Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Trevor
The crunch of tires wakes me. Not the sharp crack of someone hitting the drive at speed — the slow, deliberate crunch of someone trying not to make noise.
Gravel shifting under weight, the engine just above an idle, the sound of a vehicle creeping onto a property in the middle of the night like it knows it doesn't belong.
I lie there. The ceiling stain hasn't changed its borders. My t-shirt is damp where my back meets the mattress. The sheet is tangled around my legs. July in Pennsylvania, and the heat doesn't break after dark — it settles, becomes something you breathe instead of something that happens to you.
Cole's Toyota. I know the sound of it. I've been tracking it for nights without meaning to, lying awake and listening to the sequence: gravel, engine off, door open, door close, footsteps across the backyard, the scrape of the side door.
Tonight the sequence breaks. The crunch comes, then nothing.
No engine cut. No footsteps. The truck idles at the end of the drive ten seconds, maybe fifteen, then the crunch comes again, moving away, and I'm left with the fan turning and the heat pressing down and restlessness beyond imagination.
I sit up. The mattress groans. My shoulder throbs, a dull ache that lives deep in the muscle and surfaces when I'm tired or stressed or both, which is most of the time now.
I swing my feet to the floor. The wood is cool under my soles, or maybe it's just that my skin is hot.
Hard to tell the difference at this hour.
Downstairs in the dark. I move by memory — hand on the banister, three fingers trailing the top rail the way I did coming down these stairs for the last time at twenty-two, except now I'm coming down them for what feels like the hundredth time in ten days and the house shrinks a little with each trip.
The kitchen linoleum is cool and sticky under my bare feet.
I flick the light on. Harsh yellow floods the space, makes the brown-and-cream pattern look feverish.
I pull a water bottle from the fridge. Cold against my palm. I don't open it. Just hold it, feeling the chill work into my skin, and that's when I see the door.
The garage door off the kitchen is ajar.
Not wide — an inch, a thin vertical line of dark between door and jamb.
Cole left in a hurry. Didn't latch it. I can picture it: him shoving through the side door, moving fast, still angry from the kitchen, his hand hitting the latch but not seating it.
The mistake you make when your mind is somewhere else.
I stand there with the bottle in my hand and the yellow light beating down and Eileen's concentrator a faint breath from down the hall, and the line of darkness from the garage seems to widen without changing size, like it's breathing.
I nudge the door open with my foot.
The fluorescent tube is already on. Cole left it burning — which is its own kind of clue, because the man who counts every pill and squares every mug to the millimeter doesn't leave lights on by accident.
The garage smells the way it always does: motor oil and metal and concrete that never dries all the way.
The workbench runs the length of the far wall, a slab of scarred pine Wade built twenty years ago and never maintained.
Above it, a hand-drawn map of Roan and its outskirts is tacked to the wall with pushpins.
Not printed — drawn, on graph paper, the streets rendered with a shaky precision that says someone who knows the roads by heart but can't quite hold the scale.
Pushpins in red and blue. Routes inked in, circuitous, dodging the main roads.
On the bench: three composition notebooks splayed open, pages covered in Cole's cramped, slanting hand.
A coffee can of pens at the far end, the red Folgers logo faded to pink.
Color-coded tabs bristle from the notebook edges — blue, red, green, a system I can't read but that Cole clearly lives inside.
The notebooks aren't hidden. They just sit there, exposed, like the contents are too urgent to conceal or too dangerous to risk moving.
I set the bottle down. Pick up the first notebook.
The pages fall open to a blue tab. Annette Coyle.
Four years ago. Block letters, underlined twice.
Below it, in Cole's tight script: Left for Seattle 4/17.
Never called home. Sister (Brenda) filed missing persons 4/22.
Report #7743. Signed Calloway. No follow-up.
No door-to-door. Closed 4/29. And under that, one word: DEAD.
I turn the page. Judy Marsh. Three years back. Same pattern in the same hand: Pulled out of school. Stopped answering texts. Cover story about a sick aunt. Report filed, case number, Calloway's signature. Closed inside a week. DEAD.
My throat goes dry. I flip faster. Voss's name on nearly every page, circled in red, sometimes dated, sometimes joined by arrows to other names.
Calloway. Always Calloway. The sheriff's name written hard enough to emboss the back of the page.
In one margin: Lakehouse???, three question marks eating half the line.
My hands feel wrong. Sweat on the spine, my fingers leaving damp prints on the paper.
I keep turning. The entries get denser, the writing more compressed, like Cole was running out of room or patience or both.
Dates. Times. License plates. Witness statements that trail off mid-sentence, followed by (refused to continue) or (door shut in face) or just a line drawn through the whole paragraph like he couldn't stand to look at it.
Then I flip to a page near the back and the air leaves my lungs.
Hannah Brooks. The name spans the top in letters that slant harder than the rest, pressed in hard enough to tear the fibers. 17. Track. Spotted her getting into Voss's car outside Roan High, 3 wks ago. Below it: Pulling back from practice. Quiet. Won't say why.
The page is dense. Question marks everywhere, big and aggressive. Underlines. Arrows running Voss to Calloway to dates to places I don't recognize. And at the bottom, in writing so tight it looks like the pen was jammed against the paper: still in play / still time.
The muscle in my cheek jumps, the tic I've had since the war, the one that surfaces when my body needs to do something and my brain hasn't caught up.
The notebook feels heavy in my hands — not the weight of paper and cardboard, but the weight of what's written inside it, sitting in my chest and refusing to move.
I set it back on the bench exactly where I found it. My fingers leave damp spots on the cover. I step into the kitchen and leave the garage door open, the light burning. The yellow glow spills through and cuts across the linoleum.
I hoist myself onto the edge of the counter.
The Formica is cool under my thighs. The water bottle sweats beside me, unopened.
The overhead light is too bright. It makes everything look wrong — the stove with its one good burner, the pill organizer in its spot, the mug Cole left this morning, ring-stained and empty.
Down the hall, the concentrator hums. In and out. A machine keeping a woman alive one milliliter at a time. I sit on the counter with my bare feet dangling and the garage light bleeding yellow through the doorway and the weight of those notebooks in my chest, and I wait.
The side door opens. Not with a slam — Cole never slams doors here, not with Eileen's room down the hall — but with the careful click of a man who's spent years moving through dark spaces without making a sound. The screen settles into its frame with a soft sigh.
He stops dead when he sees the kitchen light.
I watch it happen. Cole in the doorway, one hand still on the screen's edge, body half-turned toward the yard like he's been caught mid-exit.
Hair pushed back, damp at the temples. His shirt dark with sweat between the shoulder blades.
His eyes find the kitchen light first, then the open garage door with its glow spilling across the linoleum, then me — on the edge of the counter with my bare feet hanging and the water bottle sweating beside me and my face doing whatever it's doing, which is probably hiding nothing.
His expression goes flat. Not angry, not yet — flat, wiped clean, every usual tell sanded down to nothing.
His jaw sets. The muscle in his cheek ticks.
His eyes hold mine for a beat, two, and in the quiet I can hear the refrigerator and the fan and the concentrator down the hall, like the house is holding its breath.
He closes the side door without a sound. The latch clicks, soft, precise. Then he's moving, three strides across the kitchen, and the air goes dense between us.
"What were you doing in my garage?"
Low. Controlled. Dropped to just above a whisper, which makes it worse — all that heat with nowhere to go, compressed into a register that lives between speaking and not. The sound of it does something to my chest I won't name.
I hold up a hand. Not stopping him — holding space, the way you do when someone's moving too fast and you need them to slow. "The notebooks, Cole. A seventeen-year-old girl getting into Voss's car. What the fuck."
Something shifts in his face. The flatness cracks — not into anger but into something warier, the look of a man caught and still weighing how much to give.
His eyes cut to the garage door, the yellow light, back to me.
He doesn't deny it. Doesn't try. Just stands there, hands at his sides, jaw working, the sweat drying on his neck in the stale air.
I push. "I thought you were screwing around out there at night. I thought—" I stop. The words sit behind my teeth, sharp and ugly. "I thought it was something I'd have to be ashamed of. That's what it looked like from where I was sitting."
His expression doesn't change. "But you don't think that now."
Not a question.