Chapter Eight
Damon
He found Thomas Ridley's last known address within an hour of returning to his office the next morning — a modest house in Poughkeepsie, thirty minutes from Ashcombe, purchased in cash six months after the fire with a sum that, cross-referenced against Ridley's known salary history, should not have existed.
Elena sat across from him at his desk, going through the property records with the same unhurried precision she brought to everything, and said, without looking up, "He didn't retire. He was paid to disappear."
"That's what it looks like."
"That's what it is, Damon." She finally looked up, and something in her face had gone careful, the look of someone about to say something they weren't sure the other person was ready to hear.
"This isn't just about your father anymore.
This is about a man who worked in your house for fifteen years, who held you back from a fire, and who was paid to go quiet about it and never come back.
Whoever's behind Concord had people inside Ashcombe. People your family trusted."
Damon set down the property records and looked out his office window at the city he'd spent ten years building an empire over, and felt something in his chest that was less grief now and more a cold, precise fury he hadn't allowed himself to feel since the week of the funeral, because fury, unlike grief, demanded action, and for nine years he had not known what action to take.
Now he did.
"I want to talk to him," Damon said.
"Damon—"
"Not through lawyers. Not through Anya's people, not yet.
I want to sit across from Thomas Ridley myself and ask him what he saw that night, and I want to watch his face while he answers, because I have spent nine years assuming I already knew the worst thing that ever happened to my family, and I am no longer certain that's true. "
Elena was quiet a moment, studying him with the steady attention that had, somewhere in the last week, become the single thing he looked forward to most in any given day.
"Then I'm coming with you," she said. "Not because you need protecting.
Because you shouldn't have to hear whatever he says alone, and because four days ago you sat across from me and told me the truth about your family with nothing to gain from it, and I'm not going to let you go looking for the rest of that truth by yourself. "
Something in Damon's chest — the same something that had cracked in her doorway five nights ago, the something he'd been carefully failing to name ever since — opened further, and he found himself reaching across the desk to take her hand before he'd fully decided to do it.
"Thank you," he said, and meant it more completely than he'd meant anything in years.
Elena
They drove up to Poughkeepsie the next afternoon in a car Anya had insisted on providing, armored, unmarked, driven by a man Anya trusted with her own life, and Elena spent the hour watching the city give way to the Hudson Valley's autumn color and thinking, not for the first time that week, about how strange it was that four days ago her biggest concern had been whether her grandmother's care facility would approve the extended payment plan, and now she was riding upstate in a bulletproof car to interrogate a man about a nine-year-old murder disguised as an accident.
She looked at Damon, silent beside her, watching the trees blur past with an intensity that told her he was somewhere else entirely — back at Ashcombe, probably, back in bare feet on a lawn watching a wing of his childhood home collapse.
"Hey," she said quietly, and waited until his eyes found hers. "Whatever he tells us. It doesn't undo what you've built since. You know that, right?"
Something moved through his face — not quite a smile, but close, the ghost of one.
"I'm not sure I believed that until I met you," he admitted.
"I've spent nine years believing that everything I built was a way of surviving what happened to them.
I hadn't considered that it might also just be — mine.
Separate from the grief. Worth something on its own. "
"It is," Elena said, and reached over to take his hand, resting on the seat between them, and Damon turned his palm up to meet hers the way he had that first night, holding on like something in him had finally stopped bracing for the ground to disappear.
The house, when they reached it, was modest and well-kept, a single-story ranch with a garden gone slightly wild for autumn, and the man who answered the door — seventy now, gray-haired, stooped in a way age alone didn't fully explain — went the color of old paper the moment he saw who was standing on his porch.
"Mr. Castellan," Thomas Ridley said, and his voice shook on the second syllable of the name. "I always knew this day would come. I just hoped I'd be dead before it did."