Chapter 6 Renata

Ivy's POV

"Whose case," I say, because staring at two identical scratches isn't an answer, it's just proof that I'm right to be scared.

Callum doesn't look up from the desk right away. His thumb rests against the edge of the photo like he's holding it in place against a wind that isn't there, and the silence stretches long enough that I start counting seconds again without meaning to.

"A woman," he says finally. "Found in 2006."

"That's not a name."

"It doesn't need to be, not for what I'm asking you to do, which is just confirm the marks match. That's all this is."

I don't buy it, not for a second, and I let that show on my face instead of pretending otherwise. "You drove across the city before your shift for a case that doesn't need a name attached to it."

His jaw tightens. He's good at controlling his face, better than most people I've watched try to lie to me, but there's a specific stillness that comes over people right before they say something they've rehearsed too many times alone in a car, and he has that stillness now.

"You're stalling," I say. "I've watched two officers do exactly that in this apartment tonight. I know what it looks like."

"I'm not stalling." He says it too fast for it to land the way he wants it to. He catches himself doing it, and something almost like a laugh moves through his shoulders, tired more than amused. "Fine. I'm stalling a little."

"Renata Cole," he says. "That's her name."

I wait, because there's clearly more sitting behind his teeth than a name and a year.

"She was twenty-six. Found near the downtown branch library, three blocks from where she worked. Case went cold within six months. Officially, it's still open, technically, the way a lot of old files stay open on paper long after everyone's stopped actually looking at them."

"Officially." I catch the word and hold onto it. "This isn't your case, is it. Not the way you're carrying that folder."

He glances down at it like he's only just noticing how tight his own grip has gotten. The folder's edges are soft, worn round at the corners the way paper gets from being handled over and over, not filed away and pulled out occasionally the way an active case file would be. I know that kind of wear. I have a box of it sitting open on my own floor right now, tape peeled back this morning for the first time in three years.

"You keep a copy at home," I say. It isn't a question either, not really, just me putting words to something I recognized the second I saw how careful his hands were with it. "The same way I kept mine. Something you weren't supposed to hold onto, but you did anyway, because letting the department be the only ones with it felt like losing whatever's left of her."

Something moves fast and sudden behind his eyes, like I've said something closer to the bone than I ever meant to. For a second neither of us talks, and the apartment feels smaller than it did five minutes ago, the two of us standing over matching photographs of a button that shouldn't exist twice in the world, let alone twice in one morning.

"How did you know that," he says, quiet, the first thing he's said since walking in that doesn't sound rehearsed.

"Because I did the same thing." I nod toward the closet, toward the box he already noticed and didn't ask about. "Copied my own file the week after. Told myself it was so I'd have some control over what happened to me. Really it was so nobody could pretend it didn't happen if I ever needed proof."

"You're not just working a cold case," I say, going back to him instead of myself, because standing in my own confession too long makes my chest ache in a way I don't want him watching happen. "You're working her."

He doesn't answer that directly. He sets the folder flat on the desk instead, pressing his palm briefly against the cover like he's steadying something inside himself rather than the paper. When he finally looks up at me, his eyes have a different weight to them than they did in the doorway, less controlled, more like something that's been held shut for a long time finally giving a little at the seams.

"I was twelve," he says. "When it happened."

I don't push. I've learned, from the other side of it, that pushing too hard on a person right before they say the thing that costs them the most just makes them swallow it back down. I stand still instead, hands loose at my sides, giving him the same patience he gave me on my own doorstep an hour ago.

He looks past me, toward the window, though I don't think he's actually seeing the street below it. "My mother sent me to a neighbor's that night. Said it was too late for a kid to be up. I remember being angry about that, being twelve and angry about missing something, not knowing there was anything worth being spared from."

His hand moves to the corner of the folder again, not opening it, just resting there, like touching it keeps whatever he's about to say tethered to something solid.

"My mother used to say Renata was the brave one." His voice stays level through that part, careful, practiced, the voice of someone who's said this exact sentence to himself a hundred times in the dark and never once out loud to another person standing in the room with him. "She used to walk home alone at night because she said being scared of the dark was letting somebody win who hadn't even done anything yet."

"She sounds like she meant it," I say, quiet, because he needs to hear someone caught the specific shape of what he just said.

"She did. Every word of it." Something almost like a smile crosses his face, gone before it finishes forming. "She used to walk me to school even after I told her I was too old for it, just to prove the point to herself, I think. That nothing out there got to decide how she moved through her own life."

He stops. His hand flattens harder against the folder, knuckles going pale, and when he speaks again the practiced part of his voice isn't there anymore, stripped down to something rawer underneath it.

"She was wrong about that. Somebody had already done something. We just didn't know it yet."

The room goes quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet right before somebody says the thing they came to say, the thing that's been sitting under everything else since he raised that badge to my peephole. I watch his throat move once, like the sentence is getting caught somewhere on the way out, and I don't fill the silence for him, because some things a person has to hand over on their own terms or not at all.

"Renata was my sister."