Chapter 9 #2
"We wait." It's out before I've thought it through, reflex more than strategy, and the second it lands I know it's the wrong answer.
Not because it's false — waiting is the job, sometimes — but because Trevor spent years in a uniform that taught him action is the only currency that matters, and watching an empty house is the opposite of action, and he knows it, and I know he knows it.
"Waiting's not a plan." His voice hasn't changed.
Still measured, which makes it worse, because the control is a choice and the choice is its own weapon.
"Waiting is what you do when you're out of options.
We're not out of anything. We knocked on a door.
Nobody answered. There's road between that and sitting here till the tank's dry. "
"You wouldn't know a plan if it knocked on your door for ten minutes and got no answer."
It lands wrong — off by enough that he knows I fired and knows I missed and knows why. I see it hit. A flicker, fast and gone, a tightening around the eyes that means I scored in a place I didn't mean to.
His jaw works. Once. For a second I think he might match the low blow with one of his own, the way we did at nineteen and eighteen, trading barbs that were never about the thing they pretended to be.
He doesn't. He looks back at the house. His fingers drum once on the frame — that same short rhythm — and the silence after is thicker than the one before.
"We could check the neighbors," he says finally. Lower. Flatter. The control sanded down to something almost tired. "Someone might have seen her leave. If she left."
"Nobody on this street talks to us. You knock on a door in this town asking about a woman who might be in trouble, and by sundown Calloway knows your name, your plate, and what you had for breakfast. That's how it works. Always has."
"So we do nothing." Not a question.
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't say anything useful."
"Useful." I bark it. Short, sharp, something breaking that's been under tension too long.
"You've been back a few weeks, Trevor. I've been inside this thing for years.
I know how the pieces fit. I know which doors open, which get slammed, which have somebody behind them with a reason to make sure you stop knocking.
So maybe sitting in a truck feels like nothing to you.
Maybe it looks like surrender, with all your procedure and your chain of command and your neat little boxes for everything that doesn't fit.
But out here, sometimes sitting is the move.
Sometimes waiting is the plan. And if you can't handle that — if you need your hands busy every second so you don't have to sit with the fact that some problems don't have a solution you can shoot your way out of — then maybe you picked the wrong garage to walk into. "
It comes out in a rush. Too fast, too much, each word landing like something I've carried too long and finally set down, and the setting down doesn't bring relief — it brings the hollow feeling back, wider, because now Trevor's looking at me with that stillness again and I can see the calculation running behind his face.
The same one that's been running since he walked back in: weighing variables, measuring risk, deciding whether the man in front of him is an asset or a liability or something in between that doesn't have a name yet.
His eyes drop. To my hands on the wheel. White-knuckled, tendons standing out, and I didn't notice until he looked, and now I can't unnotice, and the fact that he saw before I did lands in my chest with everything else that's landed there today.
He looks back at the house. Says nothing.
I start the truck. The engine turns over loud after the silence. The AC kicks on, blowing air barely cooler than outside, and I let it blow because the noise gives us something to hide behind that isn't the weight of everything we just said and everything we didn't.
I don't say we're leaving. I put it in drive and pull off the curb, and Trevor keeps his arm out the window and his eyes on the side mirror, watching the beige house shrink until it's just another box on a dead street, and neither of us says a word for three blocks.
I take the long way home because the long way is what you take when you're not ready to be where you're going, and right now Cembrook Road feels about as welcoming as a holding cell.
Right at the dead light. Left at the water tower with its faded ROAN PRIDE stencil nobody's touched up in a decade.
Cut behind the elementary school where the playground sits rusting, the swings still, the slide too hot to touch.
Routes that skirt the main drag. Routes that let me check my mirrors without being obvious.
Old habit. The kind you don't think about until you're doing it, and then you can't stop, because stopping means admitting you have a reason to check, and admitting that means admitting someone might be looking, and in Roan someone is always looking.
The rearview shows empty asphalt. The side mirrors show the same.
Nobody following. Nobody cares enough to. The thought should comfort. It doesn't.
Trevor rides with his arm out the window, forearm exposed to the dead air, and I catch myself watching the light on the skin there — the look of sun on Trevor Hollander's forearm being a subject I've spent ten years trying not to think about and failing at, monumentally, the way you fail at things that were never winnable.
His fingers are loose on the panel. Relaxed.
Or performing relaxed, which for him is the same thing — control so complete it becomes its own tell, because nobody's that calm after the conversation we just had unless they're working hard at it, and the working is itself a data point.
I don't call him on it. We've hit our quota for calling each other on things today, and we blew past it a comment ago.