Page 57 of Forbidden Protector

She hears it too. I watch it land and watch the flinch she doesn't let all the way to her face. For one terrible second I want to take it back so badly my hand actually moves, like I could reach out and pull the word from the air before it reaches her.

I don't take it back. I don't know how, not honestly, not with a folder open on my desk carrying her grandfather's name and a question hanging in this room I can't answer for her yet.

"Understood, Blackwater," she says, and the surname costs her nothing because she's throwing it back at me like a door slamming.

Then she's gone, boots hard on the stairs, the front door taking the brunt of it on her way out.

I cross to the window in time to watch her cut across the yard fast, head down. I catalogue the tree line past the fence out of a habit I can't turn off even now, even furious, even with my own house coming apart around me one sentence at a time. Nothing moves out there. Gus has already put his head back down. Whatever he heard was the wind, or a truck a half mile off on the county road, minding its own business. Today, at least.

Hours later, I stand in my own study with a dead man's folder open on the desk.

Then I pick up the phone.

Knox answers on the second ring,

"I need you to show me the video," I say. "The one you've had since last August. Jacob's."

Silence on the other end long enough that I know exactly what it means. He's gone quiet the way he does when a thing he's been carrying alone finally gets handed a second set of hands.

"Right now?"

"Right now." I'm already reaching for my keys. "She put nineteen eighty-seven on my desk with her own blood attached to it, Knox, and I'm done being the last man in this family who doesn't know what we're standing on."

Another pause. Then, quiet, the way Knox gets when he's decided something costs less than it used to.

"Come to my office."

I hang up and go, out into the cold, past the empty spot in the driveway, toward my brother and whatever he's been sitting on since a courier left a flash drive on a Blackwater cabin's doorstep last August and handed him a dead man's last words.

Whatever's on that drive, I'm done finding it out alone, behind everyone I'm supposed to be protecting.

SEVENTEEN

HOLT

Knox plays the video twice before either of us says a word.

Jacob's face fills the little screen looking like a man recording his own ghost, hat off, sweat at his collar, August heat pressing through the boards of the barn.

He says it wasn't the product they wanted. Never was. Says he found something in the old records he doesn't understand yet, only that men already died over it once, in 1987, and would again.

He names a Canadian group working both families at once. Says whoever controls the routes comes for the land next. Then, quieter, like the words have to be pried out of him: our mother knew part of it. Has known for years.

Knox doesn't look at me when it ends. He looks at the black screen a long time, like Jacob might still be in there if he waits long enough.

"I asked Dad," he says. "Straight out. Whether he knew what Jacob meant by the old records."

"And?"

"He squared the pen on the desk. Twice. Told me a man doesn't chase a dead foreman's guesswork in front of people who'd love to watch this family flinch." Knox shakes his head. "Then he asked who told me to ask, like the question itself was the trespass."

"That's not an answer."

"It's Gideon's answer, though. You know it is." Knox sets the laptop down like it weighs more than it does, and doesn't look at me for the rest of it. "He doesn't square a pen twice unless the question landed somewhere it shouldn't have."

I've watched my father do that my whole life. Square the pen. Let the silence sit until it starts working for him instead of against him. He isn't a man without an answer.

He knows exactly what Jacob meant. He's just deciding how much of it he can afford to let us see him carry.