I set the magazine on the side table. Stand. My knee protests again — the good one, still the good one — and I move toward the door with the heaviness of a man carrying something he didn't ask for and can't put down.
Her eyes follow me. Not saying anything. Just watching. The same look she gave me at twenty-two, when I was backing down the gravel drive with my bags in the truck bed and my eyes fixed on the road ahead because looking back would have cost me something I couldn't name. She watched me then. She watches me now. Some kinds of knowing don't change, even when everything else does.
The house creaks around us — old wood settling, or the pipes knocking, or the weight of three people breathing in rooms too close together under a roof that wasn't built for this much history. The July heat presses through the screens, carrying cut grass from somewhere down the street.
I pull the door to behind me — not all the way, just enough to give her the privacy she's earned and I haven't — and stand in the hall with the concentrator hissing behind it and Cole's words still turning.
Two dogs circling a drain. She's not wrong.
Evening comes slower than morning did. The light holds on, stubborn, throwing long shadows across the side yard toward the garage. I tell myself I'm looking for a wrench.
The lie sits light in my chest, like it hasn't fully committed to being one. A wrench. Sure. The Ford's front left tire has a slow leak I've been meaning to deal with. There's a socket set out there somewhere, buried under one of Wade's old toolboxes. A wrench. That's all.
The garage door sticks when I push it — the frame swollen with the July damp — and it takes a shoulder to move it. The smell hits first: motor oil and metal and concrete that never dries, plus the sour note of old coffee from a mug Cole left on the bench today. The bulb is off. I flip the switch. It sputters to life, that sick yellow over everything — my skin, the floor, the workbench exactly as I left it twelve hours ago, which is the problem.
The notebooks are where Cole left them. Not hidden. Stacked under the worktable beside the Folgers can of pens, tabs bristling in their color system I still can't read but that Cole lives inside. The hand-drawn map is tacked to the pegboard, Roan and its outskirts in his shaky precision, pushpins in red and blue, routes inked to dodge the main roads. Everything as it was, exposed and unapologetic.
I don't touch them. My hand hovers near the stack, fingers half-curled, then drops. Not my system. Not my case. Not my garage, technically — though the deed saysHollander and the walls have absorbed more Marek than Hollander in the decade I've been gone.
But the index card is there, at the edge of the bench, set down in a hurry and never filed. Hannah Brooks. Cole's cramped slant, pressed hard enough to dent the cardboard.
I stand there. The wrench pretense evaporates. My hand rests on the edge of the bench, thumb inches from the card's corner, and I don't pick it up. The information's already in my head, has been since last night, turning with the fan blades and Cole's words and the weight of a girl who got into a coach's car and that this town has decided not to look at too closely.
How long I stand there, I don't know. Long enough for the bulb to warm the air. Long enough for the concrete to release the day's heat back up, turning the garage into something between an oven and a confessional. Long enough that when the side door opens behind me, I don't startle. I've been expecting it. Or dreading it. Hard to tell anymore.
Cole stops in the doorway. I feel him there without turning, the air pressure changing the way it does before rain. His eyes find the workbench, the index card, my hand resting near it, and the calculation runs behind his face. He's clocking the absence of wrenches. The absence of socket sets. The fact that I'm standing in front of Hannah Brooks's name and not the tool rack, and the pretense I walked in with is as transparent as the garage's single-pane glass.
The air is raw. Last night's fight still live in it, neither resolved nor retreated from, banked like a fire smothered but not out. I can smell him from here — garageon his clothes, sweat from whatever he's been doing since the silent coffee run. His shirt dark between the shoulder blades. His hair pushed back the way it gets when he's been dragging his hands through it, which means he's been thinking.
I don't move away from the bench.
"I want in," I say.
Flat. Stripped of ceremony. Not a request — logistics, the way you'd brief mission parameters to a squad leader who hasn't decided yet whether you're an asset or a liability. "You're a known quantity in this town. They've had years to build a story around you — troublemaker, delinquent, Mick's problem kid. Doors shut when you knock. I'm a stranger. Gone a decade. A veteran with a service record that exists whether or not I ever talk about it. People open doors for veterans in towns like this. They respect the uniform even when it's not being worn."
Cole makes a sound. Short, low, humorless. Not a laugh — something thinner, the vocal version of a door shut without being slammed. His eyes hold mine across the bench, and what's in them isn't surprise. It's assessment. A man weighing variables he didn't account for and doesn't trust.
"Why?" he asks.
One word. Flat. Like he already knows the answer and is waiting to see if I give him the one he expects or something he hasn't prepared for.
"Because that girl is seventeen."
The simplicity of it lands. No elaboration. No tactical justification. Just the fact. Hannah Brooks is seventeen. She got into Denny Voss's car. She's pulled back fromeveryone since, and Cole watches her around town getting smaller by the week, and there's a pattern under it, and the pattern has names written in Cole's hand on cards that live on a workbench in a garage that smells like motor oil and regret.
Cole stares at me. His eyes are very blue in the yellow light, fixed on mine until the hair stands up on my arms, and for a second I think he might say something — break the pattern, name the thing in the room, which is that we're standing close enough to touch and neither of us is breathing right and the current between us has nothing to do with Hannah Brooks.
He looks away first. His hand finds the spine of the blue notebook — Annette's — and his knuckles go white around it, tendons standing up like cables. He doesn't say yes. Doesn't say no. The bulb buzzes. Somewhere outside, a car passes on Cembrook, its engine fading toward town.
"If you're in," he says finally, low and clipped, each word measured on the way out, "you follow my lead. My methods. My contacts. My call on what gets shared and when. This isn't the Marines, Trevor. There's no chain of command. There's me, and there's the work, and if you can't live with that, walk now."
My jaw tightens, the muscle ticking, and the part of me that spent years following procedure wants to push back. Wants structure. Wants the thing I'm good at — the hierarchy, the clarity, knowing exactly where I stand and what's expected.
I nod. One sharp dip of the chin. Marine affirmative. The kind of yes that doesn't need elaboration, because elaboration is for people who haven't made up their minds,and mine was made up sometime between last night's fight and this morning's cold coffee and the moment I stood in front of Hannah Brooks's name and understood that walking away wasn't an option anymore.
The bulb buzzes. The concrete radiates heat. Her card sits at the edge of the bench, name face-up under the light, and the space between Cole's shoulder and mine stays exactly what it's always been, and neither of us does a damn thing to change it.
Cole starts talking. His voice takes on the clipped efficiency of a man who's explained this to himself so many times the words come out pre-formed, rehearsed in the dark hours when the only audience is the workbench and the maps.
