Chapter 36
The thirty-first hour started the way the other thirty had, with me checking my phone at a red light and hating myself for it.
Owen called instead of texting, which should have told me something before he even said hello. Owen was the one who did all of Caleb’s digital work, the quiet, meticulous half of Rourke Investigations who lived behind three monitors and rarely surfaced for anything short of a crisis.
“He hasn’t logged in since yesterday morning,” Owen said, no preamble.
“We had a locate due at ten. He didn’t send it.
He didn’t answer when I called twice. I know he went off grid for a family thing, his father, I think, so I gave him room.
But this is longer than the room I gave him.
I’m not panicking. I want to be clear that I am professionally choosing not to panic.
I thought you should know, since I’m guessing he’s not answering you either. ”
“One text yesterday afternoon. Nothing since.”
“That’s not like him. Even when he’s off the grid he tells me where the grid ends.
” A pause, the sound of him deciding how much to say.
“I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m telling you because you’d want to know, and because if I show up at his house and something’s actually wrong, I need to already know you’d want to be there too. ”
“Has anyone seen his truck?”
“Not since he left the office two days ago. I’ll call the neighbor two doors down, he’s talked to her before, she waters his plants. I’ll call you back if she’s seen anything. Don’t do anything before I call you back.”
I told him I wouldn’t, and I meant it when I said it, and then I sat at the red light thinking about a man alone in a house with a locked office and a father who called with news bad enough to make him disappear, and by the time the light turned green I had already decided the waiting was over.
I called Caleb once, straight to voicemail.
I texted Owen that I was heading to Mason Ridge and to call me the second he heard anything, and I drove with both hands tight on the wheel, running every possible failure at once instead of picking one and solving it.
I knew, driving there, that I might be walking into something worse than an unanswered phone.
I decided to go anyway, and to keep my own phone in my hand the whole time so someone would know where I was if I stopped being able to say so myself.
His house sat quiet at the end of a street lined with the kind of restrained brick homes that looked like nobody had ever raised their voice inside them.
No truck in the driveway. Blackout curtains pulled tight across every window I could see, which told me nothing, because as far as I knew that was simply how he lived.
I knocked. I waited. I knocked again, longer, and called his name at a volume that probably qualified as a decision rather than a knock, and got nothing back except the small mechanical click of a sprinkler head starting up two yards over.
I thought about calling the police for exactly as long as it took me to picture explaining myself to a dispatcher, and then I thought about what would actually be waiting on the other side of that door if something was wrong, an ambulance instead of an officer, and how long either one would take to reach a quiet street like this one.
I already knew I had the skill to know faster than anyone I could call.
I texted Owen where I was and what I was about to do, so that if I was wrong about being alone in there, somebody would know to come looking.
The front door had a deadbolt above a standard pin-and-tumbler, nothing exotic.
I checked the panel through the sidelight glass first and saw the light steady and green, not armed, which meant either he’d left in enough of a hurry to skip it or the front door ran on some delay he trusted more than I wanted to think about.
I had a tension wrench and a rake pick in the zippered pouch I kept in my glove box for exactly this kind of maintenance emergency, and my hands were steadier on the pins than they had any right to be, given how hard my heart was going.
The bolt gave in under a minute. No alarm sounded. I told myself, out loud, standing on his porch with the door easing open under my palm, that I was doing this to confirm he was alive and not doing anything else, and I made myself believe it because it was true.
“Caleb?” My voice went smaller than I wanted it to inside that front hall. Nothing answered.
The living room was clean in a way that had never expected company.
A single leather chair angled toward a bookshelf holding maybe a dozen books, spines even.
No mail on any surface. A go bag sat zipped and upright against the wall near the hallway, the kind of thing you’d pack if leaving fast had once mattered more than leaving comfortable, and I looked at it longer than I meant to.
On the shelf, tucked between two books instead of displayed, I found a photograph.
Caleb, younger, maybe seventeen, arm slung around a girl I recognized as a younger version of the woman I’d seen through a coffee shop window two nights ago.
Rachel. They were both laughing at something outside the frame. It was the only photograph in the room.
I touched nothing. I stood in the middle of his sparse living room with my arms crossed and kept my hands there, refusing to make the trespass any larger than it already was.
There was a second door down the short hallway, closed, and I could feel the pull of it the way you feel a hand at your back near the edge of a pool. I didn’t open it. I stayed where I was, ten feet from a door I had no right to open, and waited.
I heard his truck before I saw it, slowing outside too fast, and I heard the engine cut and the door and his footsteps coming up the walk in a rhythm with nothing patient in it at all.
He came through his own front door already talking. “The bolt was open. I didn’t leave it open.” He crossed to the alarm panel, scanned the window, hallway, and go bag, then saw me. Relief hit first. Fury followed.
“You’re okay,” I said. “I needed to know you were okay.”
“You picked my lock.” His voice had gone flat and hard. “You broke into my house.”
“I knocked first. I called your name. Owen hasn’t heard from you in over a day, Caleb, and neither had I, not really, not since one line from your truck yesterday afternoon.
I didn’t know if you were hurt, or if your father had done something, or if you were in here needing somebody and too proud to say so. I made a choice. I’d make it again.”
“That’s not the same as what I do.” He said it like a man grabbing for a rope he already suspected was fraying. “I watch from outside. I don’t come in.”
“You came into my apartment, Caleb. You fixed my window latch before you ever told me your name. You’ve stood in my kitchen and called it the start of something real between us, and I let it be that, because I decided I wanted it to be.
But you don’t get to walk through my locked door and call it love, and then walk in here and call the exact same act a violation, just because this time it’s your door, your walls, your one photograph nobody’s allowed to ask about.
” My voice was climbing and I let it. “I’m not saying what I did tonight doesn’t count.
It does. I crossed a line to get in here, and I know it.
What I won’t accept is you telling me your privacy matters more than mine ever did. ”
He stood very still. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Maybe it isn’t identical. I was scared for you, not curious about you, and that’s a real difference.
But it doesn’t change what I need you to hear.
You don’t get to keep every door in your life locked to me and then decide, alone, which of my doors you’re allowed to walk through because you’ve judged it necessary.
” I uncrossed my arms. “I didn’t open that door.
” I nodded down the hall. “I didn’t touch your files.
I didn’t go looking for anything you didn’t leave sitting out where a person walking through a room might see it.
I came because I was scared for you, and I found a house that’s ready for every emergency except the one where somebody loves you and needs to know you’re alive. ”
“You were afraid, and you still chose for me,” he said. “You don’t get to make that clean because you found something true in here. I did it to you. You know exactly why it isn’t clean.”
“You’re right. It isn’t clean. I crossed the line.” I picked up my bag. “But I’m not staying here while you use my mistake to avoid looking at your own.”
“Josie.”
“Here’s what’s true right now. I’m not asking you to watch me, or follow me, or park anywhere, until I tell you I want that again.
I need that to be mine to give, not something you decide for both of us because you’ve convinced yourself you know what keeps me safe better than I do.
” I said it evenly. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.
I need you to actually let that be true, and not show up outside my building because waiting feels unbearable. Can you do that?”
He didn’t answer fast enough, and I let the silence sit there between us instead of filling it for him, and I let myself out through the door I’d opened without his permission.
That night I closed every curtain in my apartment. For the first time since the plumbing van arrived, not knowing whether anyone watched was mine to carry, not his to manage.