Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Cole
Three days since Eileen went into the hospital.
Three days of cafeterias and beeping monitors and the smell of institutional soap that clings to your clothes like it's paid to.
Three days of watching Trevor's profile in the Ford's passenger seat as we drive back and forth between Cembrook Road and Roan General, his jaw doing that thing where it sets so tight the muscle jumps, neither of us talking about what we're both thinking — that Eileen looked smaller each time, and the road keeps getting shorter.
I need air. Something that isn't the hospital or the house or Trevor's hand on the back of my neck in the dark, which is its own kind of torture because it feels so good and I can't afford to want it right now.
So I walk to June's at two in the afternoon, because the diner's the only place in Roan where time works differently, where the clock on the wall says whatever it wants and nobody argues.
August heat presses down like a hot towel laid over my face.
The sidewalks are empty. Smart people are inside with their AC cranked to murder, drinking cheap beer and pretending the temperature isn't a personal insult.
I'm sweating through my shirt before I hit Main Street, the fabric sticking to my back in the way that makes you want to peel your own skin off and hang it on a clothesline.
June's sits at Main and Fourth, neon buzzing even in daylight, the front windows fogged from the AC fighting a losing war with the heat.
I push through the door and the cold hits like a fist. Goosebumps up my arms. My shirt instantly clammy.
Half-full — a couple of old-timers at the counter nursing coffee they've been nursing since breakfast, a table of construction guys in the back arguing about something that involves a lot of hand gestures and not much volume.
And then I see her.
Tally. Corner booth by the window. Jacket zipped to her chin in ninety-eight degrees with the AC set to arctic.
Her lank brown hair hangs over her face like a curtain she's drawn closed.
One hand around a coffee mug, the other tucked under the table where I can't see it.
Not drinking. Just holding. The mug's been there long enough the coffee's gone cold, and cold coffee at June's tastes like motor oil filtered through a gym sock, so her not drinking it tells me everything I need to know about her state of mind.
She hasn't seen me. Her eyes are on the table, or the wall, or some middle distance that doesn't contain other people. I cross the diner in six strides and slide in across from her before she can bolt.
She goes rigid. Full-body. Like someone ran a current through the vinyl. Her fingers tighten on the mug until the knuckles go white. Her eyes cut to the door — once, fast, a woman who's memorized her exit routes — then back to me. Her jaw sets.
"Five minutes," I say. Low. The diner's not loud, but low voices travel less, and I don't need the construction guys hearing this. "That's all. Whatever you know. It could help someone. Could help Hannah."
Her head shakes. Short, jerky. Left-right, left-right, like her neck's on a spring wound too tight. "No." Bitten off. "I'm done. I don't know anything. I told you that."
"Tally." I lean in. Not crowding — closing distance. The table's narrow, Formica scarred from twenty years of silverware and coffee rings, and when I lean, the distance shrinks to nothing. "You came to me. You set the meeting. You had something. Something about Voss, the lakehouse—"
She shoves back. The chair legs scrape the linoleum — sharp enough that both old-timers turn their heads and one of the construction guys pauses mid-gesture.
She's on her feet, jacket pulled tight, her free hand braced on the table edge like she's holding herself up.
Her eyes are wide. Not scared — furious.
The kind of furious that lives right next to terrified and sometimes borrows its clothes.
"Don't." Barely above a whisper, but it carries. Hard-edged. A woman who's hit her limit and is done being polite about it. "I'll call the cops on you. I swear to God I will."
Something cold settles in my chest. Not surprise — recognition. The feeling when a pattern you've been tracking snaps into focus and the picture's worse than you thought. I go still. Hands flat on the table. Don't move. Let the silence work.
"Why are you scared of me?" Flat. Quiet.
Stripped of the heat I walked in with. "You came to me first, Tally.
You called. You set the meeting. Now you're sitting in a diner in August in a winter jacket, threatening to call the cops because I asked for five minutes.
Something changed. Tell me what changed. "
It cracks something. I watch it — the rigid line of her jaw softening, hardening again, her eyes going wet and furious at once, a woman too angry to cry and too scared not to. She leans in, just far enough that the next words land between us like something dropped from a height.
"An officer came to my door." A hiss. The kind that lives in basements and back alleys and the corners of small towns where bad things happen and nobody talks about them.
"Two days after I talked to you. Told me Cole Marek was a troublemaker.
Said I shouldn't do business with you. Said it would go badly for me if I did.
" She pulls back. Tugs the jacket tighter like she's trying to vanish inside it.
"I've got nothing for you. I never did."
She's moving before the last word fully lands.
Out of the booth, around the table, across the floor in quick clipped steps that say run without running.
The door swings. The bell jingles. August heat pours in for three seconds before it settles, and then she's gone, and I'm sitting in a vinyl booth with a half-empty mug in front of me and the weight of what she just said pressing on my chest.
The diner breathes around me. The overhead fan clicks — that uneven tick it's had since I was a kid eating grilled cheese at the counter while Wade drank his coffee black and talked to no one.
The construction guys have gone back to their argument, quieter now, like they've sensed something and decided discretion's the better part of not getting involved.
One old-timer clears his throat. The other adjusts his hat.
Behind the counter, June's watching. Dish towel in her hands, gone still.
Has been still. Her eyes on me — not judging, not concerned, just watching with the focus of a woman who's seen enough in this town to know when something's happened and is filing it away.
She doesn't speak. The look says enough.
I sit there. Tally's coffee is cold, a film skinned over the surface. I push it away. Pull out a five, set it beside the mug. More than the coffee costs. Less than what I owe.
It wasn't a coincidence. That's the thing that lands, that turns my stomach from cold to something worse.
Tally shutting down. Brenda's door slamming.
Every witness I've gotten close to in two years has had a door closed in their face, and I've told myself it was paranoia, small-town caution, the arithmetic of fear that runs when the people supposed to protect you are the ones you're most afraid of.
But it's not paranoia. Someone in the department knows exactly what I've been doing. Knows which doors I knock on. Knows which witnesses might talk. And they're running interference — steering people off, closing doors before I can get a foot in, cutting every thread before I can pull it.
I'm being watched.
And the thing underneath that, the thing I don't want to look at: an officer at Tally's door two days after she met me at this diner.
Which means they knew about the meeting.
Which means somewhere between her sliding me that note and now, someone clocked it.
The break-in flashes through my head — the night the garage got tossed, the can off its ring, the notebook out of true — and for a second the old cold certainty rears up, they were in my house.
Then I remember it was Trevor. Just Trevor.
Which should be a relief and isn't, because it means the watching is subtler than a break-in.
It's quieter. It's people. It's a badge at a door, two days after, every time.
I get up. The vinyl sticks to the backs of my thighs. I nod at June — once, sharp, the kind that says I'm fine and we both know I'm lying — and push through the door into the flat August heat.
The sun hits like a slap. My shirt, still damp, clings again. Main Street stretches empty both directions, storefronts dark, lights cycling for nobody. Somewhere a dog barks. Somewhere an engine turns over and fades.
I start walking. One foot in front of the other. The heat presses down. Roan presses down. The weight of being watched presses down, and I carry it all the way back to Cembrook Road, because carrying is what I do, and right now it's the only move I've got.
Scene 2
The screen door whines when I push it open.
The house breathes around me — empty in the way only a house with a sick person in it can be empty, like the walls are holding the shape of someone who isn't there and the holding's costing them.
No concentrator hissing. No Eileen in her chair by the window.
Just the kitchen clock ticking and the refrigerator humming and the weight of a house too quiet for its own good.
Trevor's at the counter, leaning against it with a glass of water, still in his work shirt — the gray button-up he wears when he's doing something with his hands, sleeves rolled, the fabric dark between his shoulder blades.
He turns when the door closes. Doesn't speak.
Just looks at me, and whatever he sees makes his jaw set before he's decided to set it.
I drop my keys on the counter. They clatter, too loud for the quiet.