Chapter 32- Threads of disappearance

Chapter 32- Threads of disappearance


CLAIRE

You know what this night needs?” he said, eyes flicking toward me. “Wine. Preferably an irresponsible amount of it.”

Despite myself, I huffed out something close to a laugh. “Wine? That’s your answer to bullets flying past my head?”

“Claire,” he said, pushing himself up from the couch with a groan, “if I waited for life to calm down before opening a bottle, I’d die sober.”

He moved toward the kitchen, and I followed, my legs slower than my head. The kitchen was wide but warm, counters lined with stacks of mismatched mugs and the faint scent of coffee beans clinging to the air. I perched on a barstool, elbows on the counter, watching him.

I trailed after him. The kitchen light golden, the kind that made the whole room feel smaller than it was.
He opened the fridge.

I sat onto the barstool across from him, propping my elbows on the counter. “You strike me more as a whiskey man.”

“That’s the trick, Claire.” He said. “People always think you’re one thing. It’s good to surprise them sometimes.”

When he turned to me, he was holding a bottle so massive I had to blink twice.

“That’s not wine,” I said. “That’s a weapon.”

He grinned, holding it up to the light. “Imported. Gift from a very persistent distributor who thought a bookstore café was a good place to move luxury vintages. He was wrong, but I kept this for nights like…well, like tonight.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.” He reached up for glasses, then glanced at me. “Don’t look so shocked. You think I only hoard books?”

“Honestly, yes.”

He poured. The smell hit before the glass slid across the counter toward me. It smelt rich . I stared at it like it might explode.

“I didn’t expect you to…” I lifted the glass. “How did you even get this? This is like three paychecks in a bottle.”

“Like I said, people make bad business decisions around me sometimes.” He lifted his own glass. “Cheers.”

We clinked, Then I took a sip. The wine wasv smooth across my tongue, dark fruit and something smoky at the edges.

“Damn.” I swallowed, licking my lips. “That’s…better than I thought.”

“You were expecting boxed merlot?”

“Something in a screw top, yeah.”

“Wounded,” he said, pressing a hand to his chest in mock offense.

I laughed—really laughed this time—and it felt like the first genuine sound I’d made in days.

“You remember the first day we met?” he asked, swirling the wine in his glass.

I gave a short laugh. “Yeah, I remember. I walked into your bookstore and almost fell on my ass You caught me before I ate the floor. For half a second, you seemed charming. Dazzled me with your coffee, too. But then you got weird—started going on about Grayhaven and the lighthouse and people vanishing.”

Evan smiled, leaning one elbow on the counter. “Weird? That’s what you call warning someone about the town?”

“Most people call that scaring off your customers,” I shot back.

“Most people,” he said, tilting his glass toward me, “aren’t you. You came back.”

I took a slow sip of wine. “Curiosity and caffeine addiction are strong motivators.”

He chuckled, but the sound faded quickly. “The thing is, Claire…there’s a reason I was so pushy about it. Why I couldn’t shut up about the lighthouse.”

I tilted my head. “Why do I feel like this is going to ruin the wine?”

“Because it probably will.”

His voice was calm, but the way he set his glass down made my stomach clench.

He didn’t look at me when he started talking. He looked at the wall,

“I grew up here. You know that much. My parents weren’t perfect, but we were…normal. Two boys and their bikes in the yard. My brother—Daniel—was eight.”

The name hit like a stone dropped in water. He said it gently but I still felt something was off.

“One summer afternoon, we went down to the cliffs by the lighthouse. We weren’t supposed to. It was too dangerous, too many stories. But we were kids. Kids think rules are invitations to break them.”

His voice got thinner. He rubbed his thumb along the rim of his glass.

“I don’t remember what happened. Not really. Just flashes. Rocks under my foot, Wind so strong it knocked me sideways. And a sound I can’t describe—like metal grinding against the sky. Then nothing. I blacked out. When I came to…” He forced himself to speak “Daniel was gone.”

The kitchen seemed to shrink around us. My fingers tightened around my glass.

“Search parties,” Evan continued. “Sheriff Calloway—Nora’s father—he ran the whole thing. They combed every inch of rock and water. No sign. No body. Just…vanished.”

“What about your parents?” My voice was gentle .

“They didn’t survive it.” He breathed out slowly. “My mom held on for a month. Just long enough to write a note I wasn’t allowed to read until years later. Then she hung herself in our kitchen. I found her.”

I took in a breath,i couldn't imagine being that young,and experiencing all that.

““That’s why you left Grayhaven,” I murmured.

“Yeah. But the thing about running is—you always end up back where you started.” His mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile.
"For years, I swore I’d never come back. But when my father died, I did. The house was empty, the bookstore was cheap, and I thought maybe if I filled the silence with paper and ink, I could pretend I wasn’t still listening for Daniel’s voice.”

Evan finally looked at me.
“You wanted to know why I help you. Why I put myself in the middle of this. It’s not curiosity.
Every time I look at Lila—how young she is, how much she’s already lost—I think of him. If Daniel were alive, he’d be her age. ” His jaw tightened.

Finally, Evan pushed his chair back. “Come on. There’s something I need to show you.”

I followed him upstairs, the floor creaking under our steps. At the end of the hall, he stopped before a closed door,his hand was resting on the knob like he had to talk himself into turning it. Then he did.

The room was colder than the rest of the house. The walls were lined with shelves and corkboards crowded with papers, maps, photographs. Red string crossed from one corner to another like veins.

I stepped inside slowly. “Jesus, Evan.”

“Obsession,” he said simply. “Some people call it unhealthy. I call it…unfinished business.”

I walked closer, eyes scanning the papers. Newspaper clippings yellowed with age. Names I didn’t recognize. Lines drawn from the lighthouse to places far beyond. Notes scrawled in the margins: boat vanished in clear weather…child never found…lights reported again.

“These aren’t all drownings,” I murmured.

“No,” he said. “People disappear on land too. Fishermen talk about strange lights. Kids climb the rocks and never return. Boats go out in calm waters and don’t come back. And every single one…” He tapped a finger against the map, right where the lighthouse was marked. “…circles back here.”

I looked at him, at the calm in his face despite the madness covering the walls.

“And you think this ties into Lila?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But it’s the same kind of wrong. The same silence where there should be answers. And I can’t ignore that.”

For the first time since I met him, I saw Evan not as the witty bookseller, not as the calm presence beside me, but as a boy who had lost everything and built his life out of pieces no one else wanted to touch.

I turned back to the map, the lighthouse glaring back like an eye.

Evan looked at me, calm despite the his confession. “So. Do you think I’m out of my mind yet?”

I exhaled slowly. “I think,” I said, “you’re a man who hasn’t stopped fighting for the people he lost.”