Page 118 of In the Dark of the Past

“He didn’t know your name was on the list,” Finn said, looking at the mug. Not at me. “Or he said he didn’t. He knew there was a list but didn’t make sure he knew who was on it.”

“That’s a meaningful distinction,” I said. “But not an exonerating one.”

“No,” Finn agreed. “It isn’t.”

He finally looked up.

“I gave him twenty-four hours. Told him to get a lawyer. One not county-connected. Voluntary cooperation with the AG or face what comes when we file at nine.”

“What do you think he’ll do?”

Finn was quiet for a moment. “I think he’ll call a lawyer,” he said finally. “I think he’s been waiting for someone to give him a reason that felt like enough. Whether that’s the same thing as doing the right thing…” He trailed off. “I don’t know.”

“It might have to be enough,” I said. “For now.”

He nodded, and then he set the coffee down and came to where I was standing, putting his hands on the sides of my face the way he did when he needed to say something he didn’t have words for. I let him. I curled my hands around his wrists and waited.

He didn’t say anything, just pressed his forehead to mine for one moment, breathing.

Then, he said, “Let’s go file.”

Atlas drove us to the county records office. Finn’s suspension order from the state board would likely arrive sometime this morning, and we needed to be out of the department’s official channels before it did. The AG’s regional office was twenty miles east, and Atlas had the number and a contact name from a case three years ago, back when he still had a badge and worked on a case from Boston. Finn had the evidence bags from the annex, the printed photos, and the quarry recording copied to a thumb drive.

I sat in the back seat and watched the town go by.

Maple Ridge at nine in the morning looked the same as it always had. The coffee shop on Main, the hardware store, the civic center with the plaque on the wall. The library where my father used to take me Saturday mornings, where I’d learned to read in a chair near the window that caught the light a particular way.

The same town. Different knowledge.

Finn made the call to the AG’s office from the parking lot while Atlas and I waited. He was on for twelve minutes. When he got back into the truck, his face had the quality of a man who had just transferred something heavy to a stronger set of hands and was not yet sure how he felt about his arms being empty.

“They’re sending someone,” he said. “Today. They want originals and the cooperating witness statement.”

“Jordyn’s already written hers,” Atlas said.

“I know. I told them.” Finn looked at the building across the lot. “They asked about Sean.”

“What did you say?”

“That he had until nine tomorrow, and I had reason to believe he’d use it.”

He didn’t say whether that was true, and I didn’t ask.

Afterward, we drove back to Finn’s house and waited.

Waiting was, in my professional opinion, one of the hardest things a person could do. Not because of the absence of activity—people were generally better at tolerating inactivity than they believed—but because of the way of the waiting when the outcome mattered. When you had done everything you could do, and the next move belonged to someone else, and all that was left was to be present in the gap.

I knew this. I knew it theoretically, experientially, and from every clinical hour I’d spent helping people learn to tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into it.

I was not good at it today.

Finn worked. He sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and a yellow legal pad, building the case documentation the way he built everything—methodically and from the bottom up. Atlas made more coffee. I read the same page of a book eleven times, and eventually, closed it and sat on the back porch listening to the pines.

My mother had known about the annex. She had spent years trying to reach it and hadn’t. I had walked in with a tension wrench and my working knowledge of Lucas Grant’s psychology, and I’d been inside in under an hour.

I thought about whether that made me lucky or prepared. Probably both. But neither was sufficient on its own.

I thought about the folder with my name on it. The photograph taken outside the clinic. *Return to Maple Ridge — monitoring active.* Whether the job offer that had brought me back had been genuine, or whether the Watchers had a longer reach than I’d considered. Whether it mattered.