My grandfather had understood this. Had taken Patrick's account and built something with it, not immediately, not for leverage, but as a form of witnessing. This happened. Here is the record. He had spent nine years assembling the evidence because someone needed to, because Thomas Reyes had no family to do it, because the truth had been buried and the record was the only form of justice available when the official channels were closed.
Survive, he had written in a book and left in a room.
I had thought it was for me. I was beginning to think it might have been for Thomas too, in whatever way documentation could be survival, the insistence that a life had mattered, that it had not simply ceased without remainder.
I was still thinking about this when the chair across from me scraped back from the table.
I looked up.
Cleo sat down with her bag and a stack of sheet music that she dropped on the table with the unceremonious confidence of someone who had been using this library for two years and had opinions about which tables had the best light. She looked at my screen, at the archived page, the photograph of Thomas Reyes, and then at me, with the direct quality she brought to most things.
"Thomas Reyes," she said.
It wasn't a question. She'd read it off the screen.
"Yes," I said.
She looked at the photograph again. Something crossed her face, not surprise exactly, but the specific quality of recognition landing somewhere it hadn't expected to arrive.
"He played at my grandmother's club," she said.
I went very still.
Cleo's eyes came back to mine. Clear, steady, the frank attention of someone who had just made a connection and was deciding what to do with it.
"Adele Baptiste is my grandmother," she said. "She wrote about him. After he disappeared." She looked at the screen once more, at Adele's byline, the small photograph beside it. "Why are you researching him?"
The library was quiet around us. The archivist moved somewhere in the back room, the soft sound of materials being replaced on shelves. The afternoon light came through the tall windows in the specific horizontal way of late November, warm and declining.
I looked at Cleo Baptiste, whose grandmother had given Thomas Reyes some of his first paying work, who had sat with him in an empty bar on a Tuesday afternoon while he played for two hours and then left with a quiet kind of thanks.
"It's complicated," I said.
She held my gaze.
"I have time," she said.
* * *
Chapter 12: Cleo Knows
I have time, she'd said.
I looked at her for a moment, at the frank openness of her face, the sheet music stacked without ceremony, the photograph of her grandmother still visible on the screen between us. Adele Baptiste, who had given Thomas Reyes some of his first paying work. Who had sat in an empty bar and listened to him play for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon and not known it was goodbye.
I made a decision about how much to give her.
"I found his name," I said, "in documents connected to the family I'm staying with. Old documents, fifteen years old. His disappearance was referenced in connection with something I've been trying to understand." I paused. "I'm not sure I have the full picture. I came here to fill in what I could from the public record."
Cleo listened to this with the stillness she brought to things that mattered. When I stopped she didn't immediately respond, which I'd learned meant she was organizing something rather than waiting for permission to speak.
"What kind of connection," she said.
"The kind that suggests someone in that family may have been involved in what happened to him."
She absorbed this without visible reaction, no sharp intake of breath, no widening of eyes. Just the continuation of that organizing stillness.
"May have been," she said.