Page 47 of Claimed on the Ridge

The silence between us has a different texture now. Before the kitchen, before the names, silence was loaded with what we weren't saying. This silence is the aftermath of having said it. The air is clearer, thinner, easier to breathe.

I finish the plate. He takes it, rinses it, sets it in the rack.

"The report," I say.

He nods and walks toward the hallway. I follow.

His office is small and close. The desk takes up most of the room. Maps cover one wall, and the satellite phone charges in its cradle on the shelf beside the radio. He opens the laptop, turns it toward me, and steps back.

The missing persons report is a single page. The text is black on white, the formatting generic, the language sterile. The photo is from the Anchorage Children's Hospital gala, a couple of years back. I wore a green dress that Gary picked out and a smile that took the better part of an hour and more champagne than I wanted to construct and keep in place.

The woman in that photo has longer hair, styled and straightened, pinned at the temples, Gary's preference. She is thinner in the face and wider in the eyes, and the tilt of her chin is calibrated to a degree that only another woman who has been calibrated would recognize.

I don't recognize her.

Missing. Female, 29. Auburn hair. Last seen departing Anchorage en route to Sitka via prior arrangement. Reporting party: husband.

I read it twice. The second read is slower. The description is accurate to be useful, vague to be deniable. Gary constructed it the way Gary constructs everything, detail for results, and ambiguity for the image.

A concerned husband looking for his missing wife. The ribs don't appear. Neither do the bruises that Amberly found on a clinic table in a town Gary has never heard of. None of the things that made me flinch at a dropped pan or watch hands before I watch faces. It's the version of our marriage that Gary shows the world, polished and sealed. The narrative is clean because Gary is meticulous about narratives.

Alex stands by the door, not watching me read. He's watching the wall. The room is close. The proximity of him in a space this tight tests my concentration in ways the report on the screen doesn't deserve to compete with.

He gave me the room to process. A man his size making himself into furniture takes practice, and he has it. He learned it from situations, not from women.

"He'll hire people," I say. My voice comes out steady, clinical. The voice I used in Gary's living room when company came and I played the role of wife who has opinions but not too many. "Gary doesn't do his own searching. He writes checks and other people do the looking."

"How would he approach it?" Alex asks.

The question is not rhetorical. He's asking me to help him think like my husband. The cold accuracy I can bring to that request is one of the uglier skills my marriage produced.

"He'd call the police first. The report is his opening move, gives him jurisdiction and a paper trail of concern."

I tick through the sequence I've been running since the first mile of highway out of Anchorage.

"When the police come back with nothing useful, he moves to private resources. A firm in Anchorage, maybe Seattle. People who find women who don't want to be found. They'll find that I visited my mother in the hospital in Sitka, but only once. I didn't return. When they find no trace of me there, they'll widen the radius."

"The truck," Alex says.

"The truck is the weak point. I paid cash in Fairbanks, but the seller has a face and a memory. If Gary's people canvas the area, someone will remember the woman who bought a truck she didn't test drive."

Alex listens. He doesn't interrupt, doesn't redirect. He leaves the space open instead of filling it with reassurance, and I'm not used to that from someone with the size and authority to simply take over.

"We should move your truck," he says when I finish. "Into the shed behind the workshop. It's visible from the road where it is now."

The shift from listening to planning is immediate. He absorbed my threat assessment and went straight to the first actionable step, skipping past the part where most people tell me I'm overreacting.

"We need to warn Amberly," I say. "If anyone comes through town asking questions, she's the most visible Sawyer. She runs the clinic. If Gary's people are thorough, they'll start there."

"I called her after I found the report," Alex says. "She has the short version."

Before he told me. Before the kitchen, before the names. He found the report and his first call was to his sister. That is the most Alex thing I can imagine.

"The short version," I repeat.

"Your situation. The report. That someone might come looking." He holds my gaze. "I didn't give her your name. That's yours to give."

The distinction lodges under my ribs. He called to warn his sister, to protect her, and he drew the line at my identity. He controlled the information flow with care, but the line he drew was mine. He kept my name out of his mouth because it belonged to me.