Chapter Twelve: The Driver's Widow

Elena

The phone rang before I could call him. I answered so fast I nearly dropped it.

"Sorry," Damian said, before I could even speak. "Someone tried to get into my systems the second your message came through. I had to shut everything down first."

"So it's not just me," I said, and something in my chest that had been braced for an hour finally let go, just slightly.

"It's not just you." A pause. "We can't talk like this anymore. Not on phones. I'll send you an address."

I looked at the closed bathroom door like it might have ears of its own. "I don't know how I get out of this house without him knowing."

"You'll find a way," he said, simple, no weight to it, and somehow that was steadier than anything gentler would have been.

I sat there a long moment after he hung up, my heart still going too fast, and thought about every time in the last five years I had let fear stop me from doing the one thing I actually needed to do. I thought about the wet road that killed my parents, and how long I had spent in my first life simply waiting to see what happened to me instead of going out and finding the truth myself.

I was done waiting.

I told Sophia I was going to see my sister. I took my own car, and I watched the mirror the entire drive, my hands tight on the wheel, terrified and moving forward anyway, because being afraid had stopped being a reason not to do things a long time ago.

The address led to a narrow street of terraced houses on the edge of town, nothing like the world I'd been living in for five years. Small gardens. Peeling paint. The kind of ordinary, tired street that never appears in anyone's photographs.

Damian was already waiting outside a house with a faded blue door. He didn't touch me when I got out of the car, but something in the way he looked at me, checking, quiet, made my throat go tight. Then, just before we knocked, he shifted half a step in front of me, angling his body toward the road behind us instead of the door, some old instinct in him already watching for whoever might be watching us.

We knocked together. It took a long time for anyone to answer, and then the door opened on a chain, just a few inches, and a woman's face appeared in the gap. Older than I expected. Tired in a way that went deeper than age.

"We're not selling anything," she said.

"We wanted to ask about your husband," Damian said. "Thomas."

Her face changed the second she heard the name. Not surprise. Fear, old and practiced, the kind that lives in a person's body long after the thing that caused it is gone.

"He's been dead two years," she said. "I don't talk about him."

"We think what happened to him might be connected to something happening to me right now," I said, before she could close the door. My voice cracked slightly and I let it, because I was too tired to perform strength I didn't have left. "My name is Elena Blackwood."

The door didn't move for a long moment. Then, slowly, the chain slid back.

"You'd better come in then," she said. "Before someone sees you standing on my step."

The house was small and dim, curtains drawn even in daylight. She didn't offer us tea, just gestured us onto a worn sofa and sat across from us with her hands folded so tightly in her lap the knuckles had gone pale.

"I know why you're here," she said, before either of us could ask anything. "You want to know if he really did it."

I didn't answer. I didn't trust myself to.

"I never believed he did," she said quietly, and there was no certainty in it, only the worn, exhausted shape of a question she'd been asking herself for two years without an answer. "I can't prove that. I've never been able to prove anything. I just knew my husband, and the man they described in that report wasn't him."

"What happened before he resigned," Damian asked gently. "Do you know?"

She looked at her hands a long time before answering. "He came home shaking one night. Wouldn't tell me why. Packed a bag and said we needed to leave the city, then changed his mind three days later, said it was handled, someone had made sure it was handled." She looked up at me, and something in her eyes made my chest ache. "He stopped sleeping after that. Every night for a year and a half, until he wasn't here to stop sleeping anymore."

"Was he alone that night?" I asked, my voice smaller than I meant it to be. "The night of the accident. My parents. Was he alone in that car?"

She was quiet so long I thought she wouldn't answer at all.

"No," she said finally. "He wasn't alone."

The room went very still. My pulse had climbed into my ears somewhere in the last minute without my noticing, and now, in the silence, I felt the pressure behind my left eye rise with it, that same familiar tightening that always seemed to know exactly when to arrive.

"There was someone else in that car," she said. "I don't know who. He never told me a name, not once, not even at the end when I begged him to tell me something so I'd understand what I was losing him to." Her hands twisted together. "He said if he ever said the name out loud, it would find its way back to him, and it would be the last thing he ever did. So he never said it. Not to me. Not to anyone."

I wanted to press her. Some old, cold, calculating part of me hated itself a little for wanting that from a woman who had already lost everything to this same silence.

I didn't press her.

"Thank you," I said instead, quietly. "For telling me even that much."

She looked at me like she hadn't expected that, like she'd braced for me to demand more, and something in her face softened.

"There's one more thing," she said, as we stood to leave. "Someone came round last week. Asking the same questions."

My whole body went cold. "Who?"

"A woman. Didn't give her name. She said she used to work for a family in this city, years back, and that something she'd seen lately made her start wondering about things she'd buried a long time ago." The widow shook her head slowly. "She looked frightened the whole time she was here. More frightened than curious. I told her nothing. I'm only telling you because you gave me your name at my own door, which is more than she did."

Something about that description caught in my chest and wouldn't let go. A woman who used to work for a family in this city. Frightened, not curious.

We thanked her again and stepped out into the grey afternoon light, and the moment the door shut behind us the world tilted, just slightly, the pavement seeming to lean toward me before settling back into place. I put a hand out and found the cool brick of the widow's front wall and held onto it, my vision flickering at the edges like a light bulb deciding whether to give out completely.

"Elena." Damian was in front of me before I'd even fully registered moving, one hand steady under my elbow, not asking, just there, the way he'd positioned himself at the door without being asked to. "Sit down. Right here, on the step, don't argue with me."

I didn't argue. I sat, and put my head down, and breathed until the flicker passed and the street came back into focus, ordinary and grey and real again.

"I'm alright," I said, which wasn't quite true.

"You're not," he said, crouched in front of me, his eyes moving over my face with a focus that had nothing to do with strategy or evidence for once. "But you're still here. That's enough for right now."

I glanced back once at the house as we finally walked to the cars. The widow stood in the front window watching us go, and there was no suspicion left in her face at all, just something quieter and sadder. Pity, I realized. She was looking at me the way you look at someone standing exactly where you once stood yourself, not knowing yet how much it was going to cost her.

I had to look away first.

We walked the rest of the way in silence, my mind turning over everything she'd said, trying to fit it against Thomas Reid's photograph, against the accident, against a frightened woman who used to work for a family in this city and had come asking these same questions before we ever arrived.

Damian's phone buzzed in his pocket.

He pulled it out without much urgency, the way you check a message you assume is nothing, and I watched his face change the instant the screen lit up. All the color went out of it at once.

"What," I said, my heart already slamming before he even answered. "What is it."

He turned the phone toward me without a word.

One image. No caption. No name attached.

Us. Right now. Standing exactly where we were standing, on this exact street, outside this exact house, taken from somewhere close enough that I could see the widow's front window in the frame behind us. I understood, looking at that photograph of my own back, that whoever had sent it wasn't watching from a distance.

They were close enough to see us breathing.