Chapter 2
CALLUM
My uncle calls at six in the morning, which means he's been awake since four, which means something is bothering him, which means something is bothering me whether I want it to or not.
"She's here," he says, skipping the greeting the way he always does, as if pleasantries are a toll he's decided he no longer has to pay. "Drove in yesterday evening. Aggie at the gas station sold her gas."
I pour coffee into a mug hand-thrown by a ceramicist in Telluride whose work has a two-year waiting list, a gift from my uncle for my thirtieth birthday, because the Aldriches don't give gifts so much as issue reminders of what good taste looks like.
The coffee is black, hot enough to burn, and I drink it that way on purpose.
The small, controlled discomfort of it keeps me focused.
"I know," I tell him. "I texted her last night. We're meeting at ten."
A pause. With my uncle, pauses are their own language. This one translates roughly to: I'm recalibrating my opinion of you, and you should be concerned about which direction it's moving.
"At the house?" he asks.
"She suggested it."
"Of course she did." Another pause, shorter. "June's daughter. She'll be sentimental about the property. Use that."
"I'm the attorney for the estate, Uncle Ward. I'm going to review her mother's will and discuss the disposition of assets."
"You're going to get her to sell."
The line goes dead. Ward Aldrich doesn't say goodbye for the same reason he doesn't say hello.
He considers both a waste of breath, and Ward has never wasted anything in his life except other people's patience and, on occasion, other people's lives, though that second category is something the family discusses only in the abstract, and only after enough scotch to blur the edges of what discuss actually means.
The thing about Ward that makes him dangerous, more dangerous than people realize, is that he can also be extraordinary.
When my parents died in the car accident on the pass road, I was twelve, and Ward drove to the hospital himself, sat beside my bed for three days without sleeping, and read me the entirety of Treasure Island in a voice so gentle I didn't recognize it as his.
He held my hand during the funeral. He told me I would never be alone.
And he meant it, in his way, the way a man means it when he's offering you a place in a machine and calling it a family. The kindness was real. The cost of the kindness was also real, and I didn't understand that part until much later.
I set my phone on the marble counter and drink my coffee and look out the floor-to-ceiling windows of my house.
My house, technically, though the Aldrich family trust holds the deed, which means it's my house the way a corner office is your office: yours to use, never yours to own, and removable the moment you stop being useful.
The view is spectacular. The San Juans in early morning light, the peaks already dusted white, the valley below still in shadow.
The house itself is less a home than a display case: floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, polished concrete floors that reflect the sky, furniture placed with the geometric precision of pieces in an art gallery.
Everything in it is clean and cold and deliberately chosen, and nothing in it makes a sound.
I removed the clocks years ago because the ticking bothered me.
I don't own a television. The refrigerator is a model engineered to run silent.
The quiet in this house is not the absence of noise. It is a project, something I built and maintain, the aural equivalent of the view: controlled, beautiful, and completely empty of life.
Wicked Falls sits in the valley like a jewel in a velvet box, every roofline and church steeple and cobblestone street arranged with a precision that suggests someone designed it to be looked at from above.
Someone did. My great-great-grandfather, Elias Aldrich, who built the original family estate on the highest point of this ridge specifically so he could watch the town he'd created.
The house I grew up in, the house my uncle still occupies, is that estate: stone and timber and over a century old, perched above everything, because Elias believed that altitude was a metaphor for authority and my uncle believes Elias was right about everything.
My house is newer, built below the estate when I turned thirty, a consolation prize wrapped in glass and concrete.
Close enough to the family to be useful. Low enough to know my place.
I shower, dress, and spend twenty minutes reviewing June Holden's estate file, which I've already memorized but which I review again because preparation is the only form of control I trust completely.
The will is straightforward: everything to the daughter, Greer Holden, age thirty, currently residing in Portland, Oregon.
The property, the house and the land, is unencumbered. No liens, no debts, no complications.
Except the property sits on top of the one thing my family cannot allow to surface, and June Holden knew that, and she spent decades using that knowledge as a shield, and now the shield has passed to a woman who has no idea she's holding it.
The drive into town takes minutes. My house is on the south ridge, below the family compound but above everything else, which is the architectural equivalent of my position in the Aldrich hierarchy: close enough to be trusted, low enough to be expendable.
I take the switchback road that drops through stands of aspen and blue spruce, past the trailhead for the old mining road, past the locked gate that marks the boundary of the Aldrich mineral claims, claims that haven't produced silver in living memory but that the family maintains with a diligence that has nothing to do with mining and everything to do with what else those tunnels contain.
Wicked Falls at nine in the morning is a postcard.
Tourists in expensive hiking gear window-shop on Main Street.
The coffee shop on the corner has a line out the door, and the barista waves at me through the window because everyone in this town waves at Aldriches, the same way everyone in a cathedral crosses themselves when they pass the altar.
Reflex, not affection. The gesture you make toward power so that power doesn't notice you haven't made it.
I park on the gravel shoulder in front of the Holden property early.
Not exactly on time, because arriving exactly on time suggests you had to manage your schedule to be there.
Not late, because that would tell Greer Holden I don't respect her time, and I need her to feel respected.
Respected people are easier to negotiate with.
They give you the benefit of the doubt longer.
The house looks like what it is: a building that was loved deeply by a woman who couldn't afford to maintain it.
The porch sags, the paint peels, the garden has gone to wildflower chaos in a way that June probably considered a philosophical statement about the relationship between beauty and control.
June Holden turned neglect into an aesthetic and stubbornness into a personal brand, and the fact that I admired her for it irritated me then and irritates me now, because admiring the opposition is a crack in the architecture, and I don't tolerate cracks.
She was the only person in this town who told my uncle no, and she did it with a smile that said she knew exactly what it cost and considered the price worth paying just to watch him leave empty-handed.
At ten, I get out of the car and straighten my jacket. Charcoal, no tie, because a tie in Wicked Falls reads as Denver and Denver reads as outsider and the last thing I need is for Greer Holden to see me as anything other than local. I walk up the path through the feral junipers.
She opens the door before I knock.
The first thing I register is her mouth.
Full lower lip, the top one thinner, sharper, pressed together in a line that says she's already decided how this meeting ends.
The second thing I register is that she looks like June, the same dark hair, the same sharp jaw, the same way of holding her head slightly tilted, as if she's evaluating whether you're worth the full weight of her attention.
She's taller than her mother was, thinner, with circles under her eyes that speak to something more systemic than a few bad nights.
Her eyes are lighter than June's, and they land on me with a directness that feels less like eye contact and more like a rangefinder.
I want to look at her longer than I should. The thought arrives clean and unwelcome, like a blade slipped between ribs.
"Mr. Aldrich," she says. The name sits in her mouth like something she's deciding whether or not to spit it out.
"Ms. Holden. Thank you for making time."
"My mother just died and I'm alone in her house. Time is the one thing I have a surplus of."
Sharp. Good. Dull people are easier to manage, but they bore me, and I have the distinct, inconvenient sense that Greer Holden is not going to bore me.
She steps back to let me in, and the house swallows me the way it always has, with the low ceilings, the dark wood, the smell of lavender and old paper and the particular mustiness of a structure that's been holding its breath for a very long time.
June's house has always felt more like an organism than a building, something alive and watchful, and the sensation is stronger now that June is gone, as if the house is trying to compensate for her absence by doubling down on its own presence.