Page 143 of In the Dark of the Past

She’d sent me into the fight with everything she had. We’d finished it.

I hadn’t found it in time to help her.

That was going to live somewhere in me for a long time. Not as guilt exactly. I understood the logic of it, understood that I’d been young when she was taken and that teenagers didn’t have the resources or the knowledge to dismantle decades-old institutional corruption. I understood it intellectually. The understanding didn’t close the distance between what I’d been able to do and what she’d needed.

But she’d been right about the other thing, too. About doing it with someone you trusted.

I thought about Finn at dawn with his legal pad, running the case through its paces. About Atlas making a third mug of coffee without turning around. About Libby’s hand over mine when the Gazette correction came through. About the Murder of the Month Club crowded into the library basement and the bar’s back room with their phones off, stepping into the roles without blinking.

I hadn’t done this alone. She’d told me not to, and I hadn’t.

I folded the letter back into the envelope. Held it for a moment. Then set it on top of the cedar chest.

I didn’t cry. I got quiet the way I always got quiet, the way that Finn had learned to read as something other than absence. The internal reorganization of a person deciding what to carry and how.

My father had been innocent. My mother had known it. She had gone into that building carrying the proof, and she had kept quiet to keep me safe, and then, she had died there. And now, the man who had directed both of their fates was in federal custody, and his network was being systematically dismantled, and the annex records that she’d been trying to reach were in the AG’s evidence chain.

It wasn’t enough. It was also everything she’d asked for.

Both of those things were true. They were going to stay true. I was going to have to learn to carry them at the same time, the way you carried most real things—not resolved, just integrated.

I heard a car on the gravel outside.

I hadn’t texted him. I also hadn’t told him where I was going. But he knew this house, and he knew what the cedar chest meant, and Finn Callahan had been reading my silences since we were teens.

Footsteps on the stairs. The door opened quietly.

He looked at me on the floor with my back against the bed and the envelope on the cedar chest, and he didn’t ask if I was okay, because he’d gotten very good at understanding when that question was the wrong one.

He came and sat beside me. Back against the bed, shoulder against my shoulder, the same posture.

“All of it?” he said.

“All of it,” I said.

He was quiet. We both were, for a while. The afternoon light continued its slow work across the floor.

“She was right about everything,” I said.

“She was.”

“She told me to do it with someone I trusted.”

I felt him look at me.

“Did you?” he asked. Careful. Not performing careful, actually asking.

“Yes,” I said. “More than once, actually. The whole club.” I paused. “But she meant one person specifically. The way she wrote it—someone to trust, not because you are weak. She knew I’d need the distinction.”

“She knew you well,” he said.

“She did. Even back then.” My voice held steady, which surprised me a little. “She liked you. If she’d known I left Maple Ridge because I was running from something, she’d have been pleased to know I came back to it.”

Finn’s shoulder pressed against mine, very slightly.

“River?”

“Yeah?”