Page 135 of In the Dark of the Past

River came back an hour and forty minutes later, walking through the door and setting her jacket down. She stood in the kitchen for a moment with the particular stillness of someone who had just done something hard and was letting the act settle.

“How was she?” I asked.

“Broken,” River said. “The way people are when the thing they were most afraid of turns out to be true.” She paused. “She’d already guessed, of course. Some part of her had known when he didn’t check in after last night. She just needed someone to say it out loud.”

“Did his message help at all?” I knew it was stupid the minute I said it, but it was already out.

River was quiet for a moment. “I think it will,” she said. “Just not today. Knowing he said it, that he knew it was his fault and said so before the end, that’s something she can hold on to when the anger comes.” She looked at me. “And the anger will come.”

“I know,” I said.

She came and stood beside me at the window. The afternoon was building toward the hour when Solis’s team would arrive, and the town would start to understand that something had shifted.

“My father’s name is in a public record again,” she said. “As a corrupt official. By tonight, it’ll be in the Gazette’s digital edition.”

“For maybe forty-eight hours,” I said. “Until Solis’s team demonstrates that it’s fabricated and that fabricating it was obstruction. The retraction will run the same week as the indictments.”

“I know,” she said. “I know that’s true.” She paused. “It still costs something, having his name in that story again.”

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

I didn’t try to take anything away from her. She didn’t want that, and it wouldn’t have been honest.

She turned from the window.

“Forty-eight hours,” she said.

“Give or take,” I said.

She nodded once.

Somewhere across town, Evan Narnachek was in an AG safe house at the beginning of what would be a long road. I didn’t know how that went for people. River would be part of it, every Thursday at two once he was settled, doing the work she’d been trained to do and had been doing at a distance for a long time.

We hadn’t reached our after yet.

But it was close enough that I could see the shape of it from here.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

River

The house was quiet.

Not the quiet of nothing happening, rather the quiet of everything having happened and the world not having caught up to it yet. Finn was at the kitchen table with the legal pad. I was on the couch with my third cup of coffee and restlessness of someone whose body had forgotten how to be still now that there was nothing left to do but wait.

Outside, Maple Ridge was going about its day. I could hear a truck on the road two blocks over. Somewhere, a dog was barking at something it found objectionable. Ordinary sounds from a town that didn’t know yet what was coming.

“I can’t sit here,” I said.

Finn looked up.

“I know,” he said. He put the pen down. “Hollow Oak?”

“Hollow Oak,” I said.

Cade had unlocked it by the time we arrived. He was behind the bar with Atlas and the expression of a man whose place of business had been trashed, had not slept, and was not going to mention it, and when we came through the door he set two mugs on the counter without asking. Libby was already at the long table with both laptops open. Autumn had taken over the corner booth with a printed map of the county and a system of colored pins that I wasn’t going to ask her to explain. Myra was at the bar with her laptop and a glass of water and the expression she wore when she was working through something that didn’t fit. Nivea and Andra were talking quietly at a side table. Nobody had been able to find Rand yet.

It felt, for the first time in three weeks, like something close to normal. Except that nothing about it was.