Page 139 of In the Dark of the Past

“Thank you,” he said. And then he added, “Yes. I understand.” He ended the call.

The room had gone quiet. Everyone was watching him.

“Solis,” he said. “They’re moving in twenty minutes.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Libby sat back in her chair and let out a long breath. Autumn set her pen down very carefully, like she was afraid of making noise. Cade put both hands flat on the bar and looked at the middle distance with the expression of a man absorbing something he’d been working toward for three years.

I looked at Finn.

He was already looking at me.

There was nothing to say that wasn’t smaller than what the moment was. So, I didn’t say anything. Neither did he. He reached across the table and put his hand over mine, and I turned my palm up, and we sat like that while outside on Main Street the town went on not knowing that something was ending.

Soon, it would know.

Tonight, it would know.

Chapter Forty

Finn

Twenty minutes later, we were on Alderman Road.

We parked one block south. Atlas had come without being asked, which was his way. The three of us stood at the corner in the dark and watched the light in Grant’s study window, where the shape of him moved occasionally across the glass—unhurried, domestic, the silhouette of a man going through the motions of a normal evening.

He didn’t know yet. Or he knew and was performing not knowing, which with Grant was always possible.

Solis’s team came in quietly. Four agents plus Solis, two vehicles, no lights. They pulled into Grant’s driveway without drama. Two agents to the back of the house. Solis and two others to the front door.

The knock was formal. Three measured raps.

The study light didn’t move for a moment. Then it went out.

A long beat—ten seconds. Fifteen, maybe—before the porch light came on and the front door opened.

Grant filled the doorframe the way he always did, shoulders back, composed. Even now. Even at 8:06 on a weekday evening with three state and federal agents on his front step, he managed the posture of a man receiving guests he had anticipated.

We were too far to hear the exchange. I watched it in body language. Solis presenting the warrant, Grant taking it with both hands, reading it the way you read something you already knew was coming and are deciding how to respond to. A lawyer’s read. Buying seconds.

Then he looked up, and even from a block away, in the dark, I knew what his face was doing—the recalibration, the rapid internal assessment of what was recoverable and what wasn’t. The politician’s reflex. Not panic, not remorse, but immediate triage.

He said something to Solis.

Solis replied briefly.

Grant looked out toward the street then—not at us specifically, he couldn’t have known we were there—but at Maple Ridge. At the town.

The houses with their porch lights on and their dinner dishes done and their ordinary evenings proceeding in ignorance. The town he had spent decades managing, shaping, deciding who belonged in it and who needed to be corrected.

It lasted maybe three seconds.

Then he turned back to Solis and stepped out of the doorway.

No handcuffs yet—that would come at the official building, not on his front step where a neighbor might see. That was procedure. But the agents flanked him on both sides as they walked to the vehicle, and the space between them had a geometry that was unmistakable to anyone who knew what they were looking at.

River was very still beside me.