Most of them are nothing to me. Initials aren't much and ten years is a long time.
I was gone before half these men would've come up. But two of them stop me.
Two sets of letters that go with two faces I grew up around—two men who sat at my father's table, two men who'd have gone looking for my grandmother's birthplace because they were the kind who went looking.
"You've got something," Imani says. She's watching me. "Where'd you go?"
"These two." I put my finger on them. "I know these two."
"Ironwood?"
"Ironwood."
She sits back.
"Then you've got your answer on WT," she says, low. "You don't have to say it. I can see you already got there."
I got there the second she said comp.
I've been shoving it back for four minutes because it's too clean and too cruel to be real—that the place they kept Mila ishis, that the eleven doors she walked past sit inside a building that belongs to the man who put my mother in a ditch on 92.
WT.
Wendell Trask.
* * *
I don't sleep.
I sit on the roof, which is Doom and Brick's spot, and nobody comes up to tell me I can't, so I stay.
It's cold enough that my hands quit reporting after twenty minutes and I keep them on the ledge anyway.
I run it around and around until the edges wear smooth.
My father would know.
It won't let go of me.
Nineteen years inside Ironwood, and a man doesn't do nineteen years in a thing like that withoutknowingwhere the men go to do what they can't do at home.
If Trask owns a property in Cochise County where his people get comped, my father knew it was there. Maybe not what it was. But that it existed.
And he never said one word.
I tell myself he didn't knowwhatit was, that a man in the program doesn't volunteer things that get him moved somewhere worse, that he had a son on the outside, and silence was the only thing keeping either of us alive.
I say all of it to the dark and none of it lays a finger on the other part, which is that Mila was down there and my father knew the building she was in.
I don’t think about it too much.
There's a place at the bottom of it I can't make myself look at, so I stop at the lip, and I sit on a cold roof until the sky goes from black to the color of dishwater.
Then I go find Amara, because a call to a man in WITSEC isn't something a prospect sets up on his own.
It takes four days and it happens in Amara's office with the door shut.
There are rules.
