Chapter 2
Audrey's POV
He didn't ask. He just picked up my suitcase.
Not the carrier — he left that in my hands, like he'd already understood it wasn't something to take. Just the luggage, and then a slight shift of his body that put his shoulder between me and the nearest camera lens.
I didn't move.
Henry. I looked back at the open front door. The gap between agents. Nobody coming through it.
"Henry hasn't come out yet."
"He needs to stay." The tone he used could have been reading a weather report. "There are things here he has to handle."
I knew I should let that go. I stood there for two seconds with a response ready, then swallowed it. Because what would I actually argue? That I needed him? That I couldn't do this without one more familiar face?
He never made promises he couldn't keep. My mother's voice, from somewhere I hadn't opened in years.
I thought of her at the kitchen window. Morning light, pruning shears, the white roses she grew along the sill that she said were too high-maintenance but couldn't stop tending. Her profile turned away, that particular stillness she had when she was deciding whether to say the next thing out loud.
I'd asked her once why we never visited her family. She was quiet for so long I thought she wasn't going to answer.
Some family members aren't meant to live under the same roof, she said. That's just how it is with some people.
But she never used that voice when she talked about Gabriel. The tone was different — lighter, with something almost exasperated underneath it, like remembering a person who had a talent for being inconvenient and endearing at the same time. He was so stubborn as a kid, you have no idea. He never said yes to anything unless he meant it.
If there's ever a day I'm not there, and you don't know who to trust—
She'd said it once. I'd filed it under the category of things adults said to cover hypotheticals they didn't actually believe would happen. Every parent said things like that. Insurance against a future they were sure would never arrive.
I knew now that she'd been sure it would.
I went after him.
I caught his sleeve — not his hand, just the fabric of his coat, somewhere near the cuff — and held on. He looked down at where I'd grabbed him.
"Gabriel." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. I tried again. "Uncle Gabriel."
The word felt strange in my mouth. But it was also the only thing I had that made this real — that made him a person I was supposed to trust and not just a stranger who'd gotten out of a car and said my name.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he adjusted his position so I was walking in the space between him and the man in the black jacket, both of them angled outward, steering me through the cluster of reporters toward the car without another word.
The car door closed and the noise stopped.
Not faded. Stopped.
I sat with Maple's carrier on my lap and became aware, slowly, that my hand was still clenched in the fabric of his sleeve. I'd pulled the cuff into a crease. I let go.
"Sorry."
He glanced at where I'd been holding. "Don't apologize."
Not reassurance. Just a statement of what was unnecessary.
The driver pulled away from the curb. Gabriel was sitting twelve inches away from me, looking out the window like the street held information worth reading.
I watched the house until the trees on the corner swallowed it.
You're just going out. You'll be back.
I held that thought in my chest and kept it still. I needed a few more minutes where it was allowed to be true.
He handed me a water bottle at some point. I took it without drinking.
He waited, then reached over without comment, unscrewed the cap, and handed it back.
I drank.
Highway signs started appearing — big green rectangles pointing north. I watched them come and go. The salt smell of Charleston had already faded. I hadn't noticed it go.
My phone screen lit up in my lap. Not the notification — a message. Then another.
Caroline: are you safe? please just tell me you're safe
Below it, a missed call from Noah. Then another, timestamped twenty minutes apart.
The three of us had been in the same class since we were seven years old. I stared at Caroline's message for a moment, then at Noah's name, and couldn't find a single thing to type back. Not because I didn't want to. Because safe was a word I didn't know how to apply to myself right now, and anything else felt like too much to start.
I closed the screen without opening either conversation.
A few minutes later, the phone lit up again. This time it was a notification, two lines of preview text, and before my thumb could reach it I caught the first four words: MERCER COUPLE LINKED TO—
His hand came down over mine, not grabbing, just covering the screen completely. He picked the phone up, turned it face-down, set it on the seat beside him.
"Don't."
I looked at where the phone was now sitting. "Tell me what it says."
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, it was with the precision of someone reading from a document he'd already memorized:
"Your parents used the same gun. Both deaths have been preliminarily ruled self-inflicted. No evidence of forced third-party entry at the scene." A pause. "The federal warrant for search and arrest was scheduled for the following morning. Given that, the case has been classified as a joint suicide."
I kept my face toward the window. The highway was flat and gray and went on in a straight line as far as I could see.
"So the official version is that they were scared of being caught."
"That's the current determination."
My father's last words were still sitting somewhere I couldn't put down. Forgive us. We didn't have another way. The police had heard those words too, and filed them under guilt. Under fear. Under a man who knew he was caught.
That wasn't what his face had looked like.
"Do you believe it?" I asked. "Their version."
The silence before his answer wasn't evasive. He was actually thinking about it.
"I only commit to what I can verify." His voice was even. "Right now, that isn't much."
I turned and looked at him directly for the first time since getting in the car.
"So you don't know either."
A beat of silence.
"No."
One syllable. No qualifier, no cushion. Just the honest edge of what he actually knew, handed over without dressing it up.
Something in my chest loosened — just a degree. Not quite relief. More like being given the accurate size of a problem rather than a smaller version trimmed down to fit what I could handle. I hadn't realized how exhausting everyone else's careful softening had been until someone stopped doing it.
I turned back to the window.
Later, he placed a manila envelope on the seat between us.
"Family court approved an emergency temporary guardianship. You're with me until you turn eighteen. The legal arrangement ends there."
I looked at it. The flap was still sealed, corners crisp.
"Your place?"
"Yes."
"Not the Blackwood house." The words were out before I'd decided to say them. A reflex, like something my mother had left running in the background. She'd never described that house in detail. She hadn't needed to — it was in the way she always pivoted away from the subject, that specific expression that meant that's a door we don't open.
"No. Mine."
I put two fingers into the mesh panel on the side of Maple's carrier. She'd pressed herself flat against the back wall, doing that particular stillness that meant she'd gone into full survival assessment mode. Her nose came forward and touched my fingertips.
"Can she come?"
He was quiet.
"She won't be any trouble. She barely makes noise, she doesn't scratch things, she just—" I was aware, from some separate and slightly mortified corner of my brain, that I was making a character reference for my cat to a man who had just restructured his living situation for me without being asked. "She'll find a corner and stay there."
"I didn't say she'd be a problem."
I stopped talking.
He was still looking at the file folder on his knee. Same page. Hadn't turned it in the last ten minutes.
I reached over, moved the envelope to my side of the seat, and set it against my leg without opening it.
Dominic — I learned the name when Gabriel said it, brief, giving directions — pulled off at a gas station somewhere past the Virginia line. He asked through the partition if I needed anything.
I said no.
He came back with crackers and a water bottle that was slightly warm, left them in the cupholder without making it a thing.
The radio came on during the next hour. National news, top of the hour. I heard the anchor say the Mercer case like it was a line in a script, my entire family's collapse compressed into three syllables of broadcast copy. Dominic switched it off before the next sentence.
Gabriel hadn't moved. I picked up a cracker and chewed. No flavor. I took another one, because my body was apparently still making autonomous decisions about its own continued operation regardless of what I thought about the matter.
He noticed. He looked out his window.
I don't know when the dark fully settled.
The highway had given way to something narrower — slower curves, no center divider, branches beginning to close overhead. My eyelids kept dropping and I kept pulling them back up, running on some last reflex of dignity, even though there was no version of tonight where I arrived anywhere looking intact.
Don't fall asleep. You don't know him well enough.
The thought didn't finish itself the third time.
