The garage light bleeds under the back door in the small hours, a thin yellow line across the dark grass. I see it from my window when I get up for water, or when I'm lying awake watching the ceiling stain and the fan turning overhead.
The truck engine in the dark has a careful quality, muffled, like a man who doesn't want to wake neighbors who are two hundred yards down the road and asleep anyway. Cole is quiet for his own reasons, and those reasons live in the garage, on that workbench with its maps and clippings and the scattered evidence of whatever he's digging into.
I think about Calloway at the funeral, his hand crushing Cole's, his eyes sharp with warning. The pieces don't connect yet, but they're sliding toward each other, and the gap closes a little with every night Cole spends out in the dark doing God knows what.
After three nights I try to ask. Casual. Over coffee at six, both of us moving through the pre-dawn gloom with the heaviness of men who haven't slept enough.
"You're up early," I say, leaning on the counter with my mug between my palms.
Cole doesn't look up from the pill organizer. He'scounting out the morning dose, fingers moving with the automatic precision of long practice. "Errands."
That's it. One word, flat, no elaboration. He closes the organizer, sets it in its designated spot, and the conversation's over before it started.
I let it sit. For a day I let it sit, and I watch the pattern hold — Cole in and out, hours that don't match any job I know about, the garage light at strange times. Mick's shop doesn't open at three in the morning. Nothing in Roan does except maybe the diner, and Cole isn't going to the diner.
On the fifth night I try again. This time I'm waiting in the kitchen when he comes through the side door at 5:30, still in yesterday's clothes, eyes hollow.
"You're out every night," I say. No lead-in. Just the observation, dropped between us like something that's been sitting on my tongue for days.
Cole stops, halfway to the refrigerator, hand outstretched. He freezes a beat before he turns to look at me.
Unreadable. Not angry, not defensive — blank, like he's weighing answers and finding none of them good enough.
"Get some sleep, Trevor," he says finally. Quiet, almost gentle, which is worse than if he'd snapped. Gentleness from Cole means he's decided I'm not worth the energy of a real answer.
He opens the fridge, takes out a water bottle, and walks out the back without another word. The screen slaps shut. Through the window I watch the garage light flickon, yellow spilling across the grass, and I stand there with my coffee going cold and everything unsaid pressing down like a sandbag.
I don't go out there. Not yet.
The restraint costs me. I feel it in my jaw, in the set of my shoulders, in the way my hand wants to close into a fist around nothing. Going out there would mean admitting I care where he goes at night. It would mean admitting I've been lying awake tracking him like a man possessed, and possession isn't a state I'm comfortable naming, especially when the thing possessing me wears Cole's face and Cole's hands.
So I stay. Rinse my mug. Check the clock — 5:42 — and go up to the spare room where the fan turns its slow, useless circle and the mattress sags like it's given up on comfort.
I close my eyes. The house breathes around me. Down the hall, Cole is finally in his room doing whatever he does in the hour between coming home and the alarm for Eileen's meds. Sleeping, maybe. Or lying awake like me, staring at his own ceiling, counting the same creaks, tracking the same absences.
The distance between us is the same as it's always been. A hallway. Ten years of silence. One locked door.
I listen to the quiet until I can almost hold it in my hands, and then a little longer, and the fan turns, and the heat presses down, and somewhere in the dark Cole breathes, and I match my breathing to his without meaning to, the way we did in that bed when we were kids pretending not to notice how close we were.
Some patterns you can't break even when you try.
I lie there until the alarm goes — Cole's phone, the sound cutting through the quiet like a wire — and then I get up and face another day in a house too small for everything it holds, and the Toyota is parked beside the Ford like they belong there, and for now, that's enough.
For now.
Chapter Four
Cole
The fluorescent tube over my head is dying. Has been for months, buzzing and flickering in its cage like something trapped, throwing a light that makes everything look sick. Midnight. The concrete under my boots is still warm from the day, breathing heat up through the soles. The garage smells like the sour note of old coffee from the mug I left out six hours ago and haven't touched since.
I should throw it out. I don't.
The back door's open because it's July and the garage would cook a man alive otherwise. Night air moves through in slow, warm drafts that cool nothing. My shirt is stuck to my back. Sweat runs from my temple down my neck, and I wipe it with the heel of my hand and go back to the notebooks.
They're spread across the workbench in the order I need them — not alphabetical, not chronological, something only I understand. Hand-drawn maps of Roan on graph paper, the streets rendered with the shaky precisionof a man who's driven them a thousand times and still can't get the proportions right. Photocopied police blotters with whole paragraphs blacked out in marker — Calloway's work, I'd bet my left nut on it, though proving it is another thing. Newspaper clippings about Annette Coyle's disappearance four years back, the print gone soft at the folds from how many times I've opened the page. Judy Marsh's clipping beside it, three years back, the photo of her smiling in a way that makes my chest hurt because she has no idea what's coming.
A printed satellite image of the roads out of town. I've marked routes in red — three different paths to the lake, each one circuitous enough to dodge the main road, each ending at the same patch of trees that doesn't look like anything unless you know what you're looking for.
