"What exactly do you think we can do about it," he says, "sitting in a truck on a dead street with the engine off and the temperature climbing? Call the police? The same ones whose reports you've got blacked out in your notebooks? Drive to the station and ask Calloway if he's seen our witness lately?"
"We wait." It's out before I've thought it through, reflex more than strategy, and the second it lands I know it's the wrong answer. Not because it's false — waiting is the job, sometimes — but because Trevor spent years in a uniform that taught him action is the only currency that matters, and watching an empty house is the opposite of action, and he knows it, and I know he knows it.
"Waiting's not a plan." His voice hasn't changed. Still measured, which makes it worse, because the control is a choice and the choice is its own weapon. "Waiting is what you do when you're out of options. We're not out of anything. We knocked on a door. Nobody answered. There's road between that and sitting here till the tank's dry."
"You wouldn't know a plan if it knocked on your door for ten minutes and got no answer."
It lands wrong — off by enough that he knows I firedand knows I missed and knows why. I see it hit. A flicker, fast and gone, a tightening around the eyes that means I scored in a place I didn't mean to.
His jaw works. Once. For a second I think he might match the low blow with one of his own, the way we did at nineteen and eighteen, trading barbs that were never about the thing they pretended to be.
He doesn't. He looks back at the house. His fingers drum once on the frame — that same short rhythm — and the silence after is thicker than the one before.
"We could check the neighbors," he says finally. Lower. Flatter. The control sanded down to something almost tired. "Someone might have seen her leave. If she left."
"Nobody on this street talks to us. You knock on a door in this town asking about a woman who might be in trouble, and by sundown Calloway knows your name, your plate, and what you had for breakfast. That's how it works. Always has."
"So we do nothing." Not a question.
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't say anything useful."
"Useful." I bark it. Short, sharp, something breaking that's been under tension too long. "You've been back a few weeks, Trevor. I've been inside this thing for years. I know how the pieces fit. I know which doors open, which get slammed, which have somebody behind them with a reason to make sure you stop knocking. So maybe sitting in a truck feels like nothing to you. Maybe it looks like surrender, with all your procedure and your chain of command and your neat little boxes for everything that doesn't fit. But out here, sometimes sitting is the move.Sometimes waiting is the plan. And if you can't handle that — if you need your hands busy every second so you don't have to sit with the fact that some problems don't have a solution you can shoot your way out of — then maybe you picked the wrong garage to walk into."
It comes out in a rush. Too fast, too much, each word landing like something I've carried too long and finally set down, and the setting down doesn't bring relief — it brings the hollow feeling back, wider, because now Trevor's looking at me with that stillness again and I can see the calculation running behind his face. The same one that's been running since he walked back in: weighing variables, measuring risk, deciding whether the man in front of him is an asset or a liability or something in between that doesn't have a name yet.
His eyes drop. To my hands on the wheel. White-knuckled, tendons standing out, and I didn't notice until he looked, and now I can't unnotice, and the fact that he saw before I did lands in my chest with everything else that's landed there today.
He looks back at the house. Says nothing.
I start the truck. The engine turns over loud after the silence. The AC kicks on, blowing air barely cooler than outside, and I let it blow because the noise gives us something to hide behind that isn't the weight of everything we just said and everything we didn't.
I don't say we're leaving. I put it in drive and pull off the curb, and Trevor keeps his arm out the window and his eyes on the side mirror, watching the beige house shrink until it's just another box on a dead street, and neither of us says a word for three blocks.
I take the long way home because the long way is what you take when you're not ready to be where you're going, and right now Cembrook Road feels about as welcoming as a holding cell. Right at the dead light. Left at the water tower with its faded ROAN PRIDE stencil nobody's touched up in a decade. Cut behind the elementary school where the playground sits rusting, the swings still, the slide too hot to touch. Routes that skirt the main drag. Routes that let me check my mirrors without being obvious.
Old habit. The kind you don't think about until you're doing it, and then you can't stop, because stopping means admitting you have a reason to check, and admitting that means admitting someone might be looking, and in Roan someone is always looking. The rearview shows empty asphalt. The side mirrors show the same. Nobody following. Nobody cares enough to. The thought should comfort. It doesn't.
Trevor rides with his arm out the window, forearm exposed to the dead air, and I catch myself watching the light on the skin there — the look of sun on Trevor Hollander's forearm being a subject I've spent ten years trying not to think about and failing at, monumentally, the way you fail at things that were never winnable. His fingers are loose on the panel. Relaxed. Or performing relaxed, which for him is the same thing — control so complete it becomes its own tell, because nobody's that calm after the conversation we just had unless they're working hard at it, and the working is itself a data point.
I don't call him on it. We've hit our quota for callingeach other on things today, and we blew past it a comment ago.
The outskirts scroll by. Flat, sun-bleached, holding their breath the way dying places do — not picturesque in their decay, just tired. Empty lots where houses used to be. Hand-painted signs for businesses that closed years ago, the lettering gone soft and gray. A gas station with plywood over the windows and weeds through the concrete where the pumps stood. The county road narrows, widens for no reason, narrows again, the asphalt patched where frost heave cracked it open and the thaw never sealed it.
I drive. Trevor doesn't push. Doesn't ask why we're taking the scenic route through Nowhere, Pennsylvania, when the direct path would have us home in twelve minutes instead of twenty. He knows why. The man connects dots faster than anyone I've met, which is irritating in a way I won't examine, because the irritation lives too close to something warmer and more dangerous, and I've built too many walls around that to start pulling them down in the cab of a truck with the AC blowing lukewarm and the radio off — off because neither of us reached for it, and reaching now would mean admitting we noticed the silence, and admitting we noticed means admitting it matters.
So I drive.
The radio stays off. The silence fills the cab. Not the angry silence from outside Tally's house — something different. Softer at the edges. The quiet that comes after the shouting stops and neither person knows what's next, so they default to nothing, and the nothing gets its owngravity, a presence between the seats with weight and temperature and a patience that could outlast us both.
We pass the lake turnoff — the dirt road that winds through second-growth forest toward the water, toward the lakehouse that doesn't show on any map in my notebooks but lives in every red route I've drawn, every arrow joining Voss to Calloway to dates that line up with disappearances. I don't slow. Don't look at it directly. Just clock it in my peripheral, the way you clock a landmark you've memorized but won't acknowledge, and then it's behind us and the county road bends east and Cembrook comes up ahead, wider than the route we came in on, lined with maples throwing thin, patchy shade.
The gravel crunches under the tires. I pull in beside the Ford's empty space — beside Eileen's car and the gap where mine sits — and cut the engine. The absence of sound is almost physical. The rumble dying. The AC cutting out. The world reduced to the tick of the cooling block and the faint hiss of Eileen's concentrator from inside, audible through the open windows now that we've stopped.
We sit. Not looking at each other. Trevor's arm still out the window, profile carved again, eyes on the house like he's reading something off the siding I can't see. The late-morning light hits the porch at an angle that makes the peeling paint look worse than it is, which is saying something. The gutter on the east side is pulling off the fascia. One porch step has a crack running diagonal across the middle, and I've been meaning to fix it for months and haven't, because fixing things implies you plan to stay, and planning to stay is a luxury I stopped affording myselfaround the time I understood this investigation had no exit and I was fine with that.
The truck ticks. Coolant moving, metal contracting. A sound so ordinary it almost hurts, because ordinary is what we're pretending toward and ordinary is the last thing either of us feels.
