Chapter 11 #2
"But she might open to you." I cross my arms. Chin up.
Pitching it hard because I need him to say yes and I won't ask twice.
Shoulders back, the stance of a man who's decided vulnerability is a luxury he can't afford, especially not in a kitchen where the man across the table fucked him twelve hours ago and hasn't mentioned it.
"A stranger. A veteran. Someone without my reputation in this town.
Someone people open doors for instead of slamming them. "
Trevor's eyes lift from the page. Find mine. Dark, almost black in this light, going very still, very focused, like he's reading something in fine print on the back of my skull.
"What does she know?" Low. Flat. Stripped of last night's heat, replaced with something colder, tactical — and the shift should be a relief but it isn't. It's worse, because tactical Trevor is the Trevor I can work with, and working with Trevor means standing in the same room without putting my hands on him, and putting my hands on him is currently my default state of being.
"Enough to matter." I uncross my arms just to cross them again, a useless adjustment that does nothing but give my hands something to do besides reach for him.
"She pushed back. Nobody else did. The Marshes accepted the story.
Hannah's parents are... complicated. But Brenda fought.
Until she didn't. Something made her stop. Something or someone."
"Will she talk?"
"Not to me." It's out before I can stop it, and the next words come faster, bitten off at the edges. "Maybe to you. The service record. The medal. The exemplary citizen."
The bite lands. I feel it the second it leaves my mouth — the sour taste of a low blow thrown with precision, aimed where it does the most damage, because Trevor's service is the one thing about him that's never been complicated, and I just used it as a weapon, and the worst part is I meant to, and I hate myself for it with a clarity that's almost physical.
Trevor sinks. Not much — a fractional drop of the shoulders, a tightening around the eyes — but I catch it.
I always catch it. Ten years of studying Trevor Hollander's face from distances that were never quite safe has left me fluent in his tells, and it's not a fluency I can unlearn.
He says nothing. Just stands there with his hand on the mug and his eyes on the page and the weight of what I said sitting between us.
A beat. The fan turns. Down the hall the concentrator hisses, and the sound fills the silence in a way that makes it heavier.
Trevor picks up the page. Reads it again. Sets it down. Turns to the hook by the door where his jacket hangs — canvas, olive drab, the kind of jacket that belongs on a man who knows how to use his hands for something other than leaving bruises on his stepbrother's shoulders.
He pulls his wallet, flips it, checks the veteran's ID is there. Pockets it. Doesn't look at me when he speaks.
"I'll go this morning."
Three words. Flat. Delivered like a compass bearing, not like agreeing to walk into a stranger's house and ask about the sister she watched disappear four years ago.
No hesitation. No conditions. Just I'll go, and the simplicity of it lands in my chest with everything else that's landed there today.
I let my arms drop. Trevor Hollander is putting on a jacket to talk to a woman who slammed a door in my face, because he's the kind of man people open doors for and I'm the kind they slam them on, and the difference between those two men is about six feet of kitchen floor and twenty years of history, and neither distance is one I know how to close.
"112 Dellard," I say. "East side, past the water tower.
Small blue house, chain-link fence." One instruction.
The only one that matters. "Don't push her.
Don't mention my name. Don't lead with the investigation.
Let her get there herself. If she's going to talk, she'll talk.
If she's not, nothing you say changes it, and pushing just makes her shut down harder. "
Trevor nods. Once. Sharp. Marine affirmative — the kind of yes that doesn't need elaboration, because his mind was made up somewhere between my pitch and the wallet check, and the speed of his decisions is one of the things I've always hated about him and one of the things I've always needed.
He pulls on the jacket. The canvas rustles. He takes the keys off the counter and heads for the door. Boots on linoleum. Shoulders straight under the olive drab, the marks hidden now, which is its own relief and its own loss.
I watch his back cross the kitchen. The broad shoulders, the straight spine, the way Trevor occupies a doorway like he's measuring whether the frame can handle what's coming through it.
He doesn't look back. Doesn't pause. Doesn't do any of the things a person might do if they were having second thoughts — about the door he's going to knock on, or about what happened against a workbench twelve hours ago and went unmentioned.
The screen door opens. The hinges whine.
It settles behind him with a click that feels too final for a Monday morning, and then he's gone, and the kitchen is just a kitchen again — cluttered, close, dishes in the rack, coffee cooling in two mugs that belong to two men who can't be in the same room without everything catching fire.
I sit. My hands find the edges of the Brenda Coyle page and hold it flat against the wood, like I'm worried it might leave too.
Outside, the Ford starts. The engine turns over with a rumble that carries through the screen, and I listen to it pull away — gravel under tires, the sound fading down Cembrook toward town, toward Dellard Street, toward a blue house with a chain-link fence and a woman who shut a door in my face two years ago and might, if the day's feeling generous, open it for Trevor.
I hope she opens it. I hope she talks. I hope he comes back with something we can use, because the case needs it and Hannah needs it and sitting in this kitchen with cold coffee and the ghost of Trevor Hollander low in my hips is not a sustainable strategy for anything but losing my mind.
The page stays flat under my palms. Brenda Coyle. 112 Dellard Street. Annette's sister. The names don't change. They just sit there in my handwriting, waiting for someone to knock on a door that might open this time, because the person knocking isn't me.