I nod. I know the one. The prickle at the base of the skull that saysmovehalf a second before the round crackspast your ear. Gut feelings are the only kind that matter when the bullets are real.
"Calloway came himself." The name lands like something dropped from a height. Her voice drops colder, harder. "Sheriff Calloway. In his uniform. Too tight at the neck, always too tight, like he's trying to squeeze into something that wasn't built for him. Sat right where you're sitting. Nodded along. Took notes. Said there wasn't much they could do without a name or a photo. And then?—"
She stops. Her jaw works. The muscle jumps, and she presses her thumb to it again, harder, like she's holding the words in by force.
"Then he turned it back on me. Gentle. Reasonable. The voice you use on someone you're about to ruin but want them thanking you for it after." Her mimicry is precise — the dropped register, the measured cadence, the faux-concern of a man who's perfected making victims blame themselves. "Had she seemed distant lately? Tension between you two? Maybe she needed some space. Young women need to spread their wings. If she wanted to talk, she'd call. Why would she want to leave, hmm?"
Thehmmhangs there. Small. Innocuous. The kind of filler that means nothing alone and everything in context, and the context is a sheriff at a kitchen table turning a grieving woman's fear back on her with the precision of a surgeon.
"I spent two years believing him." Quiet now. Almost gentle, which is how I know it's costing her everything to keep it there. "Two years thinking I drove my sister off with my nagging. That I pushed too hard. He made it my fault, and I believed him, because believing him was easier thanthe alternative — that she was gone, nobody was coming to look, and the man responsible was sitting at my kitchen table asking why she'd want to leave."
I don't say anything. There's nothing to say. The silence between us has texture now, loaded with what she's handed me and what I'm going to have to do with it. I keep my eyes on her face. Let her have the last word, because the last word is the thing victims are rarely allowed in rooms where men like Calloway sit.
When the silence has stretched as far as it'll go, I ask. Carefully. Measuring each word like powder for a charge.
"Would you be willing to talk to someone outside Roan? Not local. Someone from Philadelphia. State police, maybe. Somebody without a badge that says Calloway on it."
Brenda's chair scrapes back. Sharp, metallic, the legs catching the linoleum. She's on her feet before the question's fully landed, arms crossing over her chest, her body shifting from wounded to defensive in a heartbeat.
"What police?" Bitten off, sharp at the edges. "What police, Hollander? The ones who took two years to close a case they never opened? The ones who let a man walk into my house and carry out my sister's things in a button-down and a smile? What police exactly are you offering me, and why should I believe they'll do one single thing differently?"
She's moving toward the door. Not rushing — each step deliberate, the gait of a woman who's hit her limit and is done being polite about it. Her arms crossed so tight the knuckles have gone white. The dark circles look deeper in the dim light, and what's in her eyes isn't only grief. It's rage —the smoldering kind that belongs to someone betrayed by every institution that was supposed to protect her, who learned the hard way that protection is a story people in power tell people without it.
I stand. Don't push. Don't argue. Arguing with Brenda Coyle right now would be like arguing with the wall holding up her roof — it has more important work to do, and my opinion on its structural integrity isn't relevant. So I thank her for the water. Simple. The only honest thing I can offer that doesn't come with a promise attached.
She doesn't answer. Holds the door open, body angled toward the porch, eyes on a point past my left shoulder that meansleave nowwithout her having to say it.
I step around the seized screen and pause on the porch. Not to push. Just a beat. The kind that saysI heard youwithout asking anything back.
"I'm sorry about Annette." Three words. Flat. Delivered without ornament, because ornament's for people selling something, and I'm not. I'm stating a fact. I am sorry — about Annette, and Judy, and Hannah, and every girl who got into a car in this town and stopped being someone anyone was willing to look for. Sorry in a way that lives below language.
Brenda closes the door. No answer. The deadbolt turns. The chain slides back. The sound is final in the way only doors can be, and then there's just the porch and the heat and the cracked path stretching to the curb where the Ford waits.
I walk back down the path. The gravel crunches. The cicadas are still screaming. The plastic flamingo lies on its side three doors down, and the absurdity of it — this stupidpink bird alone on dead grass, giving exactly zero damns about the conversation that just happened or the weight it's left in my chest — almost makes me laugh, except laughing right now would probably come out as something else, and I'm not in the mood to find out what.
I get in the truck. Close the door. The cab is an oven, the wheel hot enough to burn, the vinyl cooking the backs of my thighs through denim. I grip the wheel, knuckles white, and stare at the blue clapboard house with its seized screen and its drawn curtains and its kitchen where a sheriff sat four years ago and turned a sister's grief into a weapon aimed at her own chest.
The shoulder aches — the round, the old wound, stiff from sitting too still too long with too much weight on my spine. I roll it. The joint cracks. The pain radiates down into the muscle, and I let it live there, because feeling something physical is easier than feeling what's in my chest, which has Brenda Coyle's voice in it and Calloway's reasonable tone and Cole's handwriting on a page I had no business reading.
I turn the key. The Ford starts. I pull off the curb without looking back. East on Dellard, past the water tower with its fading ROAN PRIDE stencil, past the pharmacy and its empty lot, past the sheriff's department where a cruiser sits out front like always, light bar dark, engine off, driver somewhere inside doing God knows what. I don't look at it directly — clock it in my peripheral, the way you clock a landmark you've memorized but won't acknowledge — and then it's behind me, and Cembrook comes up ahead, lined with maples throwing thin, patchy shade.
The gravel drive crunches under the tires. I pull inbeside Cole's Toyota and cut the engine. The absence of sound is almost physical — the rumble dying, the world down to the tick of the cooling block and the faint hiss of Eileen's concentrator, audible through the open windows now that I've stopped.
I sit. Hands on the wheel. Cole is inside. Cole is waiting. Cole has waited two years for someone to knock on Brenda Coyle's door and come back with something worth having, and I have it — the boyfriend, the hairbrush, the photographs, Calloway at that table turning a grieving woman's fear back on her with the precision of a man who's done it before and will do it again.
I'll have to lay it out. Watch his face. Watch the pieces slot in behind his eyes — confirmation of what we both already know. That Calloway isn't just corrupt, he's methodical. That the disappearances aren't accidents, they're operations. That the machine has been running in Roan for years because nobody was looking, or everyone who looked got quiet, or everyone who didn't get quiet got disappeared themselves.
I get out. Close the door. The side path is warm underfoot, the dirt packed hard from years of traffic, and the house waits at the end of it with its doors open and its walls too thin.
I go inside because there's nowhere else to go. The screen door settles behind me with a sigh that could be relief or resignation, and in this house the difference stopped mattering a long time ago.
Chapter Thirteen
Cole
The screen door whines open and Trevor steps through, and I don't look up. Can't. My hands are already on the table, spreading notebooks, pulling pages from the blue one and the red, the map of Roan unfolded across the sticky Formica with its red-ink lines connecting names and locations like arteries on a body I've been dissecting for two years. The kitchen is an oven, the July heat pressing through the screen. My shirt's stuck to my back. My hips ache where the workbench bit into them twelve hours ago, and the ache is its own kind of madness, because it reminds me of Trevor's hands, Trevor's mouth, Trevor inside me with a focus that belonged to another lifetime, and I'm trying very hard not to think about that while thinking about nothing else.
Trevor crosses to the sink. Pours water. Doesn't drink it. Sets the glass down and stands at the edge of the table, arms crossed, jaw set so tight the muscle jumps. He's wearing the jacket again, olive drab, canvas, the kind thathides the bruises. My fingerprints on his shoulder blades, dark and undeniable, under canvas now, which is its own relief and its own loss.
