Page 88 of In the Dark of the Past

Not today. Maybe not this week. The machinery of the AG’s office moved at its own pace, and Finn understood better than I did the gap between submitting evidence and watching it become action. There would be calls, reviews, verifications. There would be time during which Grant would still be mayor, and Sean would still be DA, and the Benevolence Fund’s accounts would still be routing their quiet corrections through Maple Ridge’s infrastructure.

But the recording was somewhere it couldn’t be buried. And the annex records were photographed and backed up and cross-referenced. And Jordyn Vale would have to decide very soon whose protection was worth more to her.

Finn had heard his brother’s voice on a recording saying ‘the arrangement has been in place for six years’ and had sat at this table and sent it anyway.

That was not a small thing.

“You okay?” I asked.

He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

“Not yet,” he said. “But I will be.”

I believed him.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

River

CSU had finished with my house two days after the break-in happened, but I hadn’t been back for more than to grab some stuff.

They’d bagged the paint samples, photographed the symbols, documented the forced entry through the back window latch. Mara had called in a cleanup crew for me, and they’d left the place considerably cleaner than they’d found it, the surfaces wiped, evidence markers pulled—the sterile consideration of a crime scene returned to the people who had to live in it afterward.

The red eyes on my floor were gone.

What remained was just a house. Creaky floors and old light and the smell of cedar and someone else’s cooking that had soaked into the walls so long it had become part of the wood. My parents’ house. The one I’d grown up in and then spent nine years carefully not thinking about.

Finn had offered to come with me, but I’d told him I needed an hour alone first. That had been ninety minutes ago, and I’d been standing in my mother’s bedroom for most of it.

Not doing anything, particularly. Not searching. Just standing in the doorway in the way you do when you’re trying to work up to something, and your body is smarter than your intentions and keeps finding reasons to wait.

The room was exactly as it had been when I was a kid, which meant it was exactly as it had been when she was taken—with. very few differences. Dad hadn’t changed anything. Her reading glasses on the nightstand. A stack of patient notes she’d never finished reviewing. The curtains she’d made herself from fabric she’d found at an estate sale in Redding, once upon a time, some Saturday when my father was working, and she’d taken me with her and let me pick out a pattern.

I’d picked the blue ones with the small white flowers.

She’d made them that same weekend because she said there was no point in buying fabric you loved only to leave it folded in a drawer.

I hadn’t thought about that in ages.

I stepped inside.

The thing about a parent’s house is that you know it the way you know your own breathing—not by paying attention, just by having been inside it long enough that the knowledge lives in your body instead of your brain. The third stair from the top that creaked. The way the hallway light flickered for three seconds before it caught. The particular angle of the afternoon sun through the back windows that turned the kitchen floor the color of old honey.

I’d tried to forget all of it.

I’d done a reasonable job.

But standing in my parents’ bedroom with the late light coming through those blue curtains, it turned out the forgetting was mostly surface. Underneath, everything was right where she’d left it.

I moved through the room slowly, running a hand along the dresser top, taking in her hand lotion, the small ceramic dish where she kept her earrings, the photograph in the oval frame that had lived on that surface my entire life. My parents on their wedding day. My father in his dress uniform, shoulders back, the pride of a man who believed completely in what the uniform meant. My mother in a cream dress she’d borrowed from her college roommate, laughing at something off-camera.

She was twenty-four in that photograph.

She wasn’t even forty when they took her away.

I set the frame back down very carefully.

I’d come back here for a reason. I’d circled it for ninety minutes, but there was a reason, and my therapist brain—the part that never fully shut off, even when I wanted it to—had been nudging at it since the night the Watchers painted their message on my living room floor.