Chapter 4
Sera
Garnet Bend, Montana was small in the way that suggested choice rather than failure.
A main street with a bar and grill and a coffee shop and storefronts that someone had taken the time to maintain.
One traffic light, blinking yellow at this hour.
The kind of town that probably looked picturesque in daylight and felt like the edge of the world in the middle of the night.
I drove through it in about five minutes and kept going.
The address was south of town, up a county road that narrowed as the houses thinned and the trees thickened. The GPS told me I’d arrived before I saw anything that looked like a destination. Just mountains in the distance, trees, a dark road, and then a gate.
I pulled up and sat in the car with the engine idling and my headlights cutting across metal that had no business being at the end of a gravel road in rural Montana.
It was heavy. Industrial. No ranch signage, no name on a post. Just the gate, set between two concrete pillars, security cameras, and a keypad mounted on a steel post at driver’s-window height.
An electronic hum came from somewhere behind the pillars.
Low, constant, the sound of a system that was always on.
I pressed the button that looked like it might be an intercom. Held it down. Nothing. Tried it again. Nothing.
I picked up my phone from the cupholder and called Travis. Four rings then the same voicemail with no greeting and no name.
I was sitting outside a fortified gate in the middle of the night, trying to get the attention of a man who had not acknowledged my existence in three years.
The keypad wanted a code. I tried the address numbers from the road. A beep, a red light. Wrong. I tried the year. Same beep. Same red light.
I could turn around. Drive back to Garnet Bend and find a motel. Try again in the morning like a reasonable person.
But I’d driven hours to get here. I hadn’t come to be reasonable.
The code would be something personal. Travis was too smart for defaults, but it had to be something his fingers could find by reflex. Something embedded deep.
Something connected to Naomi.
My sister had told me once, in a conversation I wished I could forget, about the name Travis called her. The private one. Not in front of other people, not in front of family. Just between them.
She’d mentioned it casually, the way Naomi mentioned everything about her life. Casually and completely, because it never occurred to her that the details of her happiness might land differently on someone who was quietly drowning in the wake of it.
He calls me Treasure.
I’d smiled and said something appropriate and excused myself and stood in the bathroom of the restaurant where we’d been having lunch and pressed my hands against the counter until my knuckles went white because the man I couldn’t stop thinking about had a name for my sister that sounded like he’d found the only thing in the world worth keeping.
That had been three years ago. The word had lived in me since, a small sharp object I’d swallowed and never passed.
I typed T-R-E-A-S-U-R-E.
The light turned green. The gate swung inward, silent and smooth.
I should have felt triumph. Instead, I sat there with a taste in my mouth like I’d bitten through the inside of my cheek. I’d just used Travis’s love for my dead sister to open a gate.
The driveway curved through trees and delivered me to exactly the kind of house I’d originally pictured.
A ranch house. Single story. Peeling paint, sagging porch, dark windows.
The driveway continued past the front, and I followed it around to the back, looking for signs of life.
There were none. I parked near a utility door and killed the engine.
I walked back around front and knocked. Hard, with the side of my fist. Counted to thirty. Banged again. There was definitely nobody home.
I walked around the house. Tried every window I could reach.
Tried the front door. Tried a side door.
Everything was locked, and not in the way a ranch house was locked.
The paint was flaking off, but the window frames were reinforced.
The porch was sagging in places, but the door was heavy and seated in a metal frame.
Interesting paradox.
I stood on the front porch and looked out at the dark trees and the gravel driveway and thought about what I was actually considering.
Breaking into someone’s home. Not a hypothetical someone.
Travis Hale’s home. A man I hadn’t spoken to in three years, who had never once returned my calls, who might very well call the police when he found me inside.
I grabbed my phone and looked up hotels around the area. The nearest one with availability was two hours away.
I wasn’t leaving until I talked to Travis and hopefully got his help. If that meant sleeping in my car I’d do so. But I didn’t want to do that. I was tired and scared and just wanted to get inside.
There was a keypad beside the front door. Same model as the gate. I typed T-R-E-A-S-U-R-E.
The light turned green. The lock released.
For a former CIA operative, Travis’s security sucked. But I didn’t care. I was inside now, and once he got home, he’d have to hear me out.
The house was dark and smelled like nothing.
Not cooking, not cleaning product, not the accumulated scent of a person living in a space.
I found a light switch. The hallway opened into a living room with furniture that looked staged rather than used.
A couch with cushions that held no impressions.
Surfaces with nothing on them. No books, no decorations, no evidence that anyone spent time in this room.
The house felt like a shell. The architecture of a life with no life inside it.
I called out his name. My voice sounded too loud in the space. There was no answer. I hadn’t been expecting any.
I sat down on the couch. Checked my phone. No missed calls, no messages.
I tried to picture Travis in this space and couldn’t. Reading a book on this couch or eating dinner at that table. Doing any of the ordinary things that a person did in a house they lived in. None of it fit.
Being here felt weird, probably because it was breaking and entering. I hadn’t broken but I’d definitely entered. I thought again about going back to my car. Sleeping in the backseat, trying again in the morning like a professional. I even stood up, got as far as the hallway, and stopped.
I wouldn’t sleep in my car. If I left, I’d drive to a motel.
In the morning when I got back here maybe he still wouldn’t let me in.
Maybe I’d call, and he still wouldn’t pick up.
I’d leave a message he’d never return, and I’d drive back to Spokane with nothing, and in a week I’d be exactly where I’d been for the past few months: on the outside of a door that wouldn’t open.
I walked back to the couch and sat down.
He was going to have to look at me. That was the minimum. He was going to have to walk into this room and see me sitting here and deal with the fact that I’d come all this way and let myself into his house, and I wasn’t leaving until he heard what I had to say.
He could be angry about it. He could throw me out.
But he couldn’t pretend I didn’t exist, and right now that felt like enough.
So I waited.
The adrenaline I’d been running on started to thin.
My body registered every complaint it had been saving up for hours.
The tension in my neck from gripping the steering wheel.
The ache in my lower back from a car seat that had never been comfortable.
The throb behind my eyes from staring at a dark road.
I sat on his untouched couch in his unlived-in living room and felt the exhaustion settle over me like something heavy being draped across my shoulders. Eventually I got up and went looking for the bathroom.
The hallway off the living room had several closed doors. Linen closet. Spare bedroom with a bed that looked military and untouched. Bathroom. I used it, washed my face with cold water, and looked at myself in the mirror.
I looked like a woman who’d made a series of decisions she couldn’t undo.
Back in the hallway, I noticed a couple other doors. One was probably Travis’s bedroom. The other at the far end looked different. Heavier than the others. When I opened it, a set of stairs led down.
Warm air rose from below. Not furnace heat. Something humid, dense, carrying a temperature that didn’t match the rest of the house.
I went down. The stairs turned once and ended in a hallway that was nothing like the house above. Smooth floors. Solid walls, the kind of construction that felt permanent in a way that drywall and studs did not.
I followed the hallway. I reached an open door at the end.
The pool was behind it.
Not a hot tub. An actual pool, long and narrow, set into the floor of a low-ceilinged room. The water was lit from within by something faint and blue, the only light in the space.
I stood in the doorway. The air was warm and heavy and the water was right there, and I’d been running on adrenaline and coffee for hours and every part of me hurt.
But my lungs, for the first time all day, stopped complaining.
The humid air began doing what my inhaler only half managed, and I could feel my chest opening up with every breath.
Screw it. In for a penny, in for a pound. How much worse could it get?
I pulled off my shoes. My jeans. My sweater. Left them in a pile by the edge and lowered myself into the water.
The heat took me immediately. I let my head fall back against the edge and closed my eyes and my blood pressure lowered to something close to normal for the first time in hours.
I pushed off the wall and floated on my back in the center of the pool and for a few minutes my brain was quiet.
Just a body in warm water and the soothing light from under the water.
I stayed in long past the time my fingers went wrinkly. But the quiet helped, and somewhere between floating and thinking, my brain started working again.
I couldn’t stay here. What the hell was I doing? Yeah, Travis Hale had been my sister’s boyfriend. Serious boyfriend. If Naomi was still alive, they’d probably be married by now.
But that didn’t give me the right to break into his house, even if I’d figured out the code. I needed to get out of the pool, out of his house, erase any sign I’d been here and come back tomorrow when he was home.
I’d make him listen to me.
Yes, that was a much better plan. Five more minutes and I would go. He’d never know I’d been here.
“Who are you and why the fuck are you in my pool?”
I went vertical so fast I choked on water. Coughing, blinking, heart slamming, I grabbed for the edge of the pool and looked up.
Travis stood in the doorway. He was holding a gun, and it was pointed at me.