottom, in writing so tight it looks like the pen was jammed against the paper:still in play / still time.
The muscle in my cheek jumps, the tic I've had since the war, the one that surfaces when my body needs to do something and my brain hasn't caught up. The notebook feels heavy in my hands — not the weight of paper and cardboard, but the weight of what's written inside it, sitting in my chest and refusing to move.
I set it back on the bench exactly where I found it. My fingers leave damp spots on the cover. I step into the kitchen and leave the garage door open, the light burning. The yellow glow spills through and cuts across the linoleum.
I hoist myself onto the edge of the counter. The Formica is cool under my thighs. The water bottle sweats beside me, unopened. The overhead light is too bright. It makes everything look wrong — the stove with its one good burner, the pill organizer in its spot, the mug Cole left this morning, ring-stained and empty.
Down the hall, the concentrator hums. In and out. A machine keeping a woman alive one milliliter at a time. I sit on the counter with my bare feet dangling and the garage light bleeding yellow through the doorway and the weight of those notebooks in my chest, and I wait.
The side door opens. Not with a slam — Cole never slams doors here, not with Eileen's room down the hall — but with the careful click of a man who's spent yearsmoving through dark spaces without making a sound. The screen settles into its frame with a soft sigh.
He stops dead when he sees the kitchen light.
I watch it happen. Cole in the doorway, one hand still on the screen's edge, body half-turned toward the yard like he's been caught mid-exit. Hair pushed back, damp at the temples. His shirt dark with sweat between the shoulder blades. His eyes find the kitchen light first, then the open garage door with its glow spilling across the linoleum, then me — on the edge of the counter with my bare feet hanging and the water bottle sweating beside me and my face doing whatever it's doing, which is probably hiding nothing.
His expression goes flat. Not angry, not yet — flat, wiped clean, every usual tell sanded down to nothing. His jaw sets. The muscle in his cheek ticks. His eyes hold mine for a beat, two, and in the quiet I can hear the refrigerator and the fan and the concentrator down the hall, like the house is holding its breath.
He closes the side door without a sound. The latch clicks, soft, precise. Then he's moving, three strides across the kitchen, and the air goes dense between us.
"What were you doing in my garage?"
Low. Controlled. Dropped to just above a whisper, which makes it worse — all that heat with nowhere to go, compressed into a register that lives between speaking and not. The sound of it does something to my chest I won't name.
I hold up a hand. Not stopping him — holding space, the way you do when someone's moving too fast and you need them to slow. "The notebooks, Cole. A seventeen-year-old girl getting into Voss's car. What the fuck."
Something shifts in his face. The flatness cracks — not into anger but into something warier, the look of a man caught and still weighing how much to give. His eyes cut to the garage door, the yellow light, back to me. He doesn't deny it. Doesn't try. Just stands there, hands at his sides, jaw working, the sweat drying on his neck in the stale air.
I push. "I thought you were screwing around out there at night. I thought—" I stop. The words sit behind my teeth, sharp and ugly. "I thought it was something I'd have to be ashamed of. That's what it looked like from where I was sitting."
His expression doesn't change. "But you don't think that now."
Not a question.
"No." Rougher than I mean it. "I know that's not what you are. Which makes this worse, because what youaredoing is insane. Dangerous. Calloway owns this town and everyone in it, Cole. Everyone. And you're — what? One guy with a composition notebook and a hand-drawn map? That's the plan? That's how you take down a sheriff who's been running this place since before either of us could drive?"
His jaw works, the muscle going faster now, a tell I've known since we were kids sharing a bed and pretending not to notice how close we were. His eyes are very blue and very hard, fixed on mine until the hair stands up on my arms.
"Let it be," I say, dropping low to match him, the kind of whisper that carries more than a shout. "This town eats people. It ate your father. It ate those girls. It'll eat you ifyou keep pulling this thread, and for what? What do you think is going to happen here?"
He goes still. Not the flat stillness from the doorway — something deeper, colder, a quiet with weight to it. His eyes hold mine, and for a second I think he won't answer. Might just turn and walk out the way he has all week, retreating to the garage or upstairs or wherever he goes when the air gets too thick to breathe.
Then: "You've let things be your whole life."
It lands like a fist. Clean, precise, aimed at the exact spot where it does the most damage. My throat closes. The words hang there, true and impossible to dodge, because Ihavelet things be. I let Wade happen. I let Cole happen — the hits, the belt, the closed fist in the hallway — and I stood in doorways and watched and said nothing, and then I left, and the letting-be became a habit I carried into the war and carried back out and carry still, a weight I've learned to live with because examining it would mean admitting what it cost.
I go quiet. The kitchen hums around us, and Cole doesn't back off. Doesn't give an inch. He steps closer, not crowding but present, his voice still low but taking on a clipped, exact edge I've never heard from him, like he's reading from something he's memorized down to the comma.
"Calloway at the center. Voss brings him girls. Young ones, just under eighteen, the kind nobody looks for too hard when they stop showing up — because that's what teenagers do, right? They run. They start over somewhere." His mouth twists. "Except they don't. Annette didn't. Judy didn't. And Hannah's stillhere, Trevor — she still goes toschool, she still goes to practice, I see her around town — and she won't last, not unless somebody does something, and in this town that somebody is me, because it sure as hell isn't going to be the Roan County Sheriff's Department."
He stops. His chest rises and falls once, hard, like he's been holding the words longer than he should have. "I'm not asking your permission. I'm not asking for anything. This is happening whether you're in this house or not. The only question is whether you stand in another doorway and watch, or whether ten years and a war taught you something about picking a side."
I come off the counter. The linoleum is cool under my bare feet. We're chest to chest in the narrow kitchen, close enough to see the tension in his throat, the way his Adam's apple moves when he swallows. Close enough to smell the garage on him — motor oil, metal, concrete — and under it something warmer, something human that belongs to him alone and that I've spent ten years trying to forget.
The air between us crackles. Not a metaphor. A physical thing, a current running the few inches between our chests, charged with everything we're not saying and never have, the heat of two men who've wanted each other so long the wanting has become its own language — unspoken, corrosive, impossible to put to use.
