“Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
The line stayed quiet for a beat.
Then she said, “Just come back to us.”
She hung up.
My hand shook as I lowered the phone.
Patricia was already looking at one of the monitors. “Mercer residence has movement,” she said. “Two males inside. Both armed.”
“How do you know they’re armed?” I asked.
“We have thermal and zoom. One shoulder holster, one waistband carry.”
I turned to my father. “So they were waiting for me.”
“Or your mother,” he said.
“Where is she?”
Patricia checked another screen, then another.
“We’re pulling traffic cams now. We’ll find the vehicle.”
Three hours passed inside that metal box, and I lived each minute inside a tension so fierce it made my muscles ache.
Agents came and went in plain clothes. Radios cracked. Monitors flickered. Coffee appeared and went untouched. Names I didn’t know were spoken with clipped urgency. License plates were cross-referenced. Cell towers mapped. Security footage scrubbed frame by frame.
Somewhere in those hours I learned the black SUV had left the cemetery and headed toward the industrial waterfront.
Somewhere in those hours I learned my father had been planning his own death for months.
Somewhere in those hours I stopped being merely shocked and began to be angry.
The anger arrived quietly, almost neatly, folding itself into place beneath the fear.
At first it was anger at Victor Crane, at the invisible shape of him pressing itself into every corner of our lives.
Then it turned.
My father was reviewing a schematic of a waterfront warehouse with Patricia when I interrupted.
“You let us mourn you.”
Both of them looked up.
I hadn’t meant to say it just then. But once the words came, they wouldn’t stop.
“You let Mom collapse over a coffin with no body in it. You let me stand there and bury you.”
My father didn’t answer immediately.
“You let me think you were dead.”
“Yes,” he said.
I laughed once, bitterly. “That’s all you have?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say you knew what that would do to me.”
His face changed then. The calm, controlled mask he had held all afternoon slipped.
“I knew exactly what it would do to you,” he said quietly. “That is why it nearly killed me to do it.”
I shook my head.
“No. Don’t give me some noble version of this. You made a choice. You didn’t trust me with the truth.”
He took one step closer.
“I didn’t trust the situation,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
“Not to me.”
“There should be.”
His voice didn’t rise, but it sharpened.
“Julian, if Crane had known you were in on it, you would have become part of the operation. You would have had to lie under pressure, act under surveillance, maybe even be taken. The fewer people who knew, the better the odds.”
“So you decided for me.”
“Yes.”
The bluntness of that answer hit harder than any apology could have.
I stared at him.
Patricia moved as if to step between us, then wisely stayed where she was.
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