Chapter 3 #3
I reach for my phone on the nightstand. The screen lights the room in a blue-white rectangle, and I open the photograph and hold it where he can see it.
"Do you recognize her?"
His body goes still against mine. Not tense. Not guarded. Still in the way a man goes still when the face in front of him connects to nothing he holds, when the blankness isn't a wall but an open room with nobody in it.
"No." He takes the phone from me, studies the image with the same focused attention he brings to documents and clauses and the fine print of other people's mistakes. "Where did you get this?"
"The woman on the plains. The one my mother sent me to."
His jaw works once. "The address in the book. She gave you this photograph."
"The woman took one look at me and said I have my father's eyes. So does the girl in the photograph."
He looks at the screen again. I watch the side of his face in the blue light.
The way his brow draws together. The way his mouth opens and closes without forming a word.
His thumb hovers over the girl's face the way a man touches a document he's trying to place in a file that doesn't exist. The blankness is genuine.
The confusion of a man who keeps meticulous records and has just been shown a page that belongs to no file he maintains.
"She does," he says. "Have your father's eyes."
"I know."
He hands the phone back. "She looks familiar, Greer. But I can’t place her."
I believe him. Or I believe the body that just came apart against mine, which may not be the same thing. I know that, and the knowing doesn't change the weight of the instinct.
The blankness on his face when he looked at that photograph is the same blankness I've seen on two kinds of people: the ones who genuinely don't know, and the ones who are so good at performing ignorance that the performance and the truth become the same thing.
My gut says he's the first kind. My gut has been wrong before. But Callum Aldrich isn't a man whose body lies well after his own composure has cracked on a kitchen counter, and that's the closest thing to certainty I'm going to get tonight.
That's the first fracture. Not in the case, but in my conviction that the man lying in my childhood bed is the man who tried to put me in the reservoir this morning.
If he didn't do it, then someone else did. If someone else did, the list of people who knew where I'd be and when I'd be there is longer than I thought. The machine that runs this valley has channels I haven't mapped and hands I haven't seen.
I set the phone on the nightstand, face down. The room goes dark again. I can feel the mountain pressing against the windows the way it has pressed against this house for over a hundred years, patient and heavy and full of things it isn't ready to give back.
"The woman who took the photograph," I say into the dark. "She's Chinese. Or part. And the girl in the picture has my father's eyes."
He's quiet for a long time. His arm tightens across my waist, and I can feel him working through it, assembling the pieces the way he assembles clauses, testing each one for where it fits.
"Your father had another daughter," he says. Not a question. The conclusion arrived at cleanly, the way his mind works, stated without decoration.
"That's where it points."
"And your mother knew."
"My mother sent me to her. Hid the address in a novel on my nightstand and sent me out of the valley to find it. Whatever this is, June spent years making sure I'd find it after she was gone, and she didn't trust a single soul inside this valley with the information. Including you."
The silence that follows has weight. I can feel him measuring it behind me, the shift in his breathing, the way his fingers press fractionally harder against my hip. The calculator running behind his eyes even now, even here, even with his guard in ruins on my mother's kitchen floor.
"I didn't know about any of this," he says finally.
"I know. That's what scares me."
"Why?"
"Because if June didn't trust the man she trusted with everything else, then whatever she found is worse than six dead miners in a hole.
If you don't know about it, then either someone on that pass was trying to keep me inside this valley for reasons we haven't figured out yet, or they knew exactly where I was going and what I'd find.
Either way, there's a piece of this you haven't seen.
And somebody decided it was worth killing me over. "
His phone buzzes on the nightstand. The screen lights. I see the name before he does, the glow catching the angled letters from where my head rests on the pillow.
Ward.
He looks at it. In the brief flare of the screen, what I see is a man staring at the name of the person who raised him and choosing, for the first time, not to answer.
The cost of it runs through him. I feel it where his body presses mine, the tightening of his jaw, the arm locking harder across my waist.
The screen goes dark. The silence comes back. His arm tightens, and he doesn't reach for it.
He lets it ring.