Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Cole
The diner windows are fogged where the AC hits the July heat, the glass gone to something between solid and not — present but blurred, the way most things in Roan exist. I push through the door and the bell jingles once, weakly, like it's as tired of the sound as I am.
The place is half-empty. A couple at the counter nursing coffees they stopped drinking twenty minutes ago.
An old man in the corner booth with a newspaper he hasn't turned a page of since I walked in.
Old grease and burnt coffee and the damp of a building breathing the same air for fifty years.
Vinyl booths split at the seams. The neon outside pulsing even in daylight, faint behind the fogged glass.
June's at the counter polishing silverware, not looking up. We've been doing this dance long enough that the steps are written in our bones. She doesn't acknowledge me. Doesn't need to.
I clock Tally before I'm fully through the door.
Corner booth by the window, the one with the best lines to both exits — not an accident.
Lank brown hair tucked behind her ears in that nervous, habitual way, like she's trying to keep it out of her face and her hands keep betraying her.
Pale skin that hasn't seen enough sun or enough sleep, shadows under her eyes dark enough to qualify as architecture.
She's gripping a coffee mug with both hands, knuckles white, and she hasn't taken a sip.
The mug just sits there, full and going cold, her hands wrapped around it like it's the only solid thing in the room.
Her foot taps under the table. I can see the tremor running through the vinyl seat every half-second. She checks the door — once, twice — before I've made it halfway across the room, each time measuring the distance like she's timing how long it would take to reach it.
I slide in across from her. The vinyl's warm from whoever sat here last. I keep my voice low, the way you talk where the walls have ears.
"You came," I say.
She doesn't look at me. Her eyes are on the mug, the table, the window and the blurred street beyond it. "Didn't have much choice."
"I appreciate it."
Her foot taps. Tap. Tap. Tap. Steady, metronomic, a body keeping time because the mind can't afford to stop moving.
I lean in. "The girls, Tally. Annette. Judy. Hannah Brooks. What do you know?"
She shakes her head fast, a sharp little flinch, like I've slapped her. Her voice drops to barely above a whisper, tight and compressed. "Not here."
"Nobody's listening."
"Everyone's listening." Her eyes cut to the door again.
The old man hasn't turned his page. The couple stares at their cold coffee.
June polishes the same fork she was polishing when I walked in.
Nothing's changed and everything is wrong.
"You don't get it. You don't—" She stops. Swallows. Lower: "Not here."
I push. Careful, measured, the way you approach a wounded animal — slow, predictable, giving it every chance to bolt before you get close enough to help. "I need something, Tally. Anything. Hannah's being groomed right now. Same thing, all over again."
"I said not here." Clipped, final, her voice snagging on the last syllable like it caught on something sharp.
She looks at me then — really looks, the first time since I sat down — and what's in her face isn't anger.
It's fear, specific and bone-deep, the kind that doesn't come from imagining what might happen but from remembering what already did.
The diner hums around us — the AC grinding through its cycle, the refrigerator behind the counter kicking on with a rattle, June's silverware clinking in the sink. Normal sounds. A town going about its business while girls disappear and nobody asks why.
Tally digs in her jacket pocket. Her fingers shake, a fine constant tremor she's trying to hide by moving fast. She pulls out a folded scrap of paper, creased so many times along the same lines the fold's gone soft, almost translucent.
She slides it across without looking at it, her eyes fixed somewhere over my left shoulder.
"Sunday," she says. The word drops between us like a stone. "When they're all in church. Come alone."
I pick it up. Unfold it. The address is in blocky capitals, the kind you use when you want every character legible: 447 LAKEVIEW DR. The letters are shaky but pressed hard enough to emboss the back of the page. I fold it along the same crease and tuck it into my jacket.
"Who are you scared of, Tally?"
She looks at me again. Just for a second — a flash of something dry and sharp under all that fear, a glimpse of the woman she'd be if fear hadn't sanded her down to nothing.
Her mouth quirks at one corner, not a smile, something harder and sadder, and for that half-second she's fully there, eyes clear, the shadows under them outshone by whatever's burning behind them.
Then it's gone. Swallowed. Her gaze drops back to the table, the mug, the safety of things that can't be hurt.
She stands. Tucks the same strand of hair behind her ear, automatic, a tic she's probably had since childhood. "Just come alone," she says, and then she's moving, sliding out of the booth fast and quiet, trying not to draw attention while getting gone as quickly as she can.
She doesn't look back. She looks at the door — once, twice — and then she's through it, the bell jingling that same tired note, and through the fogged glass I watch her cross the lot with her shoulders hunched and her head down, checking behind her like someone's already there.
I stay in the booth. The vinyl is warm where she sat. Her mug is still there, full and cold, the surface undisturbed. I move it to the edge of the table where June will find it.
The note sits in my jacket. I can feel its weight through the fabric, slight but specific.
I don't take it out again. The address is already in my head, along with the way Tally moved — not the jitter of someone nervous by nature, but the conditioned terror of a person who knows exactly what happens when powerful men find out you've been talking.
Sunday. When they're all in church.
I finish my coffee — June slid it in front of me at some point without my noticing. Bitter and lukewarm and exactly what I needed. The old man turns a page. The couple pays and leaves. June holds my eyes once, half a second longer than necessary, then goes back to her silverware.
The note burns a hole in my pocket all the way home.
The house holds its breath when I walk in.
Not the good quiet — the waiting kind, the kind that means someone's been sitting in it too long, counting minutes, working himself into a state.
I feel it the second my boot hits the linoleum: Trevor in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, arms crossed, jaw tight enough that I can see the muscle from across the room.
The concentrator hisses from Eileen's room, in and out, a machine keeping a woman alive one milliliter at a time. Past that, nothing. No radio, no TV. Just the refrigerator's low grind and the silence of a man who's been planted in one spot too long.
His posture shifts when I come in. Nothing obvious — a slight straightening of the spine, a settling of the shoulders, the way a guard dog adjusts its weight when someone nears the gate.
His eyes find mine and hold. Almost black in this light, doing that thing they do when he's decided something and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
I go to the fridge. Pull it open. The cool air hits my face and for a second it's the only honest thing in the room. I don't look at him. I can feel him watching the back of my head the way you feel a draft through a cracked window — unwelcome, impossible to ignore.
"Where were you?"
Flat. Less a question than a statement with a question mark stapled on after.
I take out a water bottle. Close the fridge. "June's."
"Why?"
"Coffee."
I move to set my keys down. The pill organizer's in its spot, morning doses gone, the compartments empty and waiting for noon.
Everything in its place. Everything but me — because Trevor steps into my path as I turn.
Not blocking, not quite, but present, too close, the way he's been all week.
Hovering in doorways. Filling the narrow hall with more shoulder than the architecture allows.
Like he's waiting for me to slip, to say the wrong thing, to hand him a reason.
It's been like this since he got back. Him inserting himself into whatever air I'm trying to breathe, and I'm tired of it.
"Back off," I say.
He doesn't move. "I'm not doing anything."
"You're standing in my way."
"I'm standing in the kitchen."
I turn to face him, because standing with my back to him feels like giving up high ground, and in this house ground is all I've got.
We're close. Closer than two men should be in a kitchen this size, close enough to see the muscle work in his jaw when he clenches it.
His eyes are very still and very dark, fixed on mine hard enough to lift the hair on my arms, and I know that look.
Have known it since we were kids in that bed, pretending not to feel the heat between us.
The look of a man holding something back by sheer will, and the holding is costing him.
"Stop watching me." Flat. Final. Harder than I mean it, edged with everything that's built up since he walked back into this house and decided the walls were too thin for both of us.
"I'm not watching you." Level, controlled, a man practiced at keeping his voice neutral when everything underneath isn't. "I'm living in the same house. There's a difference."
"Bullshit."
"I'm not the one sneaking out at three in the morning."
The concentrator hisses down the hall, indifferent to whatever's happening six feet from its tubing.
I move to get past him. The kitchen's a galley, built for smaller people, forcing proximity whether you want it or not, and Trevor shifts as I move — not grabbing, just adjusting, the way you do in a crowded elevator when someone needs to squeeze by.
Our shoulders brush.
It's nothing. The kind of contact that happens in subway cars and airport lines a thousand times a day without anyone noticing.
But we notice. Both of us. We go still for half a second, the contact landing somewhere under the skin and setting off something I don't have a name for.
My body remembers the doorway three nights ago — his forearm under my hand, his pulse against my thumb, the way we both froze.
Same current, same circuit, and neither of us has worked out how to cut the power.
I step back first. My shoulder feels warm where his touched it.
"I don't need you keeping tabs on me." Rougher than I meant, lower, that raw register I drop into when I'm pushed past careful.
I can feel the folded note in my jacket, warm from my body, and my hand closes around it without my say-so.
Reflex. Protection. The instinct to shield the one thing that matters from the one person who could take it from me by asking the right question at the wrong time.
His voice drops to match mine. "Then stop sneaking out at three in the morning like you're up to something."
The accusation hangs there. Accurate. Unanswerable. I am up to something, and he knows it, and that he knows it and I can't tell him why is its own kind of torture. The muscle in my cheek jumps. What wants out right now isn't the investigation or the note or the address burning in my pocket.
It's simpler than that, and more complicated, and I've spent too many years walling it off to let it through now — in a kitchen this small, a house this full of history, a moment this loaded with everything we don't say.
I don't answer. Can't. The words sit behind my teeth, lodged between confession and surrender, and if I open my mouth they'll come, and if they come, everything changes, and I'm not ready for everything to change.
Not here. Not now. Not with Eileen's machine going down the hall and ten years of silence pressing on us both.
So I walk. Down the hall, past the fan turning its lazy circle, past Eileen's closed door, to the garage door at the end.
I push through it and let it click shut behind me — almost worse than a slam, because a slam would mean anger, and anger is simple, and there's nothing simple in the way that door settles into its frame like it's carrying every unsaid thing in this house.
I stand in the dark with my hand still around the note. The concrete is cool under my boots. The workbench waits where I left it, notebooks stacked in order, maps folded along creases I've memorized. Everything in its place.
Everything but me.
In the kitchen, a closed door away, Trevor stays where I left him. I can picture it without looking: one hand flat on the counter, fingers splayed, staring at the space where I stood like it holds an answer he can use.
I take the note out again. Unfold it. 447 LAKEVIEW DR. Sunday. When they're all in church.
I fold it. Put it back. Stand in the dark with the weight of it against my chest and the ghost of his shoulder against mine, lingering on my skin like a brand I didn't ask for.
Some silences get heavier the longer they go unbroken.
I hit the switch. The garage fills with sick yellow light, and I get to work.