Chương 6
Unknown number.
He stared at it.
Emily noticed.
“Don’t answer.”
“Why?”
“Because whoever this is knows too much.”
The phone stopped.
A few seconds later, a message appeared.
Daniel opened it.
You found the contract.
Good.
Now find out why your father hid it from you.
He showed Emily.
Her expression changed.
Not fear exactly.
Something closer to anger.
“They’re watching us.”
Daniel looked toward the window.
The curtains were open.
Across the street, a man stood beside a parked car.
He was not looking directly at them.
That somehow made it worse.
Daniel moved toward the window.
The man got into the car and drove away.
“Did you see him?” Emily asked.
“Yes.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know.”
She laughed once.
A short, humorless sound.
“That answer is becoming a problem.”
Daniel almost smiled.
Almost.
Then he noticed something on the table.
A small piece of paper beneath the folders.
He picked it up.
It was a receipt.
From a storage facility.
The date was from three days ago.
The customer name was not Daniel.
Not Emily.
Margaret Ellis.
The unit number was 417.
The same number from the key.
Daniel stared at it.
Emily moved closer.
“No.”
“What?”
“No, because this is how it starts.”
“How what starts?”
“The part where we convince ourselves we have to keep digging.”
Daniel looked at her.
“Maybe we do.”
She shook her head.
“You don’t understand.”
“Then explain.”
Emily sat down.
For the first time since he arrived, she looked tired.
Not nervous.
Not angry.
Just tired.
“When Dad died, I hated him.”
Daniel said nothing.
“I hated him because everyone else got to talk about him like he was a story.”
She rubbed her forehead.
“People at school knew. Neighbors knew. They would look at me like they were waiting to see if I was like him.”
Daniel remembered.
He remembered the grocery store.
The whispers.
The way adults lowered their voices when he walked past.
“I spent years trying to prove I wasn’t him.”
Her voice cracked slightly.
“And now you want to open all of this again.”
Daniel looked down.
He understood.
Not completely.
But enough.
He had spent years running from his father’s name.
Emily had spent years fighting against it.
Those were different kinds of survival.
“I’m not trying to prove Dad was innocent,” Daniel said.
“Then what are you trying to do?”
He looked at the contract.
At the key.
At the receipt.
“I’m trying to find out what happened.”
Emily looked at him.
“That’s the same thing everyone says before they find something they wish they never knew.”
Daniel had no answer.
Because somewhere deep inside, he suspected she was right.
The next morning, they went to the storage facility together.
Neither of them slept much.
Daniel spent most of the night sitting on his couch, staring at the ceiling fan and listening to the building settle around him.
At four in the morning, he finally opened his father’s old watch from the drawer where he kept it.
The watch had stopped years ago.
He never fixed it.
He told himself it was because it was expensive to repair.
That was not true.
He liked that it was frozen at a specific time.
A reminder that some moments stayed exactly where people left them.
When Emily arrived, she brought two coffees.
She handed him one.
“No speech,” she said.
Daniel looked at her.
“What?”
“I know you.”
She stepped inside.
“You’re going to say something about how we should be careful or how we need to prepare.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were thinking it.”
He looked at the coffee.
“Maybe.”
She smiled slightly.
It was the first normal moment they had shared in two days.
Then she handed him a set of car keys.
“Whose are these?”
“Mine.”
“You hate driving downtown.”
“I still hate it.”
“Then why are we driving?”
“Because I found something.”
Daniel looked up.
“What?”
Emily reached into her bag and pulled out an old photograph.
It showed their father standing outside the storage facility.
But that was not what made Daniel stop breathing.
Standing beside him was a woman he recognized.
Their mother.
And the photograph was dated eleven years after everyone said she had left.
The man who had been following Daniel Mercer did not bother pretending anymore.
Daniel noticed him because the stranger stopped outside the repair shop at 4:17 in the afternoon and stared through the front window for nearly a full minute without looking at a single car in the lot.
Customers usually looked at the cars.
They looked at dents, tires, invoices taped to windshields. They looked at the waiting room, the counter, the clock on the wall that ran four minutes slow because Daniel had never gotten around to fixing it.
This man looked only at Daniel.
Then he walked away.
Daniel kept the wrench in his hand longer than necessary.
“Problem?” Luis asked from beneath the raised hood of a truck.
Daniel looked toward the window.
“No.”
Luis slid out from under the vehicle and wiped his hands on a rag.
“You said that too fast.”
“I said no.”
“Yeah. That’s usually when there’s a problem.”
Daniel gave him a look.
Luis lifted both hands.
“I’m just saying. You have a face you make.”
“I have one face.”
“You have several. The one you make when a customer says they changed their own brakes. The one you make when someone brings in a car full of trash. And the one you’re making now.”
Daniel glanced back at the window.
The parking lot was empty.
The man was gone.
“Get the truck finished before closing,” Daniel said.
Luis smiled slightly.
“That’s your way of saying I’m right.”
“It’s my way of saying stop talking.”
“Also your way of saying I’m right.”
Daniel ignored him, but the corner of his mouth almost moved.
Almost.
The moment disappeared when his phone buzzed.
Mara.
May you like
He stared at her name.
After their call that morning, he had expected another message. Another demand. Another attempt to drag him back into a part of his life he had spent years sealing shut.
