Chapter 30
The Last Door smelled like fog juice when I arrived the next morning, and I stood in the lobby long enough for the familiar air to settle me.
The property manager had called before I arrived.
Trent was barred from Rover Court pending an emergency lease hearing, and an officer would supervise any return for his belongings.
It was ordinary paperwork instead of drama, but it meant I would not find him waiting beside my parking space that night.
Dani took one look at me and set down the schedule she’d been holding. “You look like a woman who got grabbed by a fraudulent wrestler and then had a whole other conversation afterward,” she said. “Which one do you want to talk about first?”
“Neither. I want to reset the sensor in the conductor’s panel, and then I want to talk about neither of those things for at least an hour.”
She gave me an hour. I spent it inside The Night Train with a multimeter and a drifting magnet. The panel did not care about my bruised wrist or Caleb sleeping on my couch. The sensor needed to move six millimeters left. I moved it, the light turned green, and that was that.
I came out of the train car feeling steadier than I had in two days, and Dani was waiting on the bench outside with two coffees, which meant she’d decided the hour was up.
“Okay,” I said, taking mine. “Talk.”
“I want to talk about the thing you did in the parking lot, which was smart, and brave, and I’m proud of you, and I also want you to never do it again.
” She said all of that in the same flat tone, which was how I knew she meant every word of it equally.
“But that’s not actually the thing on my mind this morning. ”
“What’s the thing?”
“The thing is you’ve got that look. The one you get when you’ve decided to solve a person instead of a room.” She sipped her coffee and watched me over the rim of it. “You’re going to go dig up everything you can find on Caleb Rourke, aren’t you?”
I could have lied. “He has a file on me an inch thick, Dani. Public records, my old address, probably my parents’ names, for all I know my dentist. He’s watched me from a parked car for longer than I want to think about. I think I’m allowed to know what’s in a courthouse database about him.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t allowed. I said you’ve got the look.
” She set her cup down on the bench with the precision she used when she was about to say something I wouldn’t enjoy hearing.
“Here’s my actual question, and I want you to sit with it instead of answering it fast the way you answer everything fast. Does it being fair make it right?
Because those aren’t the same thing, and you know they aren’t the same thing, you design rooms around the difference. ”
I did sit with it. That was new, for me, sitting with a question instead of turning it into a joke and moving on before anyone could watch my face do something honest. “It’s not the same,” I admitted.
“If I do this to control him, or to punish him for what he’s already done, that’s different from doing it because I need to understand a man before I hand him the rest of my life.
I think I’m doing the second one. I want to be doing the second one. ”
“That’s the answer I wanted. Not because I checked a box, because you actually thought about it.” Dani picked her coffee back up. “So what are you actually going to do? Because I know you, and knowing you means I know you’ve already started.”
“Public records first. Property, business filings, the PI license itself, which is a matter of public record because Texas requires it to be. Then I’m going to do the thing he did to me, which is just pay attention.
Where he parks. What time he leaves his office.
Whether he eats lunch at the same place twice.
” I heard how it sounded coming out of my own mouth and didn’t flinch from it.
“I’m not going to hide a camera in a plumbing van, Dani.
I’m going to look at things anyone could look at, and I’m going to be honest with him about it after, the same way I was honest with him the day I waved at his sedan. ”
“And if what you find doesn’t match the man on your couch.”
“Then I need to know that too. Especially then.”
“Fine. But hear me say this part out loud, because I want it on the record between us.” Dani leaned forward.
“Public records are public records. That’s one thing.
Sitting outside his office for the third time this week is another thing, and you’re smart enough to know exactly where that line is even when you don’t want to look at it. So look at it anyway.”
“I hear you.”
“I know you hear me. I want to know you’ll listen.”
I spent the afternoon with the county appraisal site on one screen and a legal pad beside me.
Rourke Investigations had been registered four years, the license was current, and the state listed no complaints.
The property search gave me a single-story brick house in Mason Ridge, bought six years earlier.
Nothing dramatic. Just an address he had refused to show me.
That evening I called him, because doing this without telling him would have made me exactly the thing I’d told Dani I wasn’t trying to be.
“I want to see your house,” I said, no preamble, because I’d learned that with Caleb the preamble just gave him time to build a wall around whatever came next.
“Not the address. Not the property record. The actual house, or at least enough of it that I stop feeling like I’m dating a man who lives behind a hallway. ”
The pause on the other end of the line went on a beat too long. “It’s not ready for that,” he said. “The office is a mess of case material I can’t have you near for confidentiality reasons, and the rest of the house isn’t.”
“Isn’t what?”
“Isn’t anything worth showing you yet.”
I let the silence sit there long enough that he’d have to hear it. “That’s the same answer you gave me the first night, Caleb. Word for word, almost. I think you’ve had that sentence loaded for a while.”
“Maybe I have.”
“I’m not angry,” I said, and meant it, mostly.
“I just want you to notice that you gave it to me automatically, before you even thought about whether it was true tonight specifically. It’s not just a locked door.
It’s a reflex that keeps building new locked doors, one after another, and I don’t think you’ve noticed how many you’ve got now. ”
“I don’t know how to let you in without wanting the door back,” he said. It was more answer than he had given before. We said goodnight, and I hung up knowing the problem had finally named itself.
I sat with the address for a long time after that, the cursor blinking in the search bar where I’d typed Mason Ridge and a street name I had no business having, gotten the way anyone could get it. Then I got my keys.
I drove the fifteen minutes with the radio off. His house was the fourth one down, low and square, blackout curtains drawn even before full dark.
I slowed, but I didn’t stop. I let my own ordinary little car roll past at exactly the speed limit, memorizing the porch light and the dark front window and the empty driveway, and then I kept driving, because some doors you don’t walk up to and knock on.
Not yet. Not until you’re sure what you’re going to do once somebody actually opens it.