Chapter 50
Fifty
LAYLA
“Can you please state your name for the record?”
Eyes on the recorder set in the middle of the table between me and two federal agents, I took a breath.
“Gwen Busby.”
Two words. I’d spent the better part of my adult life making sure those two words never left my mouth, building a whole person around their absence, and now I’d said them into a recorder that would turn them into a file, and the file would go into a system, and the system would use them to finally open what had never been properly opened.
My name. My old name. The one I’d buried at sixteen to stay alive, spoken out loud in an official capacity, on the record, true.
The agent asked me to confirm it. To state for the record that I was the individual reported missing from Hatterwick Island, that I was alive, and that I was giving this statement of my own free will.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Gwen Busby. I’m alive.”
I didn’t fall apart saying it. I’d thought I might. For years the idea had lived in me as a kind of seam, the place where Layla Murphy was stitched over Gwen Busby, and I’d imagined that if I ever pulled the thread, the whole thing would come apart, and I wouldn’t know who was left standing.
But I didn’t come apart.
I said her name, and I was still here, still myself, still the woman who’d built a life on Orcas and trained her body into a weapon and loved a dog trained in French and fallen for a man who’d broken a neck to keep me breathing.
Saying Gwen Busby out loud didn’t erase any of that.
It just stopped the pretending she was dead.
I’d been splitting myself in two for so long I’d forgotten I was doing it, the constant low effort of keeping the two halves apart.
I was done with that now. Layla Murphy carried Gwen Busby’s history and always would.
They were the same person. They’d always been the same person.
And I was finished hiding one of them in order to be the other.
I gave them everything after that. Halston’s confession, word for word, as much as I could recall, which was nearly all of it.
The operation. Edmund. The drug routes and the trafficking built on top of them.
The proof-of-concept I’d been, and the others who’d come after.
I laid the whole thing out flat and clear and complete, the way I’d laid out a hundred stories that belonged to other people.
Except this one was mine, and saying it to people who would act on the information felt like setting down something I’d been carrying so long I’d stopped feeling the weight until it was gone.
I took them through the story three times as they checked for inconsistencies and pressure tested my statement.
When I finished, they thanked me and told me they’d need more, and that there’d be a long road ahead.
I knew there would be. I’d walked enough of these roads to understand exactly how long they ran.
Then they opened the door, and my father was standing in the hall.
My real father. The one who’d chosen me.
He’d dropped everything and crossed the country to be here, and he stood in the hallway of the island police station in a shirt rumpled from travel, with his face doing the thing his face did when he was holding too much feeling for the space available.
I crossed the distance between us, and he caught me the way he’d been catching me since I was sixteen years old.
“There’s my girl,” he said into my hair. “There you are.”
I held onto him and let myself be held, and for a minute I wasn’t an investigator or a witness or a survivor or any of the roles I’d worn to get through this. I was just his daughter, and he’d come, the way he always came.
“I’m okay,” I told him, because he needed to hear it. “Dad. I’m okay. I promise.”
“You’ve got blood on you.”
“It’s mostly not mine.”
He laughed, wet and startled, and pulled back to look at me, his hands on my shoulders, taking inventory the way he’d taught me to take inventory.
The bruise, the butterfly bandage at my temple, the exhaustion.
“God, Layla.” He shook his head. “When you told me you were coming back here, I knew this place would try to take something else from you. I just prayed it wouldn’t be the last thing.
” His voice roughened. “When the Bureau called—when they told me they had you, that you were alive and giving a statement—I was already at the airport before they finished the sentence.” He stopped.
Started over. “I’m just glad you’re standing here, Hummingbird. That’s the whole thing.”
We found a bench against the wall and sat, and he took my hand the way he had when I was sixteen and the world was too big.
“Tell me where everything stands,” I said. “All of it. Don’t manage me.”
“I never have.” He almost smiled. “Halston’s dead.
You obviously know that already, but it’s closed, and nobody in this building is asking hard questions about how, so let it lie.
” He watched my face when he said it, and whatever he saw there, he moved on.
“Your statement’s the spine of the investigation now.
That, plus the financial work you and your cousin pulled together, plus whatever your man’s contact sent—Cushley moved on it fast. Faster than I’ve seen the Bureau move in years. ”
Your man. I heard that and didn’t touch it. Not yet.
“Cushley’s good. He always was.”
“He’s executing warrants as we speak, in multiple jurisdictions.” He shook his head, the old professional appreciation surfacing through the exhaustion. “They’re pulling the whole structure into the light tonight. Shell companies, the marina, the routes—the whole lot.”
“Edmund. Tell me they have Edmund.”
“They don’t.” He said it flat, no cushion, because he’d never once lied to spare me.
“Not today. Maybe not this year. He’s got the lawyers and the distance and a dozen people between himself and anything that could touch him.
A man like that doesn’t go down because his son ran his mouth to a woman he meant to kill. ”
“So he walks.”
“I didn’t say that.” He turned my hand over in his.
“I said, not today. He’s not untouchable anymore, baby.
He’s got a name in a federal file and a son who confessed the shape of the whole operation to the one person who lived to repeat it.
That machine just woke up, and it doesn’t go back to sleep because it’s inconvenient.
The drugs, the trafficking, whatever names sit above the Ashmores—Jace has apparently been chasing them for years—it’s all federal now.
It runs way past this island, and it’ll keep running long after we’ve gone home. ”
“Jace handed it off.” He hadn’t outright said he was military intelligence, but I’d read enough between the lines to guess this was something he’d been working on.
“Everything he had, from what Cushley implied.” My father studied me. “That’s not nothing, what that man did. Handing off work like that. Most men can’t let go of a thing they’ve carried that long.”
“He let go of it for me.”
“I gathered that, too.”
I was quiet for a moment, turning over the thing I’d been circling since they’d opened the door and let me out of that room.
“My mother,” I said finally. “My birth father. They think I’m dead.” I looked at him. “Is it safe to let them know I’m not? With Edmund still out there, with the whole thing not finished—am I putting them in danger if I reach out? Am I putting myself back in the middle of things?”
My father took his time, and the care of it told me he weighed the thing instead of soothing me. Thirty years of gauging risk worked behind his eyes.
He turned my hand over and followed the scars across my knuckles with his thumb.
“It isn’t safe the way it sits tonight, and I won’t lie to you about that.
What you did in that room opens a case. It doesn’t close one.
Trial could be years out, and until the rest of this operation comes apart, your name still buys something from people who’d pay to make it disappear.
Telling the truth to a couple of agents doesn’t change that math. ”
“So the answer’s no.” Deep down, I’d known that. But after being seen for the first time in forever, I’d needed to ask.
“The answer’s not yet, which is a different animal.
” He firmed his grip on my hand. “A case this size takes years to run. They catch some of these people and lose others, and the danger to you shrinks with every arrest, but it never zeroes out. Never fully. What matters is that smaller danger beats the wall you’ve lived behind for fifteen years.
That door used to be bricked over. Now there’s a way to work it open.
Slowly, with marshals in the loop and everyone’s safety counted before a single person knocks.
Your parents could know you’re breathing. When the time’s right for it.”
Fifteen years of bricked wall. Now a door with a hinge in it. I could accept that hope.
“Not tonight.”
“God, no. Not tonight.” Dad pulled me into his side. “There’s no clock on the rest. It waits as long as you need it to.”
I settled my weight against him and asked myself for nothing past the hallway, his arm around me, my pulse knocking under the bruises.
Boots sounded down the corridor. I placed the rhythm before I lifted my head.
Jace stopped a few feet off. At some point, he’d shed the vest. His eyes moved over me and stayed.
I stood from the bench, and my legs held, and he crossed the last of the floor and gathered me in. I turned my face into his chest and pulled him into my lungs, and neither of us went hunting for words, because no sentence I owned opened wide enough for the night.
My father stood when I drew back. He looked at the two of us and took his time with that, too.
I twisted a fist in Jace’s shirt and turned. “Dad, this is Jace Hollingsworth. Jace, my father.”
Dad offered his hand. Jace closed it in his own and held on past the expected length of a handshake.
“They told me who went after her.” My father pitched it for the three of us. “What it cost you. What you were ready to spend. A man doesn’t hear that about the man his daughter picked more than once in a lifetime.”
“I’d spend it again tonight. And every night that comes after.”
“I believe you.” He clapped Jace’s shoulder and left his hand resting there. “So you get the handshake instead of the other conversation.”
One corner of his mouth twitching, Jace wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “Appreciate that, sir.”
My father collected his jacket off the bench.
I pointed the three of us at the doors before the corridor cinched around me any tighter.
I’d come to Hatterwick weeks ago with a dead girl folded up like a secret inside my chest. Tonight, I walked out of this station with her name spoken into a federal recorder, my father at one shoulder, Jace’s palm warm at my spine.
The corkboard in the entryway held the island’s grief in layers. Curled flyers. Yellowed notices from summers gone by. Low in the corner, soft under years of some deputy’s thumb, a missing poster. Not the updated one with the most recent age progression rendering. This was older.
GWEN BUSBY. I recognized the school photo from my freshman year, my chin tipped, my lips slightly parted on the verge of a laugh, captured in a life I couldn’t touch from where I stood.
I stopped in front of her.
That girl knew nothing of what would come for her.
To this island she stayed a question with no answer.
A bonfire and a squall and a girl the night swallowed whole.
Most of them would go into the ground never learning the rest. The case would grind on for years, and the woman who bought conchas from Marisol and worked her way through their cold files would answer to Layla Murphy the whole time.
No unveiling waited at the end. No homecoming where the island got its girl returned.
The poster would yellow another decade on this board, and I’d walk past it, and no one would set the face against mine and see the truth. I’d worked hard to make sure of it.
I’d stepped onto this island with one thing burning under my ribs, and now I’d passed that fire to men with warrants and a mandate. The hollow left behind surprised me. I’d worn the mission so long that the line between it and me had blurred to nothing.
Jace’s fingers laced through mine. “Wherever you went, take me along.”
“I don’t know what I am without this. I came to end it. It’s ending. And I don’t know who’s left standing in the wreckage when the fighting stops.”
He tugged me to face him, both my hands caught in his. “Then we find her together. Not tonight. Not this month. On no one’s schedule but yours. Whoever’s standing here when the smoke lifts, I want to know her. Wherever she goes from here. I’m not leaving while you work out the answer.”
The floor firmed under my feet.
I looked at the poster once more. The girl who’d remain forever fifteen. The life she never got to finish. Then I left her on the board where she belonged. Not hidden anymore. Seen. Just not by them, and not yet.
“Okay.” Some weight lifted with the word. Because I trusted that this man I loved meant it. With him by my side, I could handle anything.
Tucked against Jace’s side, with my father at my other flank, I pushed through the doors into the night and whatever future lay beyond.