Page 20 of Jonah’s Lure

Jonah looked at the phone. Frank’s number was already on the screen, waiting. Could be your last. He didn't know if that meant the call or something else, and he didn't have time to decide which would be worse. He pressed call before he could think about it any further, because thinking about it would make it harder.

It rang once.

“Jonah.” Frank’s voice came through before the second ring had a chance to finish. Not a question. Just the name, spoken with a force that had nothing composed about it.

Jonah’s throat tightened. He pressed his back against the wall and looked at the line of gray light beneath the door.

“Dad.” The word came out rougher than he intended. He cleared his throat. “I’m okay. I just—I need some space. I’ll be in touch.”

The words tasted like ash. He said them anyway, because the alternative was whatever happened when the instructions weren’t followed, and he wasn’t willing to find out.

Silence on the line. A long one. He could hear his father breathing.

“Where are you?” Frank said. His voice had dropped—quieter now, careful, the way a man spoke when he was trying not to frighten something away.

“I don’t know.” True enough.

Another silence. Then Frank said, “Son.”

Just the word. Nothing else attached to it. No instruction, no question, no demand. Just son, said in a voice Jonah had never heard his father use before—a voice scraped down to something beneath the one Frank Holt presented to the world. Something that had apparently been there all along, waiting for a moment bad enough to bring it out.

Jonah pressed his lips together. His eyes burned and he blinked hard against it, once, twice, then opened his mouth to tell him he was sorry. But before he could, the line went dead. Not a click. Not a voice. Just gone, mid-breath. One minute, exactly as the voice had said.

He pushed the dead phone back through the slot. The slot closed. The voice said nothing further.

He stood against the wall with his bound hands in front of him and the ghost of his father’s voice in his ear, feeling the sharp grief of a man who had spent years trying to earn a word from his father and had finally heard it at the worst possible moment—through a phone in a dark room, with one minute on the clock.

Son.

He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, blanket loose around his shoulders. He sat there for a long time.

He didn't try to do anything with it. There was nothing to do with it. The phone had been in his hand for one minute and forty seconds—he'd counted, in the absence of anything else to do—and in that time his father had spoken his name in the voice Jonah had been trying to hear for years. Now the phone was gone, the slot was closed, and the sound of it still seemed to linger in the room, in the close concrete air that had been the only air he'd breathed for six days.

His father had sounded old.

Not old in the way he normally seemed old when Jonah was annoyed with him. The reliable, frustrating solidity of a man who'd made up his mind about most things thirty years ago and saw no reason to revisit them.

This was different.

Stripped of something.

The voice of a man whose body had used up a resource it hadn't known it was spending, and there was no way to refill it quickly.

Jonah pressed the heels of his bound hands against his eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness.

He was responsible for that.

He'd wanted his father to need him.

Somewhere beneath the expansion plan, the service reports, the projections, and the careful documentation of the annex risk, that was what he'd really been doing. Building a case for being needed. And now his father needed him. It was costing the man things Jonah didn't have words for and couldn't fix from a concrete floor in a dark room with zip ties around his wrists.

He breathed until the colors cleared.

Then he thought about Clara.

She would have gone to the dock office the morning after he didn’t come home Saturday. She would have gone through his desk methodically, the way she did everything—not in a panic, because Clara didn’t panic, but with the focused efficiency of someone who understood that emotion was most useful when it was pointed at something. She would have found the business card in his work notebook. R. Cobb. The mobile number. She would have put it in front of the sheriff before Frank finished filing the report.

He held onto that.