Page 98 of Carry on Wayward Son

That was the story. I saw it settle into him as he said it, saw him commit to it, and I understood without asking that it was the story all four of us would tell, identically, for the rest of our lives. Bless them. Bless every one of them.

Layla’s hand clamped suddenly on my arm, her head coming up. “Koa. They shot Koa⁠—”

“A dart. Just a dart.” I caught her face in my hand, made her look at me. “He’s okay. He’s coming out of it. He’s back at Sutter House. Willa’s got him. He’s okay.”

The relief that poured through her was so total it nearly took her legs, and I held her up through it.

Then she straightened again, her hands tightening on me, and I watched something shift in her. The investigator surfaced through the survivor, the mind that never fully stopped working even now.

“Halston confessed,” she said. “All of it. He’s behind the trafficking. Piggybacked on the drug running, exactly like Daniel thought. It was his father’s operation first— the drugs, the routes, all of it— and Halston built the trafficking on top of it. Edging out whoever was running a smaller ring before. He’s taking the whole thing over now that Edmund’s stepping back. There were others. Before me and after. But I was the first of Halston’s.” Her voice was steady now, urgent, the words coming clearly. “There might be records here. Contacts. Something.”

“We’ll get your statement,” Rios said. “And we’ll take this house apart board by board.”

“You need to call the FBI.” She looked at him, intent. “Not local, not the SBI. You said yourself that you don’t know how far the corruption goes. Ask for Special Agent Ned Cushley. He handled my original case. He’s clean. He’s safe. Start with him.”

“Cushley,” Rios repeated, fixing it. “I’ll see it done. Tonight.”

“In the meantime.” I tightened my arm around her, taking some of her weight, because now that the urgency was draining out of her, I felt how unsteady she really was. “We’re getting you checked out. Gabi will meet us at the clinic.”

“I’m fine⁠—”

“You’ve got a head wound, and you’ve been drugged, and you’re shaking so hard you can barely stand.” I pressed my lips gently to her temple, to the dried blood there. “Let me take care of you. Just this once. Let me.”

She looked up at me, hazel eyes clear now, no contacts, nothing hidden, just her. And after a moment, she nodded.

I got her out of that room and away from the body on the floor. Out through the glass house where Sawyer and Ford were holding the exits, and into the night, and I didn’t let go of her the whole way.

Fifty

LAYLA

“Can you please state your name for the record?”

Eyes on the recorder set in the middle of the table between me and two federal agents, I took a breath.

“Gwen Busby.”

Two words. I’d spent the better part of my adult life making sure those two words never left my mouth, building a whole person around their absence, and now I’d said them into a recorder that would turn them into a file, and the file would go into a system, and the system would use them to finally open what had never been properly opened. My name. My old name. The one I’d buried at sixteen to stay alive, spoken out loud in an official capacity, on the record, true.

The agent asked me to confirm it. To state for the record that I was the individual reported missing from Hatterwick Island, that I was alive, and that I was giving this statement of my own free will.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m Gwen Busby. I’m alive.”

I didn’t fall apart saying it. I’d thought I might. For years the idea had lived in me as a kind of seam, the place where Layla Murphy was stitched over Gwen Busby, and I’d imagined that if I ever pulled the thread, the whole thing would come apart, and I wouldn’t know who was left standing.

But I didn’t come apart.

I said her name, and I was still here, still myself, still the woman who’d built a life on Orcas and trained her body into a weapon and loved a dog trained in French and fallen for a man who’d broken a neck to keep me breathing. Saying Gwen Busby out loud didn’t erase any of that. It just stopped the pretending she was dead.

I’d been splitting myself in two for so long I’d forgotten I was doing it, the constant low effort of keeping the two halves apart. I was done with that now. Layla Murphy carried Gwen Busby’s history and always would. They were the same person. They’d always been the same person. And I was finished hiding one of them in order to be the other.

I gave them everything after that. Halston’s confession, word for word, as much as I could recall, which was nearly all of it. The operation. Edmund. The drug routes and the trafficking built on top of them. The proof-of-concept I’d been, and the others who’d come after. I laid the whole thing out flat and clear and complete, the way I’d laid out a hundred stories that belonged to other people. Except this one was mine, and saying it to people who would act on the information felt like setting down something I’d been carrying so long I’d stopped feeling the weight until it was gone.

I took them through the story three times as they checked for inconsistencies and pressure tested my statement. When I finished, they thanked me and told me they’d need more, and that there’d be a long road ahead. I knew there would be. I’d walked enough of these roads to understand exactly how long they ran.

Then they opened the door, and my father was standing in the hall.

My real father. The one who’d chosen me. He’d dropped everything and crossed the country to be here, and he stood in the hallway of the island police station in a shirt rumpled from travel, with his face doing the thing his face did when he was holding too much feeling for the space available. I crossed the distance between us, and he caught me the way he’d been catching me since I was sixteen years old.