I looked up at the clouds.
“I am angry with your mother.”
“Me too.”
“You should be.”
“She lied to me.”
“Yes.”
“She lied to you again.”
“Yes.”
He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
“What do we do?”
It was the first time he had asked we.
I held onto that.
“We find out why Elias sent the key.”
“He wants to hurt her.”
“Yes.”
“And me.”
“Yes.”
“And you.”
“Probably.”
Oliver looked at me then.
His eyes were wet but steady.
“Then we don’t do what he wants.”
“No.”
“We don’t split up.”
“No.”
“We don’t hide important stuff.”
I smiled faintly despite everything.
“There’s the boy with the tin box.”
His mouth trembled.
“I hate this.”
“I know.”
“I hate that he can still reach us.”
I looked toward the house.
Rachel was visible through the kitchen window, sitting alone, hands clasped, waiting for the consequences she had delayed for half his life.
“He can reach,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he still gets to hold.”
Oliver was quiet.
Then he said, “I want to go to Blackridge.”
“No.”
He turned.
“You just said—”
“I said we find out. I did not say we hand-deliver you to a haunted crime scene because your imprisoned father mailed emotional dynamite.”
“I’m almost eighteen.”
“And I am almost patient.”
He almost smiled.
Almost.
“I need to see it,” he said.
I studied him.
This was not curiosity.
It was not teenage recklessness.
It was something harder.
He needed the house to become real so it could stop growing in his imagination.
I understood that.
God help me, I understood it.
“We don’t go alone,” I said.
His face changed.
“Really?”
“We go with Detective Ortiz. We go with a warrant if possible. We go with cameras, gloves, lawyers, and enough people that no Vance ghost gets creative.”
He nodded quickly.
“Okay.”
“And Oliver?”
“Yeah?”
“If your mother goes, she goes because she chooses truth. Not because you punish her with proximity.”
He looked back at the kitchen window.
Rachel had not moved.
“I don’t know how to be her son right now.”
That broke something in me.
I placed one hand on his shoulder.
“You do not have to know tonight.”
The next morning, Ana Ortiz walked into my kitchen carrying coffee, a file folder, and the expression of a woman who had been hoping retirement would involve fewer cursed mansions.
She read Elias’s note twice.
Then she looked at Rachel.
“You held back a dead woman.”
Rachel did not defend herself.
“Yes.”
Ana stared at her.
“Good. We’re starting with reality. Saves time.”
Rachel nodded.
Oliver stood by the sink, arms crossed, watching every adult like he expected us to rearrange the truth if he blinked.
Ana noticed.
Of course she did.
“Kid,” she said.
Oliver straightened.
“I’m not a kid.”
“You’re seventeen, traumatized, and wearing socks with planets on them. You’re a kid with a vocabulary.”
He looked down at his socks.
Then back up.
“I want to be there.”
“I know.”
“Don’t say no before you hear me.”
Ana looked at me.
“He gets that from you?”
“Unfortunately.”
Oliver ignored us.
“I lived in that family. I had that name. I was used in the trial, in the papers, in all of it. If there’s another woman Dad hurt, if there’s another truth Mom hid, I don’t want to hear it after everyone else decides what version is safe for me.”
Rachel closed her eyes.
Ana’s face changed.
Only slightly.
“You understand that seeing a place is not the same as controlling what it does to you?”
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