Then me. Her arms around my waist because I'm taller still, her face against my sternum for two seconds, and I feel her breathing — even, measured, a woman who's seen enough death to know holding your breath doesn't change the outcome. She lets go. Steps back. Reads my face with eyes that miss nothing and say less.
"She talked about you both." Quiet. Flat — the flat that comes from honesty, not restraint. "All the time. Right up to the end." Her hand finds my forearm. Squeezes once, strong. The kind of grip that could crack walnuts and chooses instead to hold a man's arm at exactly the pressure required and no more. "You mattered to her. Both of you. Don't forget that part."
She turns and walks to her car. Doesn't look back. Thedoor closes with a sound too small for the distance it has to carry.
Mick's already breaking down the folding chairs. Nobody asked him to. He doesn't wait to be asked — collects each one, folds it with two quick motions, stacks it against the maple that shades the eastern edge of the plot. Economical. Unhurried. A man giving two younger men a moment at their mother's grave by making himself busy twenty feet off, and the busyness is generous in the way only Mick can manage, which is by never mentioning it.
Cole and I stand at the edge of the grave. The casket sits at the bottom, pale wood gone dark in the shadow, the lowering straps still draped across it, the funeral-home men waiting at a distance for us to clear out before they finish. To our left, Wade's stone. Gray marble. Sharp dates. The name cut clean into the rock with a precision that reads like its own insult.
The wrongness of it sits between us — not a presence, an absence. The void where the right thing should be and isn't, and won't be, and never was. And the never-was has weight, and the weight pushes down on both of us in our black shirts with our sweat-dark collars, nothing left to say to a woman who can't hear us.
Cole's jaw works once. Hard. Then his mouth opens, and what comes out is low and flat and entirely him — unfiltered, precise, landing between us with the density of a truth that's been waiting for air.
"This is bullshit."
I don't argue. Don't correct. Don't soften. There's nothing to soften. He's right. It is bullshit. Eileen in the ground next to Wade is bullshit. The cemetery'sfiling system is bullshit. The heat and the sweat and the bandage itching over my eyebrow and the hollow weight behind my sternum that's been there since I pulled on mud-stiff jeans in a hospital bathroom — all of it, bullshit, top to bottom, no exceptions, no silver lining visible from where we're standing.
"Yeah."
That's all. One word. Two men at a grave. A maple tree. A stack of folding chairs. A silver-haired mechanic giving us room to breathe. The wrong stone six feet to the left. The right woman in the box at our feet. And the silence that follows when there's nothing left to say, because saying anything would be redundant, and redundancy is a luxury the dead don't offer and the living can't afford.
We stand there. The heat presses down. Beyond the tree line, a car passes on the county road and doesn't slow.
Nobody moves.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cole
The concentrator doesn't hum. That's the first thing I notice walking into the living room at seven — the wall-to-wall quiet where the white noise used to live. For months that machine ran day and night, a mechanical wheeze under every conversation, every meal, every sleepless hour I spent staring at the ceiling wondering if tonight was the night she'd stop breathing. Now it sits in the corner by the armchair like furniture that's forgotten its job, the plastic dull in the morning light, the tubing coiled on the floor like something that gave up and died quietly overnight.
I didn't unplug it. Couldn't. Walking past it to the kitchen feels like walking past a grave I haven't visited yet, and I've had enough of graves for one lifetime.
The couch sags when I sit — the same couch that's been here since I was twelve, springs shot, fabric worn thin at the arms where Wade used to lean back with a beer andthe remote and a silence worse than shouting. My coffee's cold. Made it an hour ago and forgot to drink it, because making it was the thing to do and drinking it was secondary, and now it's cold enough to ache my teeth and I drink it anyway, because the alternative is setting the mug down and holding nothing.
The map's still on the wall. Butcher paper from Mick's garage, Roan in ballpoint with the shaky confidence of a man who knows the streets by feel and doesn't care about scale. Thumbtacks at the intersections. Red for confirmed sightings of P74-892. Yellow for maybe. Blue for the two times the cruiser dropped off the grid east of town. The lakehouse circled in red marker — my hand, tight and angular, the script of someone who learned to write under pressure and never unlearned it. Below the circle, in letters too small for anyone but me to read from here: HANNAH BROOKS.
Trevor stands by the window. Not looking out. Just standing. Weight on his right hip, left arm angled in against his ribs the way it's been since the hospital. The butterfly strip over his eyebrow has started to peel at one corner. The bruise along his jaw has gone darker, near-black in the hollow under the cheekbone. He hasn't shaved. The stubble's past stubble now, edging toward beard, and it makes him look older, harder, both — the look of a man who rolled a truck at eighty and walked four miles home in one boot and hasn't mentioned either fact since.
Mick sits in the armchair. Eileen's armchair. The one that faced the window because the window faced the maples, and the maples were the one thing on this propertythat never hurt her. He doesn't look like he belongs there and doesn't look like he doesn't — he just looks like Mick, silver-haired and wiry, hands loose in his lap, eyes parked on some middle distance between the coffee table and whatever's running behind them. He's been in that chair since six-thirty. Didn't say why he came. Didn't need to.
The knock comes at quarter past eight. Three raps, firm — someone who knocks the way they do everything, with purpose and no flourish.
I open the door. June stands on the porch with a covered plate and a face doing more talking than her mouth. She looks at me. Past me at Trevor by the window. At Mick in the armchair. Her eyes are the kind that clock when something's wrong before anyone says it, and right now they're reading the room the way I read the map — taking inventory, filing it, saying nothing.
"Brought a plate." She steps past me into the kitchen, sets the dish on the counter without ceremony, beside the half-dozen foil-covered casseroles stacking up since yesterday. Nobody's touched them. The aluminum gleams like it knows it's being ignored.
She turns. Hands find her hips — planted, steady, the stance she takes behind the diner counter when someone orders something complicated at the height of the rush, a woman who's decided whatever comes next gets said standing up.
"Hannah Brooks." The name drops into the kitchen and lands hard. "Hasn't been seen in three days. Not at school. Not at home. Her mother's asking around and getting nothing. The rumors are already moving." Shedoesn't soften it. Doesn't dress it. Facts on the table, no garnish, take it or leave it.
My mug hits the counter. Hard. Too loud for the room, ceramic on Formica, cold coffee slopping over the rim and pooling on the linoleum, and I don't bend to wipe it because bending means stopping and stopping isn't on the table.
"Three days." Level. Controlled. The flat of a man who's already run the math and hates the answer. "She went into that house Tuesday. Today's Friday."
June nods. Once. Her eyes don't leave mine.
I stand. My jaw sets the way it sets when something under my ribs has decided and the rest of me is catching up. "Tomorrow. We end this."
