Chapter 8 — The Voice

She kept telling herself it was a prank call.

Someone with a voice distorter and too much time. Random targeting. It happened.

She told herself that through the night, through making Ava's breakfast, through the school drop-off. She told herself it until the telling started to sound like what it was.

She didn't believe it.

You think your husband died in an accident. That sentence had been chosen for her, specifically, delivered to her personal number by someone who had made sure they couldn't be found.

She drove to work with both hands on the wheel and tried to think about anything else.

Marcus called at eight.

"The messages," he said. Then a pause, like he was deciding how to frame it. "They're coming from inside the building."

Xander went still. "Say that again."

"Both of them. The photograph, the memo. Routed through a proxy, but the origin traces back to a terminal inside Ross Industries." Another pause. "Executive level."

"How certain are you?"

"Certain enough that I've been sitting on this for two hours trying to find another explanation." Marcus's voice was quiet in a way that meant he hadn't found one. "This isn't someone who picked up a skill and got lucky. Whoever this is, they've been inside long enough to know the architecture. They know where things are buried."

Xander turned toward the window. "I need the list. Every executive with that level of terminal access."

"Already pulling it." A beat. "There's something else."

"What?"

"They're not only sending things to you." Marcus seemed to choose his words carefully. "The photograph went to Kimberly. The call went to Kimberly." He let that sit for a second. "Whatever the aim is, both of you are in it."

The line went quiet.

"Are they pushing us toward each other," Xander said slowly, "or away?"

Marcus didn't answer.

Which was, in its own way, an answer.

She found it by accident.

She had been looking for a photograph on her old backup phone when her thumb caught a folder she'd forgotten existed.

Voice Memos.

One file. Daniel's name. Eighteen months before the accident.

She pressed play before she could think too hard about it.

His voice came through the small speaker and filled the bedroom and she stopped breathing.

"Kim. Hey, it's — it's me. I'm heading home, I'm gonna pick up food so don't — don't worry about cooking. I was thinking that place on Fourth, the one you like. Actually, I might not be able to park near there, so— I don't know, I'll figure it out. Anyway. I'll be home soon. Love you."

Twenty seconds.

A nothing message. The kind he'd left a hundred times that she'd listened to and deleted without thinking.

She pressed play again.

The slight stumble over his own words. The way he said love you quickly at the end, almost self-conscious about it, like he knew she was probably only half-listening. The street noise behind him — a city block she'd never be able to place.

By the third time her face was wet.

She put the phone face-down and sat with her hands in her lap and let it move through her — a man calling his wife about dinner, completely unaware, twenty seconds that had no idea what was coming for them.

She cried until she was empty.

Then she got in the car and drove to the cemetery because she didn't know where else to go.

She was sitting on the ground in front of the headstone when she heard footsteps on the path.

She knew it was him before she looked up. She didn't know how.

Alex stopped a few feet away. He wasn't in his work jacket. He looked at her without the composure he carried on the floor — something quieter replacing it. Less certain.

"I didn't—" He stopped. "I wasn't following you. I want you to know that."

She looked at him for a moment.

"Sit down," she said.

He sat. Not close enough to intrude. Near enough that the silence became something shared rather than something between them.

Neither spoke for a while. Just wind, and the distant sound of a groundskeeper, and the wet granite of the headstone holding the cold.

"I found a voicemail today," Kimberly said finally. Her eyes stayed on Daniel's name. "Old phone. I forgot it existed."

He waited.

"He was calling to say he was picking up dinner." A breath. "Couldn't decide where to park." She stopped. "I've been — I've been falling apart for two hours over a message about parking."

"Yeah," Alex said. Quietly. Like he understood something about that specific kind of wreckage.

She glanced at him. "You're not going to tell me it gets easier."

"I—" He paused. "I don't know if it does. Not in the way people mean when they say it."

"Then what do you say? When someone's sitting on the ground outside a cemetery?"

He looked at the headstone for a moment. "I don't know that there's a right thing."

"That's honest."

"You seem like you'd rather have honest."

She almost said yes. Instead she looked back at Daniel's name and let the almost go.

"He used to leave me messages like that all the time," she said. "Tiny ones. Do we need milk. I'm running late. Don't wait up. I never saved any of them." A pause. "I didn't think I'd—" She stopped herself. "I thought we had more time."

"Of course you did," Alex said.

"I know everyone thinks that." Her voice went a little flat. "I know it's not— I know it's not a unique thing to think."

"That doesn't make it hurt less."

She was quiet for a moment.

"What was he like?" Alex asked.

The question was careful. Too careful, almost. Like he'd wanted to ask it for longer than the conversation warranted.

She noticed. She didn't say so.

"Steady," she said. "First word I always come back to. He was—" She paused, searching. "He made things feel like they had a way through. Even when they didn't, really. He just — he was the kind of person that made you believe the next thing was manageable." She stopped. "I didn't understand how much I'd built on that until there was nothing left to build on."

Alex said nothing. But he was listening in a way she couldn't explain — not waiting for a gap to speak. Actually taking it in.

"What do you do," she said slowly, "when the person who made things feel okay — when they're the thing you need to feel okay about?"

She hadn't planned to say that. It came out before she could stop it.

Alex looked at her. Something crossed his face that she couldn't read completely — not pity, which she would have turned away from. Something more complicated, and it cost him something to hold it.

"I think you just—" He stopped. Started again. "You stay in it. Even when it's—" A pause. "Even when you can't see the other side of it yet."

"That's all?"

"It might be." He held her gaze. "It might also be everything."

She looked back at the headstone.

"I don't remember what it feels like," she said. "Happiness. The real kind." The words came out quietly, like she hadn't fully meant to say them out loud. "I can describe it. I know what it looked like when I had it. But the actual feeling—" She stopped. "I can't get back to it. I've tried."

The silence after that was the longest one.

"I think it's still there," Alex said. His voice was low. "Things go very deep sometimes. They feel gone but they aren't."

She looked at him. "You sound like you know."

"I don't." Something shifted in his jaw. "I just—" He stopped. "I need it to be true."

Need. Not think or hope. The word arrived differently and she felt it.

She didn't push. There was something in how he said it that made her understand it wasn't entirely about her.

They sat until the light changed and the cold moved through her coat. She stood. He stood with her.

She pressed her palm to the top of the headstone the way she always did before leaving.

She started to turn.

Then stopped.

The fading light caught the back of the stone at an angle it wouldn't have at any other time of day. She moved around to look.

Carved into the granite at the base. Shallow enough to miss if you weren't standing exactly here, in exactly this light.

A symbol.

Not a cross. Not a flower. Nothing from three years of visiting this grave.

"Alex," she said.

He came around and stood beside her.

She watched his face when he saw it.

The color left him completely.