I don't finish. Can't. The sentence dies because the part of me that started it has shorted out, and what's left is just me, standing in my mother's room with wet eyes and a locked jaw and the hollow certainty that nothing is ever going to be the same, and that the sameness was the trap the whole time.
The nurse gets the door. The crew files in — two men, a woman, uniforms, bags, the practiced economy of people who've run this enough times that the steps live in the hands. They move around Eileen with care. Check for a pulse that isn't there. Make their notes. Talk low, the way you talk delivering news that's already been delivered by something bigger than all of them.
I step into the hall. The house feels smaller. The walls closer, the ceiling lower, a place that's lost its center pulling in around the gap. I take out the phone. Check again. Nothing. No Trevor.
I call him. Straight to voicemail — no ring, just the dead air that means a phone is off or broken or out of range, and out of range doesn't happen in Roan, because Roan is five square miles and the signal covers all of it but the lake. The lake is where Trevor went this morning, with a phone and a mission and the window Ibought him by leading a stranger's tail to Harrisburg and back.
I call again. Voicemail.
I text:where are you. call me.
I stand outside her room while the crew works behind me — zippers, the turn of a clipboard page, low voices trading details that mean nothing to the dead and too much to the rest of us. The phone sits dark in my hand. No answer.
A third call. Nothing.
The dread settles in for good then — low and cold, the feeling of having swallowed something that won't go down, and it sits in my gut with everything else I'm already carrying, and everything else is more than a body's built to hold and was full before today started.
Trevor's missing. Eileen's dead. The evidence is maybe gone, the mission maybe blown. The maybe is the thing eating me; certainty would at least be quick.
I slide down the wall and sit on the hallway floor, back against the plaster, knees up, the phone in my lap with the screen turned up, waiting for a call that doesn't come. I've waited like this once before — waited on word about Trevor, years ago, and put a bottle in my hand for months when the word came back wrong — and the echo of that old waiting is almost worse than the new one, because I already know how long a man can sit on a floor when the news goes bad.
The house is quiet but for the professionals working. The machine's off. The belt hangs on its nail in the pantry. The DNR sits on the kitchen table where we left it, unsigned — and useless now, because Eileen Marek madeher own way out, on her own terms, in her own chair, facing her own window, and the grace in that doesn't escape me even as it takes me apart.
I sit on the floor and wait. For Trevor. For answers. For anything to move. Nothing moves. The phone stays dark. The dread stays heavy. And the house goes still around me — a house that's been dying as long as I've known it and has finally, tonight, finished the job.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Trevor
Light comes first. Not sunlight — not the kind that filters through trees or windows and makes things look better than they are. The other kind: flat, buzzing, the wavelength of hospital fluorescents that turn every face the color of bad milk and make you feel worse than you are, which is its own brand of malpractice.
I blink. Once. Twice. The ceiling tiles swim into focus, beige squares with water stains in the corners that someone painted over instead of replacing, the job so half-assed I can still see the outline of whatever leaked. My head feels packed with cotton and razor wire. Something beeps to my left — steady, metronomic, the kind of sound that's meant to reassure and instead just tells you something electronic knows your heart's beating, information I could've provided for free.
The chemical bite hits next. Antiseptic. Industrial-grade, the kind that doesn't just clean surfaces but scoursmemories, and right now mine could use the scouring, because what's in there isn't doing me any favors. I try to turn my head and my ribs send up a flare from sternum to spine in one clean, bright line of fuck-you. Two cracked ribs, minimum. I know the feeling — I've had cracked ribs before, overseas and since, and the body doesn't forget the signature of bone that's decided it would rather be in two pieces than one.
Left hand. IV line. Clear tube taped to the back with more adhesive than the job needs, like the nurse worried I'd make a break for it, which — fair. Right arm. Blood pressure cuff still velcroed loose, the accessory that says someone was monitoring me and might again if I make enough noise.
The bandage comes into focus last. Left temple. Gauze and tape, the kind of dressing that covers something worse than it looks, and my fingers find the edge without permission and press, gently, and the pain is sharp and specific and tells me exactly how deep the cut goes — deep enough to matter, not deep enough to kill me, which is the story of my medical history in one data point.
Memory returns in pieces. The brain serves trauma in courses, appetizer first, and the appetizer is always the least useful part of the meal.
The lakehouse through the tree line. Green light filtering through oak leaves. The smell of the forest after rain. My boots on soft earth. The phone in my hand, screen hot, thumb sweating on the shutter.
Calloway's cruiser on the gravel drive. The sheriff in civilian clothes — pale blue button-down stretched acrosshis gut, khakis, leather shoes that belonged in an office, not on a lakefront. His face through the viewfinder.
Voss's hand on Hannah's shoulder. Fingers digging into the hoodie. Steering her toward the door with the casual authority of a man who's done it before. Her face — watchful, scared, the jaw of a kid who won't surrender even when surrender's the only move left.
The unmarked sedan. The handshake. Twelve frames of grainy proof that Cole's been right for two years and the town's been wrong for longer.
Then the headlights. The rearview filling with white glare. The truck fishtailing. Gravel under the tires. The guardrail rushing up. The world rotating — once, twice — glass webbing, metal screaming.
Then black. Just black. The kind that has weight and temperature and won't apologize for either.
My right hand moves before the rest of me. Patting the thin blanket — nothing. The gown — pockets that don't exist. The side table — plastic pitcher, a remote for a TV that isn't on, a floral tissue box someone thought would cheer up a room where people come to remember they're mortal. No phone. No rectangular weight in my palm where the evidence should be.
I sit up. Too fast. The room tilts — left, right, then settles on an axis a few degrees off from true. My hand finds the bed rail. Grips. The metal's cool and solid and real in a way nothing else here is, and I hold it like the only honest thing in a building full of lies.
The call button's on the rail. I hit it. Once. Hard. The press that says I'm not asking, I'm informing.
