Page 97 of In the Dark of the Past

“I’m not asking you to stop wanting to,” I said. “I’m asking you to keep from acting on it. Those are different things.”

He nodded. Slowly. It was the nod of someone filing something away carefully because they intend to actually use it.

We finished our coffee.

Outside, the wind had come up. I could hear it in the pine stand behind the house, that low, rushing sound like the trees were all exhaling at once.

“I’m staying tonight,” I said.

“I figured,” he said.

“Same reason as before. I need to be somewhere that isn’t my parents’ house and isn’t a hotel.”

“I get it,” he said again. And then, quieter, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Not I’m glad you came back. Not an emphasis on the return. Just, I’m glad you’re here. Present tense. Right now.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

The mugs were still on the table.

I wasn’t sure which of us moved first. I didn’t think it mattered. What I remembered was the quality of it. Not like the first time, which had been slow and careful, two people handling something fragile. This was different. This was two people who had just told each other the truth about where they stood and were still here, still in the same kitchen, still reaching.

That was the thing I kept coming back to, even in the middle of it. That we were both still here.

I hadn’t forgiven him. I’d said so and meant it, and he’d heard it and hadn’t tried to argue. What was happening now wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t even comfort, exactly, though there was some of that in it, too. It was closer to I see you. You see me. We know where we stand, and we’re standing here anyway.

The anger was still in the room. That didn’t leave. But it shifted to make space, the way it did when you’d given it its due and it was satisfied with being acknowledged rather than acted upon.

Finn was careful with me in the way he’d been careful before, but it read differently now. Before, careful had meant giving me room to stop things from progressing. Now, it meant something else. It meant I know what you told me, and I’m not going to pretend you didn’t. It was the attentiveness of a man who understood that this wasn’t absolution and wasn’t trying to make it into one.

At some point, he said my name.

I said his back.

What followed wasn’t neat. Nothing was resolved. But it was honest, which was the thing I’d told him I needed. And it was chosen, which was the thing I’d told myself I needed. And when it was over, we lay in the dark and didn’t try to make it into more than it was.

That was enough. That was exactly right.

The anger would still be there in the morning. So would we.

I lay awake for a while after, listening to Finn breathe in the dark.

I wasn’t anxious. Wasn’t running through the case. Wasn’t obsessing about what had just happened. Just awake like you get when too much has happened in a day to fully close off from it, and your mind kept returning to certain moments the way a tongue returned to a sore tooth.

My father hadn’t done it.

My mother had known.

I thought about what she’d written at the bottom of the first page.

The Watchers were never the top of the chain.

We’d confirmed that at the quarry. Grant. Sean. The hierarchy above Jordyn, above the masks and the painted eyes and the knives in the dark. But there was still more. The letter had said so. Someone with the authority to bury cases was in on it. Someone who had been doing it for years.

We had the quarry recording. We had the tripwire log. We had Jordyn, who was rattled enough that the right conversation might crack her open. We had the chain from Jordyn to Grant to Sean, and we had Sean’s admission recorded on Finn’s phone.

We had enough to start.