12. Monique
Monique
Weston finds me at the desk.
He comes in from the stairs rather than the elevator, which means he's been awake in the suite.
Weston Blackwood takes the elevator when he's composed and the stairs when he isn't. His sleeves are pushed up. He has the sketch paper in one hand, folded.
"Iris is not answering my calls," he says.
"How long?" I look at him for a moment.
"Since a few hours ago." He puts the sketch paper on the counter and smoothes it flat with his palm.
"Did you try — "
He looks at me. "I already left a few voicemails."
I think about Iris's shoulders pulling in while she waited for Beckett at the elevator. The breath she took when he wasn't in the room.
I close the overnight file. "Give me five minutes to hand over."
He nods and picks up the sketch paper.
After I pick up my jacket and change my top, we take his car. I buckle in, and he pulls out of the parking lot.
Neither of us says anything for the first two blocks. It isn’t uncomfortable. He drives, while I watch the city slide past my window. We’re both turning the problem over in our heads.
"She mentioned the portfolio review," he says. “The call dropped before I could…" He stops. His jaw moves once. "She's been excited about that work."
"I bet she is."
"She hasn't been that way about anything since she came home." His hands shift on the wheel. "I didn't push. And then the photography happened, and she finally seemed like herself, and now…"
"Weston."
He stops.
"We'll find her," I say.
We look at the road. The streetlights thin out as we leave downtown, and I don't say anything else because sometimes the most useful thing is to sit in the car and let the person next to you relax.
We check three places in the first hour.
A coffee shop on the east side where Iris goes when she wants to draw without anyone knowing where she is — empty of her.
A gallery on Benefit Street, closed now, the woman locking up knowing Iris by name and not having seen her today.
A park near the water where she used to go in high school.
We walk it in the cold, just the two of us.
Weston is controlled during all of this. The effort shows in the set of his shoulders. He asks questions at each place with his voice level and his face open. He doesn't let himself think too far ahead until he has more information.
We get back to the car after the park.
I reach for the handle. His hand lands over mine on it, and for a second, neither of us moves.
His palm is warm, the weight of it settling over my fingers. His fingers are sitting over mine without closing deliberately, just there. The cold air is still, and the gravel under our feet is quiet.
One beat. Maybe two.
He lifts his hand and opens the door.
Getting in, I buckle the seatbelt and watch the road ahead, avoiding his gaze as he climbs into the other side. Neither of us looks at the other as he starts the car and pulls out.
My hand is on my knee, and I keep it there.
The last of the city gives way to dark storefronts and empty intersections, and somewhere behind my sternum, something has settled that wasn't there before, and I don't examine it. I let it sit.
"There's one more place," he says. "The coastal property. She's been out there twice since construction started. She likes the light in the afternoon because it comes through the framing before the windows go in."
"Does she have access?"
"She has a key."
"Then maybe that's where she is," I say.
He drives.
The property is forty minutes north. As the city falls away, the road narrows, and the coast takes over — gray water between the trees, houses with their shutters closed, summer furniture stacked on porches. I watch it pass by.
The radio is off. There’s only the sound of the road, the heat from the vents, and the silence of two people who’ve already said everything worth saying.
I think about how Beckett behaves toward Iris. I grew up in a house where my dad was just like him.
Victor.
Just the shape of him arriving unbidden. I put it back down and watch the road.
The property sits at the end of a gravel drive, the main structure still in framing, plastic sheeting over the open windows making a low sound in the wind. The lights are off in the temporary site office at the far end — a converted trailer Weston uses when he's working on-site.
He exhales. "I hope she’s here."
I look at him. We park, and he's out crossing the gravel before I've unbuckled. I follow.
The site office door is unlocked. He pushes it open and stands in the frame for a second, and I see his shoulders register it before he says anything — the dark room, the cold radiator, the clean table. Empty.
"She's not here." His voice is flat in the way that costs him something.
He steps inside anyway and looks at the things that would tell him she'd been here recently. A mug in the sink, dry. The chair pushed in. Nothing disturbed since the last time he was on-site himself.
"She has the key," he says. "I don’t think she's been here."
I stand in the doorway and let him look. There's nothing useful I can say.
Pulling out his phone, he tries calling her again. I hear it ring through to voicemail from where I'm standing. He doesn't leave a message this time. He just lowers the phone and stands in the middle of the small, dark room.
"Weston."
He looks at me.
"We've been driving for hours," I say. "We haven't eaten. She's not answering, and we're not going to find her by getting back in the car exhausted and guessing." I keep my voice level. "Let her come to you."
He's quiet. I watch him not like it and accept it anyway.
"Okay." Weston looks at me. "There's a main house here," he says. "It's not finished, but it has a kitchen and heat."
We walk across the gravel to it.
The entry faces east, into the prevailing weather. I step inside and clock it immediately — no covered approach, no overhang, nothing between the door and the open site. Anyone arriving in a real storm gets soaked in the twenty feet between the car and the threshold.
The door faces this direction because the original framing assumed a different access road that got changed during permitting, and nobody moved the entry.
"The door's in the wrong place," I say.
He turns around.
I'm already looking at the angle of the entry relative to the driveway, calculating the weather exposure, and running the fix in my head. Rotate forty-five degrees south, add a short covered approach, the existing frame absorbs it without major structural change.
It's a twenty-minute problem on paper.
"The prevailing weather comes off the water from the east," I say. "Your entry is directly into it. If you rotate it forty-five degrees and extend three feet of covered approach…" I stop.
The look on his face is warm enough that I have to look away first.
"Sorry," I say.
"Don’t apologize for it." Quiet. Plain. “It’s admirable.” He keeps his eyes on me.
I look at the entry.
The site kitchen has two cans of tuna, crackers, and a half-jar of peanut butter. We sit at the small table, eating and talking about Iris — what she said, what she didn’t say, and what the pattern looks like from the outside.
Weston talks. I listen and ask questions when the pauses stretch too long. After a few moments, the formality between us quietly disappears without either of us noticing when it happened.
We sit in the warm house while the coast stretches out beyond the uncovered windows, nothing left in either of us for the performance of distance.
"I missed something with her," he says, looking at the table. "A long time ago, I was so focused on keeping everything running that I stopped looking at what was actually happening."
"You weren't missing it. You were managing everything else."
"That's not an excuse."
"It's not. It's what happened." I look at my hands around the mug. "You can't see everything from where you're standing."
"You saw it."
"I knew what to look for."
He doesn't ask why because he already knows.
"I keep trying to fix things for her," he says. "And it’s the wrong move. I know it is, but I keep making it."
"She knows you love her. You’re her brother."
"Knowing someone loves you doesn't always help if the way they love you looks too much like something else, maybe overprotective." He stops. His jaw works once before he looks up.
There isn't much table between us.
His eyes find mine and stay.
I don't know who moves first. I don't think either of us decides to. The table is between us, and then it isn't.
We’ve both moved without thinking about it. His hand is at my jaw the way it was in the pool, steadying rather than holding. My hands come up to his chest, and I don’t push him away.
We both understand what that means.
He kisses me like someone who’s waited a long time to do it — unhurried, careful, patient. My hands, which have been sensible all evening, find his collar and stay there. His hand leaves my jaw and slides into my hair.
The kitchen is quiet. Outside, the coast does whatever it does in the dark.
The kiss deepens. His other hand comes to my waist, and I lean into him. He feels it and moves closer.
A small sound slips out of me — quiet and involuntary. His mouth is warm and unhurried, and beyond the uncovered windows, the night is dark and still.
I don't step back.
I stay exactly where I am, which is closer to him than I have let myself be to anyone in six years. My hands are at his collar, and his hand is in my hair.
The coast is quiet, and the house is warm, and for the first time since I was eighteen years old, I stop looking for a way out.