Chapter 13
The Whole Truth, Almost
~
She hadn't decided anything by the time she drove out to the yard three days later, and she told him that the second she got out of the cruiser, because pretending otherwise felt like a worse use of both their time than just saying it plainly.
"I don't know what I'm doing yet," she said. "About the ultimatum. About any of it."
"Didn't expect you to." Silas fell into step beside her, and they walked without any fixed destination in mind, out past the last row of stripped cars to where the fence line gave way to open field and the noise of the shop faded down to almost nothing. "Figured you'd tell me when you knew."
"That's it? No advice?"
"You've had enough people in your life telling you what to do with your father's legacy." He said it without heat, just an observation laid down plain. "I'm not looking to be one more."
They walked a while in the kind of silence that had stopped feeling like something to fill weeks ago, boots crunching over dry grass, the evening going gold and then gray around them.
Somewhere off toward the tree line a dog barked twice and went quiet, and the light had that low, slanted quality that made everything look softer than it probably was, the fence posts throwing shadows twice their own height across the field.
She was aware, walking beside him, of how easily her stride had matched his without either of them adjusting for it, the kind of unthinking synchrony that usually took people years to build and that they seemed to have found somewhere in the last month without either of them noticing it happen.
She found herself, unprompted, wanting to give him something in return for the space he'd just handed her.
"I keep thinking about the manifest," she said. "About Danny Fisk. You told me the shape of it. I don't think you told me all of it."
He didn't answer right away, and she let the silence sit the way she'd learned to, watching him work through whatever calculation he ran every time this door came up between them.
When he finally spoke, his voice had gone rougher than she'd heard it since the night in the office with the laptop and the hand she'd covered with her own.
"I was two minutes away," he said. "That night.
Danny called it in as routine, same as it was supposed to be — pick up a package from a contact the old leadership had been dealing with for a year, nothing that should've needed backup.
I was riding parallel, close enough to reach him fast if something went sideways, because something in my gut didn't like the setup even though I couldn't have told you why at the time.
By the time I heard him yell, I was ninety seconds out.
By the time I got there, it was already over. "
"Silas—"
"I've run that ninety seconds a thousand times since.
Different route, different speed, leaving five minutes earlier instead of telling myself I was being paranoid for even riding parallel in the first place.
" He kept his eyes on the horizon, not on her, the way a man looked at something safer to hold onto than the person standing next to him while he said this.
"The old president made the call to send him alone.
I'm the one who let it happen anyway, because I trusted a chain of command I already half suspected wasn't telling me the whole truth about who we were actually dealing with.
Took the gavel from him myself eight months later, once enough of the club saw plainly what his carelessness had cost us.
Been trying to make sure nobody makes that mistake again ever since. "
"That's not the same as killing him."
"Feels the same most nights." He finally looked at her, and whatever careful control he usually kept over his own face had slipped enough that she could see exactly how much this had cost him to say out loud, twice now in the span of a week, after fifteen years of saying none of it to anyone.
"I don't tell people that story to be forgiven for it.
I tell it because you asked, and because I decided somewhere back at that depot that you'd earned better from me than the version the rest of this town gets. "
She reached for his hand without fully deciding to, and he let her take it, his fingers closing around hers with a careful, deliberate pressure that felt like its own kind of answer.
"My father used to tell me the world only made sense if you could sort everyone into two columns," she said, after a while.
"Good and bad. Law and outlaw. He wasn't a cruel man, he just — needed the sorting to hold, I think, because the alternative was admitting how much of his life he'd spent chasing shadows he couldn't actually prove were there.
" She looked down at their joined hands, small and strange and unlike anything she'd let herself want in longer than she could remember.
"I built my whole idea of you off his two columns.
I'm not sure anymore they were ever the right shape for sorting anything. "
"That scare you?"
"Terrifies me." She said it honestly, because honesty seemed to be the only currency that had ever actually worked between them.
"I don't know how to be the daughter who finishes his case and the woman standing in a field holding your hand at the same time.
I don't know if those are even the same job anymore. "
"Maybe they were never supposed to be two different ones."
She let that settle, walking beside him in the last of the light, and felt something in her chest loosen that had been clenched tight for three years without her ever quite naming what it was.
It wasn't relief, exactly. It was closer to the feeling of setting down something heavy she hadn't realized she'd been carrying with both arms the whole time, only to discover her shoulders remembered the shape of the weight even after her hands were empty.
"There's a warehouse," she said finally, steering them back toward the thing that had brought her out here in the first place, because some part of her needed the solid ground of the case before she let herself sit any longer in the unsteadier ground of everything else.
"County Public Works annex off Route 9. Meridian Point's shipping records route through a contractor code that traces back to a lease the county holds on that building.
If the manifest's real cargo is moving anywhere permanent, that's where. "
"Then we go look. Carefully. Daylight, backup, the way we should've done the depot."
"Agreed." She held onto his hand a moment longer than the conversation strictly required, and neither of them commented on it. "Silas. One more thing."
"Yeah."
"What happened the night my father died.
" She said it quietly, no accusation in it, just the plain shape of a question she'd been circling for three weeks and could no longer walk past. "You know something.
I've known you know something since the day I walked through that gate.
I'm not asking you to hand it over before you're ready.
I'm asking you to tell me there's an answer coming. "
He was quiet long enough that the silence itself became unbearable, and when he finally spoke his voice had gone low and careful, threaded through with something that sounded almost like grief.
"There's an answer coming," he said. "I'm not ready to give it to you tonight."
"Okay," she said, and made herself mean it, though the not-knowing sat in her chest like a stone the whole drive home.