I picked up my phone again.
Typed:One thing. My books stay in my room. No one moves them, clears them, or decides they're decorative. They go where I put them.
Sent.
Watched the highway.
The reply came after a longer pause this time, long enough that I'd started to think he wasn't going to answer, which would have told me something too.
Agreed.
And then, a moment later:
Anything else.
I looked at the fields going past the window. At the sky that was the color of undecided weather. At the place where the road bent ahead of me and disappeared past a line of bare trees.
I typed:I'll make a list.
I put my phone away.
I did not feel afraid, exactly. Fear was too simple a word for what I felt, too narrow. What I felt was more like standing at the edge of a very large thing, looking at how far it went in every direction, and understanding that the only way forward was to be as precise as possible about every single step.
I was good at precision.
I would need to be better.
I reached into my bag, past the photograph and the stopped watch, until my fingers found the flash drive. I held it without looking at it. Thought about my grandfather's voice, low and careful:
The kind that matters.
I didn't know yet what was on it. But it was real protection — the kind that matters. And someone, somewhere, was going to want it back.
* * *
Chapter 3: New Orleans
New Orleans smelled different.
That was the first thing. I'd been in the car for seven hours, watching the landscape change in increments, the flat stretch of interstate giving way to water on both sides, then the city rising out of the delta like something that had grown there rather than been built, like the whole thing had simply decided to exist and the land had rearranged itself to accommodate. And before I could see it properly I could smell it: the river, the humidity, the particular density of a city that had been fermenting in its own history for three hundred years.
It smelled like flowers and like something underneath the flowers.
The driver took me through streets I didn't recognize, past wrought iron and painted shutters and trees so old their roots had broken through the sidewalks and no one had thought to fix it. I pressed close enough to the window to see the sky, heavy, white-gray, the kind of sky that meant rain later and heat now, the air thick enough to feel. Everything moved a little slower here, or seemed to. People on the sidewalks, the ceiling fans turning in open windows, the spanish moss in the oaks along the boulevard.
The Garden District looked like money that had stopped needing to prove itself.
Wide streets, deep lots, houses that didn't compete with each other because they'd each already won. I watched them pass, Greek Revival columns, wraparound porches, the occasional flash of a garden between gates, and told myself I was making notes, not being impressed. There was a difference. Being impressed meant something had gotten through. Making notes was just data collection.
I was very good at convincing myself of the difference.
The car turned through a set of iron gates and onto a gravel drive, and I got my first full view of the Moreau house.
It was white. The white came first, not the bright white of something newly painted, but the settled white of something that had been white for so long it had earned it. Three stories, columns along the front, a porch that wrapped around both visible sides, magnolia trees planted at even intervals along the drive. The windows were tall and shuttered in dark green. There were lights on inside, visible even in the gray afternoon, warm against all that white and shadow.
It was, genuinely, beautiful.
I had not expected that. I had prepared, on the seven-hour drive, for danger and strangeness and the particular kind of grief that came with losing something you'd built. Beauty had not occurred to me as a variable. I noted, distantly, that this was its own kind of problem.