Chapter 10 — The Missing Name

The torn edge wouldn't leave her alone.

Kimberly sat in her car outside the storage facility for almost twenty minutes before she trusted her hands enough to drive. The notebook sat on the passenger seat, closed, and still she could feel it there — the missing page a wound she kept circling back to no matter how hard she tried to look away.

Don't trust—

Four words. A blank space where a name should have been.

She made a list in her head, the way she made grocery lists, except every item on this one made her stomach drop a little further than the last. Coworkers Daniel had mentioned in passing. Supervisors whose names she barely remembered. People from the trip itself — the ones who had come home, and the one who hadn't.

And then, underneath all of it, sitting heavier than the rest, the name she didn't want to put there.

Xander Ross.

She made herself say it out loud in the empty car. Just to test how it sounded against the silence.

It sounded plausible.

That was the problem. Her hands tightened on the wheel before she'd even started the engine.

Marcus called him into the small conference room on the executive floor — no windows, the room they used when something needed to stay contained.

Xander closed the door behind him and felt the click of the latch land somewhere in his chest.

"I found the sender," Marcus said.

"Who?" The question came out tighter than he meant it to.

"Former executive. Reese Calloway." Marcus turned the laptop around. A photo. An employee badge. A termination date three years old. "VP of operations. Left the company eleven days after Daniel's accident."

Xander studied the face. Unremarkable. The kind of face that disappeared into every boardroom photo from that era — and yet his pulse had already started moving faster, like his body understood something his mind hadn't caught up to.

"Left," he said slowly, "or was removed?"

"Resignation. Officially." Marcus's mouth tightened. "No severance dispute. No public statement. Just gone." He tapped the screen once, hard. "But the timing's wrong for a coincidence. Eleven days, Xander. And he had executive terminal access right up until the day he walked out."

"Which means he had access to the HORIZON files."

"He had access to everything." Marcus's voice dropped, and something in it made the room feel smaller. "This is someone who watched what happened after the accident from the inside. And then vanished. And now, three years later, he's back — sending things to you. To Kimberly."

Xander sat back. His hands had gone still on the arms of the chair, too still, the kind of stillness that came from holding something down.

"Why now?"

"That's the part I can't answer." Marcus closed the laptop with a soft click that felt louder than it should have. "Three years of nothing. Then the same week you walk onto that floor as someone else—"

"He knows I'm there."

"He's probably known longer than that." Marcus's expression didn't move, but his voice had. "Whoever this is, they're not improvising. They've been waiting for something. I don't know what set it off."

Xander stared at the closed laptop and thought about the burner phone. Purchased two weeks before he'd ever made the decision to go in.

Someone had known before he had.

His stomach turned over slowly, and he sat with it, because there was nowhere to put that feeling yet.

She went looking for him before her shift started.

She told herself it wasn't about the page. She told herself a number of things lately that she didn't fully believe, and added this one to the pile without much resistance.

Alex was at the loading dock, checking a manifest, and when he looked up and saw her crossing the floor, something shifted in him immediately — alert, careful, already reading her face before she'd said a word.

"You look like you didn't sleep," he said.

"I didn't." She stopped close enough that the conversation could stay between them. Her arms folded without her deciding to fold them. "I need to ask you something. And I need an actual answer this time."

"Okay." Something tightened at the corner of his jaw.

"Do you know the name Reese Calloway?"

It was small. Almost nothing. But she had learned to watch for it now — the half-second flicker behind his eyes before the control dropped back into place, the way you learned to read a sky before weather you already knew was coming.

"Why would I know that name?" he said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's not a name I recognize." Careful. Measured. Too measured, the words laid down like something rehearsed rather than felt.

She held his gaze, and her chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with the question. "You do this thing," she said, quieter now. "Every time I ask you something that matters, you give me an answer that's technically true and tells me absolutely nothing."

He didn't argue.

He didn't deny it either.

That silence was its own kind of answer, and it landed harder than anything he could have said.

"Kimberly—" he started, and his voice had something in it she hadn't heard before. Something close to pleading.

"Don't." She lifted a hand, just slightly, more to steady herself than to stop him. "I don't need an explanation right now. I need to think."

She turned and walked away before he could say anything else.

She felt his eyes on her the entire length of the floor, and she didn't look back, even though some small, exhausted part of her wanted to.

That was the part that frightened her more than the torn page itself.

She trusted him.

She had spent three years building a wall thick enough that nobody got close — she had been proud of that wall, in the quiet, joyless way you could be proud of something that was slowly killing you — and somehow, in less than two weeks, a man she barely knew had found his way past it without her noticing the breach happen.

She thought about the cemetery. The way he'd sat beside her without trying to fix anything, without offering the easy, useless comfort everyone else reached for. She thought about the voicemail, and how he hadn't flinched when she fell apart over twenty seconds about parking.

Then she thought about the half-second of panic that crossed his face every single time Xander Ross came up. The way his hands stilled. The way his voice went flat and careful, like a man walking across ice he already knew was cracked.

She didn't understand how both of those things could be true about the same person.

She didn't understand why some reckless, stubborn part of her wanted to find out anyway.

She made the decision driving home that night, somewhere between two traffic lights, with her hands tight on the wheel and her jaw set the way it got when she'd finally had enough of something.

She had spent three years letting things happen to her. The grief. The bills. The slow erosion of every plan she and Daniel had built without either of them realizing how fragile it all was. She had absorbed it, all of it, and kept moving because moving was the only language her body knew anymore.

She was done.

Daniel had been investigating something called HORIZON. He had been frightened enough to hide his notes somewhere she would never have found them on her own. Someone had removed a page rather than let her see a name. And whoever was sending those messages knew more about her husband's death than she had been allowed to know in three years of grieving him.

She would find Horizon herself.

Her hands tightened on the wheel until her knuckles ached.

She wasn't grieving anymore. Not in the way she had been. Something colder and more useful had started to take its place, and she let it, because grief had never once given her an answer and she suspected this might.

She went back to the storage unit the next morning to go through what remained.

The corridor was empty, fluorescent lights humming overhead in that thin, sterile way, the same cold concrete pressing up through her shoes. She worked through the last box methodically, the way Daniel would have — careful, sequential, nothing skipped.

It was past nine when she finally stepped back out into the daylight, the notebook tucked deep inside her bag, her body tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

She noticed the SUV almost immediately.

Black. Tinted windows. Parked across the street, angled just enough to have a clear view of the facility entrance.

Her stomach dropped before her mind caught up.

She had seen it before.

Outside the cemetery, the day she'd found the carving on the headstone. She had registered it then and dismissed it — cemeteries had visitors, visitors had cars, that was simply how the world worked. She had seen it again near the warehouse a few days later, parked at the edge of the employee lot, and told herself, with the kind of forced calm she was getting tired of manufacturing, that it belonged to someone on a different shift.

Two coincidences. She had let herself believe in two coincidences, because believing in anything else had felt unbearable.

Not three.

She stood on the sidewalk, every muscle in her suddenly very still, and looked directly at the windshield.

For a moment, nothing happened. The glare on the glass made it impossible to see who was inside, and the not-knowing was somehow worse than seeing a face would have been.

Then the engine started.

She felt the shift in her chest before her mind fully processed it — the particular, specific wrongness of a vehicle responding to being seen instead of simply existing where it had been parked.

The SUV pulled away from the curb.

It didn't continue down the street. It didn't pass her toward some unrelated destination, the way a stranger's car would.

It turned, slow and deliberate, into the lane behind her own.

Her pulse climbed into her throat.

And it began to follow.