"Cassie never mentioned it." Maybe because I’d never asked.
Something moved between us, briefly, at the mention of Cassie’s name.
"We weren't in touch much," Maddie said. "We'd grab coffee when we could, and kept meaning to make it regular." She looked at her hands. "We didn't get there."
I nodded. The specific guilt of that particular sentence… yeah, I knew it intimately.
She asked about me and I told her.
Montana, Wyoming, a year in the Yukon I gave one sentence to. She listened the way she always had—fully, without filling the gaps—and I was aware as I spoke that I was describing twelve years of my life in about forty words. Not sure what that said about me, but I didn't particularly want to examine it.
"Still moving then," she said, when I'd finished.
"Still moving."
She hadn't meant it as a verdict. I knew that. But I felt it land anyway, and I had nothing to put back against it that wasn't an excuse dressed up as something else.
The lobby hummed around us. Someone's child was crying somewhere near the entrance. I understood the impulse.
I was so damn tired. The exhaustion sat in my bones, pooling there ever since a phone rang in a dry shack in North Dakota, and it hadn't stopped since. And now this… this awareness that Maddie was still here, still sitting in this chair she hadn't needed to sit in, and I didn't know what to do with that either.
She reached for her bag after a while, and I listened to the small sounds of leaving—the zip, the shift of weight, the quiet preparation.
"I should get going," she said.
"Yeah."
She stood. Looked at me once more with that careful expression, the one I remembered, the one that meant she was checking something she wasn't going to say out loud. Then: "If there's anything I can do. While you're sorting things out." She said it offhandedly, like something you say at a door.
"Thank you," I said.
She nodded and turned. I let her get three steps before it caught up with me.
"Maddie."
She stopped.
"Actually," I started, "there is something."
Chapter Fifteen
Madison
Phelps found me outside her office at seven fifty-eight, which was two minutes before she was due in and probably said something about me that I wasn't going to examine too closely.
She came down the corridor with coffee and a tote bag, not rushing. She looked at me once, didn't seem surprised, and unlocked the door.
"Dr. Clarke," she said. "Come in."
Her office was small and practical, a desk and two chairs and a window looking out over the parking lot. She dropped her bag, shrugged off her coat, and sat. I sat across from her.
"I didn't realise you knew the Henleys," she said.
"The brother," I said. "And Cassie—we grew up in the same town. We stayed in touch for a while after I left."
Phelps nodded. "How well did you know him?"
"Well enough," I said. "We were together. Three years."