Chapter 54 MY MOTHER'S SECRET

Chapter 54 MY MOTHER'S SECRET
CALLUM'S POV

Elias's text came in at six forty three.

She went to the storage unit alone. Someone was waiting there. We are on our way back now.

I read it standing in my bedroom doorway still in the clothes I had slept in, which was to say I had not slept at all, just lay on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house settle around me until my phone lit up the dark.

I put the phone in my pocket and went downstairs.

The kitchen light was already on. Riley was at the counter doing something with her hands that she stopped doing when I walked in, turning to look at my face with the particular expression she wore when she already knew something was wrong and was waiting to find out how wrong.

"She left before six," Riley said, before I could ask anything. "I tried to talk her out of it. She told me to tell you she was fine and went out the door."

"Did you tell anyone she was here last night?" I pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and sat down. "Anyone at all."

"No." Her voice was steady and certain. "Not a single person."

I believed her. Riley had kept things quieter than a locked room for sixteen years. If she said she told nobody then nobody knew through her.

Which meant it was the phone.

I sat at the kitchen table and turned that over in my mind while Riley moved around the kitchen pulling mugs out and putting the kettle on without being asked, the way she always did when things were bad enough that doing something practical was the only sensible response.

The camera footage from the storage facility came through on my email at seven o four. I had called them while I was still upstairs and used the kind of voice that stopped people asking questions after the first one.

I opened it on my phone and watched it.

The man arrived at six fifty one. Dark jacket, cap pulled low, walking with the particular confidence of someone who had been told exactly where to go before he got there. He went straight through the entrance, straight down the main corridor, no hesitation, no checking unit numbers.

He knew.

I watched him walk out again eleven minutes later, faster than he had gone in, and I watched the timestamp on the footage and thought about Nova sitting alone in that unit for those eleven minutes with a box full of her mother's secrets and a man standing outside the door.

My jaw was doing something painful by the time I put the phone down.

The front door opened at seven fifteen.

I heard them in the entrance hall, Elias's voice low and Nova's answering him, and then they came into the kitchen together. Nova was carrying the box with both arms, holding it against her chest like she had carried it the whole forty minutes from the east side of the city that way.

She set it on the kitchen table and looked at the mugs Riley had already lined up on the counter and something crossed her face that she put away quickly.

"Sit down." Riley slid a mug toward her and one toward Elias, not asking, just putting them there.

Nova sat. Elias dropped into the chair beside her and wrapped both hands around his mug and looked at me across the table.

"The man on the camera footage," I said, keeping my voice even. "He knew exactly which unit. No hesitation."

"He came straight to the door." Nova looked at me steadily. "He didn't even pretend he had the wrong one."

"Your phone." I held my hand out across the table. "I need it."

She pulled it out of her bag and put it in my hand without arguing and I turned it over and looked at the back of it and then put it face down on the table between us.

"Matthias has had access to your location since he gave you his number," I said. "Possibly longer if he put something on your device before that."

Nova looked at the phone lying face down on the table. "He knew I was going there this morning before I even left the house."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment, her hands around her mug, her eyes on the table.

Then she reached over and pulled the box toward her and opened it and took out the photograph and put it flat on the table between the three of us.

Her mother. Castellano. Squinting in the sun outside some building, a date on the back that put it four years before Isabella Sinclair ever walked through the gates of Blackthorn Estate.

Elias leaned forward and looked at it without touching it.

I looked at it and thought about my father lying in a hospital bed and eight years of letters locked in his filing cabinet and a woman who had apparently walked into all of our lives knowing exactly whose door she was walking through.

"She planned it," Nova said quietly. "Whatever she was doing, she planned it from the beginning."

"We don't know the whole shape of it yet." Elias turned his mug in his hands. "We know she knew him. We don't know what that means."

"The USB drives will tell us." Nova looked at the four drives sitting in the box. "That's why he sent someone this morning. He wanted to get to them before we could."

"Which means he doesn't know what's on them." I looked at her across the table. "He knows they exist but he hasn't seen them."

Nova looked up at me slowly.

"She documented something he is afraid of," she said.

"Yes." I held her gaze. "And whatever it is, she hid it carefully enough that he has spent weeks trying to get close to you just to find out where it was."

The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Just the three of us and the photograph and the four USB drives sitting in an open box on the table and the grey morning pressing against the windows.

"So what do we do now?" Elias looked between us.

I picked up my coffee and looked at the box.

"We find out what Isabella knew," I said. "All of it. Before he finds another way in."

Nova reached into the box and picked up one of the USB drives and turned it over in her fingers, reading her mother's handwriting on the label.

Then she looked up at both of us with something in her expression that had not been there when she walked through the door twenty minutes ago.

Something that looked very much like her mother must have looked the day she decided to stop running and start fighting back.

"Then let's start," she said.