"Two girls in four years, and now a third in motion. Annette Coyle, four years back. Judy Marsh, three. Hannah Brooks, happening right now, I'd swear on it." His finger moves across the map — back roads, county routes, circuits that skirt the main drag through Roan with the care of someone who understands what visibility costs. "Pattern's consistent. Withdrawal first. They stop showing up. Stop answering texts. Friends say they seem off, distant, like something's eating them from the inside. Then the story — moving away, a sick relative, a parent's new job in the city. Stories that hold up on paper and fall apart the second you press on them."
His hand finds the blue notebook and flips it open to a page dense with dates. I lean in. My shoulder brushes his,a glancing contact neither of us acknowledges, and I reach toward a paragraph near the bottom where the margins are too tight to read.
Cole turns the page.
Not aggressively. No snap, no flourish. His hand just moves, the notebook rotates, and the paragraph I was reaching for is gone, replaced by a timeline across two facing pages — withdrawal dates, last known locations, report numbers in his cramped script. I look at him. He's staring at the map, jaw set, like the page-turn didn't happen or happened for reasons too obvious to comment on.
It happens again. My eyes catch a detail on the Judy Marsh page — a witness statement, a name blacked out in Cole's own marker — and as I lean closer his fingers settle across the redaction. Not his palm flat on the page; just his fingers, light over the blacked-out lines, casual enough to be coincidence and deliberate enough to be unmistakable.
The third time, I call it.
"Let me see the full Annette file."
His hand pauses on the notebook's edge. His eyes cut to me, then back to the pegboard, and for a second I think he'll refuse — shut the book, walk out, leave me with half a briefing and a growing certainty that whatever we agreed to lives mostly in my own head.
He reaches up, pulls the Annette file — a manila folder tucked between the map and the board, edges soft from handling — off the wall. Sets it on the bench. Face-down.
The message isn't subtle.
"What's the point of a partner who can't see the evidence?"
The wordpartnerhangs there. Neither of us has usedit until now, and out loud it feels both accurate and wildly premature, like calling a ceasefire before either side has stopped firing.
Cole doesn't look at me. His fingers drum once on the bench edge — short, tight, a man counting to ten in his head and making it to three. "You're not a partner. You're a resource. A face that gets through doors. That's the value. The rest stays with me."
"That's not how this works." My voice drops to match his. "If I'm going to be useful — anything other than a prop you wheel out when you need someone respectable to vouch for the crazy guy — I need the full picture. Not the highlight reel. The actual case. Dates, names, statements, the parts you've blacked out because you think I can't handle them or you don't trust me with them or both. You can't send me through a door blind and expect me to come back with anything worth having."
The military phrasing wants to come —intel drives ops— and I leave it behind, because this isn't a briefing room, it's a garage with one bulb and a workbench and a girl's name six inches from my elbow, and Cole doesn't need the jargon to understand the point.
Cole turns from the pegboard. Looks at me directly for the first time since the fight. Really looks. His eyes are very blue and very hard, and what's in them isn't anger. It's colder than that. The look of a man who's been doing this alone for two years — building a case nobody asked for, carrying names nobody else will speak — and who does not trust, on any level that matters, that the man in front of him will still be in this garage in a week.
"Last I checked," he says, flat and precise, each wordplaced like he's setting charges, "you had a pretty good track record of walking away."
It lands. Clean. Specific. Aimed where it does the most damage, which is everywhere, because he's not wrong. I walked away from this house. From Wade. From Cole — from the belt, the closed fist, the geography of fear in these walls that I stood in doorways and witnessed and did nothing about. I walked until Pennsylvania was a rearview memory and the war was the present tense, and the walking became its own habit, because stopping would have meant facing what I'd left.
I don't answer. Can't. The words sit behind my teeth, sharp and ugly and true, and if they come out everything changes, and I'm not ready for everything to change. So I hold his stare. Jaw tight, hands at my sides, shoulder inches from his, and I don't blink. Don't flinch. Don't give him the satisfaction of being the first to look away, even though every cell in my body is begging for relief.
He breaks. His eyes drop to the bench, to the face-down file, to the scarred pine between our hands. His jaw works, the muscle jumping, and for a second I think he might turn and push through the side door and leave me with half a case and a pretense neither of us believes anymore.
The silence stretches. The bulb buzzes. Outside, a moth taps the garage window — soft, persistent, something trying to get in or get out — and the sound makes the quiet heavier, not lighter.
Cole reaches up. Unpins the file — he'd put it back, I hadn't noticed — and sets it on the bench between us. Not handed. Not offered. Just placed on the scarredpine an inch from my right hand, like he's setting down something he's not convinced he should let go of.
I open it.
The contents are what I expected and worse. Photocopied police reports with paragraphs blacked out in marker. Witness statements, names redacted, addresses partial — the half-information that comes from people who saw something and are afraid to be quoted. Newspaper clippings about Annette Coyle, the print soft at the folds. A photo — a school picture, lifted from a yearbook — of a girl with dark hair and a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. Seventeen. Was seventeen. The past tense is the whole problem.
I turn pages. Cole stands beside me, his shoulder close enough that I feel the heat off him, and he doesn't look at the file. Looks at the map. The notebooks. Anywhere but the contents of the folder he just handed over, like watching me read it is its own kind of surrender.
Hannah's card sits at the edge of the bench the whole time, name face-up under the yellow light, dates below it in Cole's cramped hand, and the moth keeps tapping the glass in the dark outside — tap, tap, tap — a clock counting seconds in a room where time has always moved too fast for the people trapped inside it.
We stand there. Shoulders almost touching. Neither one moving away. The file open between us, its pages heavy with girls who disappeared and a town that looked away and two men with ten years of silence between them and a case that neither of them walked away from, even when walking away was the easier thing.
Chapter Nine
Cole
The streets are empty the way only a Sunday morning in Roan can be empty — not quiet, dead, like the whole town got scooped out and left to bake. Heat shimmers off the asphalt in thin, wavering lines. The cicadas are cranked to eleven, a constant electric whine that lives in the back of your teeth and doesn't care if you're listening.
