Chapter 3 The Question I Couldn't Answer

Corinne's POV

"You need to sit down," the officer said, and I laughed at him. Actually laughed, one short broken sound that didn't belong to me, because sitting down was the last thing my body wanted to do while three words were still burning themselves into the back of my eyes.

He knows now.

Somebody had written that on my father's wall in something I would not let myself name, and this officer wanted me to sit down like this was a moment for chairs.

A woman in plain clothes came over then, gentler than the first officer, a badge on a chain around her neck instead of clipped to a uniform. She crouched slightly so she was closer to my eye level, which is a thing people do when they're about to say something they think will break you.

"Corinne, I'm Detective Reyes." His voice was steady in a practiced kind of way, the way you'd talk down a scared animal. "I need you to hear this from me instead of finding out some other way. Your father didn't make it. I'm so sorry."

I heard the words. I understood every single one of them separately. Your. Father. Didn't. Make it. But they refused to line up into a sentence that meant what I knew it meant, the way a math problem sometimes just sits there on the page refusing to solve itself no matter how many times you stare at it.

"He was talking," I said. "The recorder. He said my name."

"That recording was made earlier tonight," Reyes said carefully. "Before anyone got to him. I'm sorry, Corinne. There wasn't anything anyone could have done by the time we arrived."

My knees actually did give out then, and it was Reyes who caught my arm, not the first officer, and something about a stranger's hand steadying me instead of my father's made the whole thing land somewhere true and terrible in my chest. My dad wasn't going to walk out of that hallway rubbing the back of his neck and asking why there were flashing lights outside his own front door. My dad was never walking out of anywhere again.

And Nora didn't know yet.

That thought hit me almost as hard as the first one, hit me so fast and so hard that I actually gasped out loud. My twelve-year-old sister was three streets away at her friend Kayla's house for a sleepover, probably eating popcorn and watching some movie she wasn't supposed to watch until midnight, completely unaware that the entire shape of her life had just changed while she wasn't looking.

"I have to get my sister," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, the way it always did the second Nora entered the picture. Some switch flips in you when someone smaller than you needs you to be the strong one. "She's at a friend's. She doesn't know anything yet."

"We can send someone with you," Reyes offered.

"No." The word came out harder than I meant it to. "She should hear it from me. Not a stranger in a uniform. Me."

Reyes studied me for a second too long, like he was deciding whether to argue, and then he nodded and told one of the other officers to drive me the three blocks himself. I don't remember much of that ride. I remember staring at my own hands the whole way, at the dried blood I hadn't noticed until right then, smeared across my knuckles from where I must have touched something back in that hallway without even realizing it.

Kayla's mom opened the door in her robe, confused, already asking questions before I said a single word, and something in my face must have answered for me because her hand flew to her mouth and she stepped back to let me in without another sound.

Nora was curled up on the couch in her pajamas, hair pulled into the messy bun she always did before bed, laughing at something on the TV screen. She looked so much like our mom in that half second before she noticed me standing there that it nearly folded me in half all over again.

Then she saw my face.

"Corinne?" She sat up fast, popcorn spilling off her lap onto the carpet, and I watched twelve years of trusting me completely play out across her expression in real time. "What's wrong? Why are you here this late? Why do you look like that?"

I had rehearsed something on the ride over. Some careful, gentle version of the truth that would let her down slow instead of all at once. I had absolutely nothing prepared for the way her face crumpled the second before I even opened my mouth, like some part of her already knew, like little sisters always know before the words arrive.

"Nora, I need you to come with me, okay? We need to go home."

"Where's Dad?"

Three words. That's all it took to break every rehearsed sentence I'd been building in my head into pieces on the floor. I opened my mouth to answer her, and nothing came out. Not one single word. My throat just closed around the truth like it physically refused to let it through, and Nora's eyes went wide and wet and terrified, watching me not answer the easiest question she'd ever asked me in her entire life.

"Corinne." Her voice cracked on my name. "Where is Dad? Why won't you say anything? Corinne, where's Dad? Tell me where."

I pulled her into me instead of answering, arms wrapping around her shaking shoulders, and felt her small body go rigid and then start to shake even harder against me, like she already understood everything from the silence alone.

That's when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

I almost ignored it. Almost let it go to voicemail with Nora sobbing into my shoulder and Kayla's mom hovering helplessly by the door. But something made me pull it out over Nora's shoulder, some instinct I didn't understand yet, and the screen lit up with a text from a number I had never seen in my life.

I'm sorry about your father. He was a good man. You should know he tried to protect you until the very end, and you should also know he's not the only reason someone is watching your house tonight.

I stared at those words with my little sister sobbing against my chest, my dead father's blood still dried on my own knuckles, and realized with a cold, sinking certainty that whoever had just texted me knew exactly where I was standing right now, in a house three streets away from the crime scene, at eleven forty at night, because they were close enough to be watching me say it.