“Of course,” he said, voice warm again, back in character. “Whatever you need from me. I want this resolved as much as you do.”
He hung up a moment later and stood there a beat longer than necessary, staring at nothing before he noticed me in the doorway.
“Adjuster,” he said, waving a hand like it was nothing at all. “Just going over a few details. You know how these insurance people are, dragging their feet over paperwork while we’re still trying to recover from all this.”
“Is everything all right?” I asked, keeping my voice soft, uncertain, exactly the tone a devastated wife should carry.
“Fine,” he said too quickly. “Completely fine.”
I nodded and turned back toward the towels, giving him nothing but the same trusting face I’d worn for him since the morning of the sirens.
But I’d seen what I needed to see.
A man who could perform grief flawlessly for police officers and neighbors alike had just cracked, however briefly, at the mention of a stranger asking questions he couldn’t fully control.
Someone else was starting to notice what I already knew.
Thomas brought it up over dinner so casually I almost missed the weight folded inside it.
“The insurance people are asking a lot of questions,” he said, cutting into his chicken like the sentence carried no more importance than the weather. “More than I expected, honestly.”
“Questions about what?”
“Timeline stuff, mostly. When I left, when I got back, what time the trip was supposed to start.”
He didn’t look up from his plate.
“I might need you to back me up on some of it if anyone calls.”
The fork in my hand went still.
“Back you up? How?”
“Just confirm the timeline. That I dropped you at the airport that morning. That everything happened the way I said it did.”
He said it so easily, like he was asking me to confirm what side of the bed I slept on.
“It’s just a formality, Carolyn. In case they call.”
I made myself keep chewing, keep breathing, keep every muscle in my face arranged into the same soft concern I’d worn for over a week.
But inside, something had gone very cold and very clear.
He wasn’t just asking me to stay quiet anymore.
He was asking me to speak. To put my own voice, my own name, onto a version of that morning I knew with absolute certainty was a lie.
“Of course,” I heard myself say. “Whatever you need.”
He smiled, relieved, and went back to his dinner like the conversation had cost him nothing at all.
I sat there afterward, alone in the kitchen once he’d gone to bed, staring at the dark window over the sink.
And understood something I’d been avoiding since the morning of the sirens.
My silence had felt, until that night, like safety. Like a woman simply waiting, watching, gathering what she needed before she moved.
But silence has a shelf life.
It was one thing to say nothing while the story stayed his alone to tell.
It was another thing entirely to be handed a script and asked to read my lines alongside him.
If someone from that insurance company called and asked me directly whether I’d been dropped at the airport that morning, I would either have to lie to a stranger’s face on Thomas’s behalf or tell a truth that would blow my own careful silence apart before I had anywhere solid to land.
I thought of Silas’s warning at the taxi door. Of the van, the mud-smeared plate, the door Thomas swore had been forced open when I knew it hadn’t been.
Of the crack in his voice on the phone with that adjuster, gone as fast as it appeared.
I had pieces. Real ones. More than most women in my position would ever manage to gather.
But pieces weren’t enough anymore.
Not if I was about to be asked to either betray myself or betray the truth, with no one standing beside me who understood what either choice would actually cost.
I picked up my phone that night, not to call Thomas’s world, but to search outside of it entirely.
For someone who could tell me what my silence was actually worth, and how much longer it could hold before it broke on its own.
I needed a lawyer.
Not eventually.
Now.
Before anyone else asked me to lie for a man I could no longer trust to tell me the truth about anything at all.
Regina Coats’s office sat above a dry cleaner on the edge of downtown Winston-Salem. Small and unremarkable. Exactly the kind of place a woman could disappear into without anyone noticing she’d gone.
I told her everything.
The van. Thomas’s car hidden behind the shed. Larry’s voice, careless in a house he believed was empty.
The smeared plate. The temporary dealer tag Silas remembered. The lie about a door I knew had been locked.