Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
MAREN
Finn's text. No caption, just the image. Knox and me on the cabin porch, his hand at the small of my back, my face turning toward him, the mountains filling the frame behind us. Whoever took it had a good lens and a clear sight line, and they'd been there long enough to find their angle.
I look at it again once we're ten miles down from the cabin and put my phone face-down on my thigh.
Knox is driving with one hand, the other flat on the gearshift, watching the county road unreel ahead of us with the kind of attention that means his mind is somewhere else entirely.
He doesn't ask what came in. He's been fielding his own messages since the ridge.
Holt, his father and two numbers he's declined without explanation, and I've watched him handle all of it with the same flat expression he uses for everything that requires him not to feel something in front of me.
I pick my phone back up. Text Finn: How long has it been out?
His response comes in thirty seconds. Since last night. Sorry.
Last night. While we were stranded in that cabin, talking in the dark, trusting things we'd been carrying for a decade.
Someone was watching from the trees with a long lens and patience.
They've had the image for twelve hours, and I've had it for thirty minutes, and the gap between those numbers is McKenna doing exactly what McKenna does.
Moving information before you know it's been taken.
Knox looks over.
"Who sent it?"
"Finn. It's been out since last night."
Two seconds of silence. Then, flat: "The camera was already there. Before we arrived."
"Yes."
Not reacting to us. Anticipating. Whoever told McKenna about the line cabin knew it was a Blackwater contingency location, knew Knox would use it if he needed to go dark. That's not guesswork. That's the kind of knowledge that lives inside a family.
Neither of us says the thing underneath that. We don't need to.
His phone starts ringing. Gideon's name on the screen.
He picks up.
I look out the passenger window at the Rocky Mountain Front sliding south, the glacier on Broken Sky catching the late afternoon light the same way it always does, and I think: last night I asked him to come to bed and he came, and it was the first time I chose without an excuse in hand, and someone photographed us from forty yards out.
The call is short. Knox says three words in the register I've learned to read as a man receiving orders he's already decided whether to follow: yes, tonight, understood. He hangs up and doesn't tell me what Gideon said. I don't ask.
I let information come to me. That's what Sullivans do.
Knox pulls through the Blackwater gate at dusk and parks beside my truck.
It's been sitting here since Saturday night, which Gideon knows, because Gideon knows everything that comes through his gate, stays on his land, and parks at his son's house for two days running. The main house windows face this way. I don't look at them.
Knox kills the engine. He sits for a moment with both hands on the wheel, not moving, and I watch his profile in the last light and think about what Gideon just said to him on the phone and don't ask.
"I need an hour," he says.
"I know."
He looks at me then. Not long. The look of a man with one foot already inside a meeting that's going to cost him something, asking me without words to still be here when he comes out. I hold his gaze and don't promise anything.
I'm a Sullivan and I don't make promises I haven't decided to keep yet.
He gets out.
I watch him cross the yard toward the main house, and I stay exactly where I am.
I could leave. My truck is right there. My keys are in my bag on the backseat. Leaving would be easy, clean, the kind of exit a woman makes when she understands what's happening and has decided not to sit in another man's driveway waiting to find out how much of it she was wrong about.
I don't leave.
I open the glove box.
Not looking for anything. That's what I tell myself, which is what I always tell myself when I'm looking for everything.
The notebook is at the back, behind the truck manual, an insurance card, and a work glove with a split seam. Brown faux leather, water-stained. Small enough to disappear.
I know what it is before I've pulled it out.
The columns are exactly as I remember from the ravine: payment amounts, rotating initials, dates running back two years. I find the page near the middle. The account number. The two letters.
B.W.
I sit with it.
He told me he didn't recognize the initials.
He said it clean and flat, the way he says everything that costs him nothing to say.
I watched his face go still for one second longer than it should have, I noted it and said nothing, because I was choosing patience, because I told myself I was holding my card.
What I was doing was hoping I'd been wrong about what I saw.
I photograph every page.
My hands are steady. They're always steady. Kathleen built me to be steady.
I put the notebook back. Same angle, spine flush with the edge, the work glove covering the corner exactly as it was. I close the glove box.
The truck cab still smells like him. Cedar, dust, and two days of driving roads that don't appear on maps. I sit in it for one more second and let that be true. Then I get out.
I lean against the hood of my own truck and call Laney.
She picks up on the first ring. "I was waiting."
"I know."
"The photo is everywhere. My phone hasn't stopped since this morning."
"I know that too." The main house is lit up, every window. The meeting already running. "He's been lying to me."
The careful silence. Then: "Knox?”
"Not about other women. About the investigation. About what he found. About who he's protecting." I look at the mountain going dark in the west. "I found the evidence tonight."
"What are you going to do?"
"Nothing yet. A Sullivan doesn't play their best hand when they're angry."
"Are you angry?"
I think about the cabin. His voice low in the dark. The real smile. This morning, his hand smelled like smoke when he reached for mine.
"The worst part isn't that he lied," I say.
"Maren."
"The worst part is that I would have understood.
" My free hand finds the truck door behind me, holds it.
"If he'd told me the truth, I would have worked with it.
I would have understood protecting your family before you've decided whether to trust mine.
" I breathe. "He didn't give me the chance to understand. "
"What does that mean for you?"
"It means I'm holding something he doesn't know I'm holding." I watch the last of the light leave the glacier. "Which is where every Sullivan negotiation starts."
I hang up.
My phone buzzes immediately. Dawson. I answer.
"You saw the photo?" he asks.
"Hours ago."
"There's something else." The sound of his truck engine underneath his voice, which means he's driving somewhere he didn't tell Declan about. "Gideon called the meeting about you. He told Knox to end it tonight. Before the families sit down together."
I look at the main house. Every window lit. Knox in there right now, across from his father, being told to walk out and cut me loose.
My truck has been parked in Knox Blackwater's driveway for two days.
I'm still standing next to it.
"Maren." Dawson's voice drops. "Come home."
"I will," I say. "Later."
I hang up, put my phone in my pocket, and stay exactly where I am. In Gideon's sightline, in the dark, waiting.
I have the notebook photos Knox doesn't know about. Gideon has ordered Knox to end things with me. And somewhere in that lit-up house, the most dangerous man I've ever chosen to trust is sitting across from his father deciding what he's made of.
I already know what I'm made of.
I want to know what he is.