Page 106 of Unlocked

"It's no trouble," he said again. The pleasantness in his voice had a quality she couldn't name, something underneath it that wasn't pleasant at all. "I'm going up anyway."

Carl was watching them both with the particular attention of a man who had spent decades reading the temperature of rooms. She saw the small flicker of something in his eyes. Concern, maybe. Or recognition.

She looked at him for just a half second longer than necessary. Carl had known her since she was a child. He’d let her out the back door, called her a ghost, and kept every secret she'd ever brought to his office. He knew her. She just hoped he knew her well enough to know something was off. To take action. But who would he call? He didn’t know of Archer or the Society. And nothing transpiring right now would be grounds to call the police.

So she forced herself to smile and look away. "That's very kind of you, Josh," and followed him to the elevator.

The ride up was silent. Her hands were loose at her sides and her phone in her pocket. But her mind raced as she thought about what to do. She needed to get the bags back. She needed to get to her mother. She needed to be in a room with other people, and she needed to not be alone with Josh. She couldn't quite think because the pieces kept arranging and rearranging themselves in her mind, and every configuration they settled into was worse than the last. And the elevator didn’t move slowly enough to allow her time to explore her options.

The doors slid open.

At the reception desk, Carol looked up and started to say something. Tatum walked past her.

"Your mother is in the conference room," Josh said, falling into step beside her. “I'll leave your bags in your office."

"You don't have to⁠—"

"I want to," he said.

He stopped outside Bunny’s office. “Why don’t you wait here?” He didn’t wait for a response. He was already turning away, her bags in his hands, moving down the hallway with the easy, unhurried certainty of someone who knew exactly where he was going and had no reason to be anywhere else.

With a scowl on her face, she watched him until he turned the corner. Then she stood very still for a moment and drew in a ragged breath.

Thankfully, her father was nowhere to be seen. She'd looked for him automatically the moment she stepped off the elevator, the old childhood reflex of locating him in a room before he located her. His office door was closed, and the light underneath it was off. He wasn't here.

Bunny's office door was open, but the space was empty.

The window in the conference room door was partially obscured by a half-drawn blind, but she detected movement through it. Her mother's posture, unmistakable even in silhouette, upright and controlled and commanding the room simply by existing in it. Someone else was with her.

Tatum squinted to figure out who.

Gil Bennet was sitting across from Bunny with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, which was how Gil looked when he was in the middle of something he was concentrating on. Documents spread between them. Both of them focused.

Tatum watched them for a moment through the glass.

Gil and Bunny.

She turned away from the conference room and entered her mother's office. She didn't turn the light on. She didn't examine why she didn't. She just didn't.

She stood at her mother's desk and looked at it. Bunny's desk was always immaculate, everything in its place, nothing left out that didn't need to be there. Tatum had grown up watching her mother clear her desk at the end of every day with the same methodical precision she applied to everything. Nothing stayed out overnight. Nothing was left visible that wasn't meant to be seen.

Except Bunny wasn't here right now. Bunny was in the conference room with Gil Bennett, the blinds half-drawn. Her posture. The way she’d leaned over the table.

Tatum's eyes moved across the desk.

Files, neatly stacked. A legal pad with notes in Bunny's handwriting. A pen. Her reading glasses. A coffee cup.

And a manila folder near the bottom of the stack, slightly out of alignment with the others, as if it had been put down in a hurry or pulled out recently and not quite replaced with the usual precision.

She almost didn't look at the label.

But then something caught her eye.

Thistledew.

She stopped breathing.

Thistledew was her grandfather's cabin in the Finger Lakes. The place he'd taken her every summer as a child, the weathered porch and the smell of pine and the particular quality of silence that existed there and nowhere else in her world. He'd named it himself, some private joke she'd never fully understood, something about the way the grass looked in the early morning. She hadn't been back since he died. She couldn't.