Page 6 of Carry on Wayward Son

“I’m aware of what I agreed to.”

“Then what are you doing on that boat? I can hear a ferry engine.”

My sister had good ears.

A navigation light blinked on the horizon. I watched it, wondering if it held any insight on how to get through this conversation.

“I have to see this through.”

“This is a terrible idea.”

“You might be right.”

“I am right, and you know it.” The edge in her voice softened around something more tired underneath. More resigned. She’d known me long enough to predict how these conversations ended. “Dad is going to lose his mind,” she said again, quieter. Almost to herself.

“Then don’t tell him.” Irrefutable logic, so far as I was concerned.

“I’m not lying to him.”

“I’m not asking you to lie. I’m asking you not to volunteer information he didn’t ask for.” He had no reason to ask for it. He’d called this morning, while I’d been north of Virginia, and I’d said nothing about my plans. I dropped my free hand to Koa’s head. “I need to do this.”

Quiet. The whisper of fir trees again. “A week.”

“A week. Maybe less,” I reiterated.

“You call me every day.”

“I will text you every day,” I amended.

“And you eat. Real food. Don’t do the thing you do half the time on assignment, where you live off of vending machine snacks and bad coffee.”

I eyed the terrible coffee in my hand and smiled a little. “I brought groceries.”

Almost a laugh. “Of course you did.” Her voice came back quieter, “Be careful. You have no idea what you’re walking into.”

“That’s my standard SOP, sis.” But I’d had a hell of a lot of training to make absolutely certain I could handle myself, and Koa was far more than a furry emotional support companion.

Ashley paused for a long time before finally seeming to understand she wouldn’t sway me. “Take care of yourself. Take care of Koa.”

“Always.”

After she hung up, I stood at the rail while the ferry cut through the dark chop of the sound. Koa pushed his nose against my hand, and I turned it over, giving him something to push against. A hundred pounds of dog, and he still tried to make himself small enough to climb into whatever space I left open. The protection work, the alerting, the focused intensity. I’d trained all of it. The thing where he decided his primary job was keeping me from going under, he’d worked out on his own.

I’d told myself for years I wasn’t coming back here. I’d believed it every time I said it. I’d also known, in the part of myself that didn’t lie, that there was a version of events where I came back anyway. Where the case, or the years, or the need for the truth would pull me across this water, whether I’d chosen it or not.

Koa lifted his head.

I followed his gaze to the horizon, where a cluster of lights had begun to resolve out of the dark. Small and amber, spread along a low shoreline. The island coming at me the way it had always been going to, from the moment I’d opened Devon’s email and seen the details of the case and known, before I’d finished reading, that I was going to say yes.

The lights of Sutter’s Ferry got closer.

I owed it to her. That was the part I couldn’t explain to Ashley, couldn’t explain to anyone, not without explaining everything. The work I did—the photographs, the cold cases, the faces I kept alive in other people’s memories—all of it had started as the same thing and never stopped being that thing, no matter how many years or how many miles.

It was always about Gwen.

Gwen, who’d died so I could live.

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